Mom, I'll do the laundry.
Our jobs are a big part of our identity, whether we like it or not. For my very accomplished mother, a dreary laundry room was symbolic of all she wasn't doing.
My mother was a stay-at-home mom who loathed laundry. She had recurring Sisyphean nightmares about it. A Mount Fuji of clothes that she kept climbing and could never summit, falling back down to the base as soon as she got close. She laughed when she told me this, but I don’t think it was all that funny to her; with three girls none of whom was the sharing kind when it came to clothes, there were really mountains of them. Up and down three flights of stairs, never getting the pile down to satisfaction, and then it would grow back like a starfish arm. I think she hated going down there so much she did a kind of la-la-la-I-don’t-hear-you thing when it was calling to her, which didn’t help.
We lived in a big, old Tudor house circa 1925. The laundry room was in the basement, which was, to put it mildly, unfinished. Dark and a little mildewy, with flickering florescent lights, asbestos c…
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