I Can’t Reconcile Laundry with the Mass Extinction of Humankind

Why are we all carrying on like it’s business as usual?

Kerala Taylor

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There are days I wake up with purpose. Sunday, for instance, is Laundry Day. The success or failure of the weekend hinges on whether or not my family is able to transform the massive heaps of clean clothing tumbling out of laundry baskets into neatly folded stacks, and subsequently tuck those stacks into the appropriate drawers.

If it doesn’t happen, as it sometimes doesn’t, I reluctantly accept defeat. I resign myself to a week of pawing through laundry baskets in the semi-darkness of early morning to locate a matching sock or my son’s favorite ninja sweatshirt.

If it does happen, my husband and I high-five each other after the kids go to bed. We clink our glasses, each containing our adult beverage of choice. We are full of pride and perhaps a touch of hubris.

We did it. We accomplished Laundry. We are invincible.

Then I remember that in the next 30 years or so, the world might end. Not the world, per se, but the world as we know it. A world with laughter and laundry. A world with trees and food and oxygen. A world that can support human life.

By the morning, I’ve once again resumed my single-minded sense of purpose, focusing on the succession of small tasks required to get my children out the door. If, by the time 7:30 a.m. rolls around, I have exercised, showered, and made coffee, and if my children have selected outfits that are at least tangentially related to the weather outside, and if they have been able to locate the various things they need for the day, and if no one melts down or screams or slams a door, then I can claim victory.

Of course, the stars do not always align. The astrological harmony required for all these things to happen in the course of 90 minutes does not always manifest, and I sometimes sit down to my computer feeling frazzled, grumbling under my breath.

Then I am seized by panic because I’m not treasuring every moment, because I still have mornings that are ruined by petty frustrations, like my daughter’s insistence on wearing flip flops in November. Who knows how long this will all last? Who knows what horrors await…

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Kerala Taylor

Award-winning writer. Interrupting notions of what it means to be a mother, woman, worker, and wife. Subscribe: https://keralataylor.substack.com