Sometime during the summer of my tenth birthday, I learned how to do laundry.
My mother was giving my oldest brother the procedural rundown before he went off to college as a freshman. I stood beside her, watched and listened.
No one in the house was allowed to do laundry but my mother, which in my understanding was because we’d do it wrong and wastefully, in her opinion. That included my father. I’d rarely use the machines during the several years that followed. And when I did, it would be on the sly when my parents were not home.
Think about that. It being a deception for a teen boy to do his own laundry. Like on one occasion when I needed to wash my bedsheets at 17 years of age, but could not offer the reason for it to my parents.
I’d thrown up in bed one night due to the excess consumption of cheap, red fortified wine that I’d bought from a classmate who made money by stealing bottles from a nearby gas station. I’d vomited near the edge of my bed, sending it down the side and onto the newly carpeted floor, staining it red.
I don’t know how the foul odor escaped my parents’ attention. But I hid the visual remnants left on the fitted sheet of my double bed. I let the wine dry, then I took it off the mattress, turned it inside out and remade the bed, placing the dried vomit at the foot. Then I bided my time.
My parents were going to be out of town in a few days. It would give me time to launder my sheets, no one the wiser. At least about the sheets. The stain on the new teal carpet was another question. But one that I never was asked to answer.
The next fall, I’d go off to college myself. I’ve been doing my laundry since. In college. In the Army. When I moved in with my girlfriend. When we bought a house together. When we got married and had two sons.
Now, I do her laundry. And I do our sons’ laundry. The family’s laundry. Not because they can’t or I have become my mother who will not allow it. But simply because I do it. The never ending rebellion.
The Laundry is #Nineteen in the weekly memoir series, Among Other Things. What’s it about? Read Introducing ‘Among Other Things,’ A Weekly Memoir Series.
