die, suzy homemaker, die

I was reading over my last post, as you do, and it occurred to me that I could tangent off of it, as you also do. I really wonder how much of my loathing of doing housework comes from the combination of my mother always hating it herself and the torture of being forced to participate as a child. Because it wasn't enough for my mom that I would--eventually--do whatever it was she had told me to do. There was also this heaping load of guilt applied that I wasn't doing more. She had some kind of misguided notion that if I really loved her, I would be volunteering to clean for her, which...no. (To those of you who are reading this right now and laughing your ass off, and you know who you are, I will say, as I usually do, shut UP.)

So then I was thinking, why is it that there are some domestic kind of things that I actually enjoy, like laundry? Does that come down to the fact that I wasn't forced to do laundry as a kid? I didn't do my own laundry till I was a teenager, and even then, only if I wanted something particular clean that was in the dirty laundry. Otherwise mom would do it when she was doing other laundry. In fact, when I was in college and I brought home laundry to do, my mom would iron it for me, so that I'd look nice. We won't even get into the pathology engendered *there*.

Yeah, so. No unpleasant laundry associations in my subconscious apparently. Which is strange for one reason. See, when I was very small, we didn't have a clothes dryer. I guess most people didn't in the 60s? But maybe when I was 9 or so, we got one. Our washing machine was in the kitchen pantry, because we had to manually hook it up to the faucet to use it and drain it into the sink. The dryer, however, was installed down in the cellar. Three floors down. It became my job to put the clothes in the dryer and take them out when they were done. Now, I was a kid, with lots of energy, so running up and down flights of stairs carrying baskets of laundry was not anything unpleasant to me. Going into the cellar, however? Oh, it was scary down there. Dark and musty and filled with cobwebs, and worst of all, there were old jars of preserved...something...on some shelves, and having watched TV shows and movies I probably oughtn't have and having a very active imagination, I would be half-convinced they were some kind of body parts. So I became extremely good at getting laundry in and out of the dryer as quickly as it possibly could be done.

Maybe that's why I so enjoy doing laundry! Since I no longer have to do it in the presence of mystery jars of doom, it's a piece o' cake in comparison! There's a logical explanation for everything, yo.

xoxo