• Life Coach Lory

Does Laundry Make the Mom?

Updated: Oct 21, 2020

overwhelmed by laundry and life moms need a break too

I have recently found it pretty difficult to stay motivated. I am feeling a little "blah" about most things, not particularly excited about what comes next. Just going through the motions. This is not a terribly familiar feeling for me, and for that I am truly grateful. BUT doing the familiar, the ordinary, and the necessary, is ever so boring and unsatisfying. And so I don't approach those tasks like I should. Or I avoid them completely. And it kinda sucks.

Laundry comes to mind as the best example of my "blah" feeling. I don't LOVE doing laundry, but I love having tidy drawers and fresh clothing and an empty laundry basket. I also don't mind folding, so much so that I am fairly obsessive about how things are folded and where they are stowed. I sit in front of a television program and fold myself into a little happy place, most of the time. But that darn laundry is becoming THE problem for me right now. I don't feel like dragging it all the way down stairs. It's one flight, indoors, mind you. And if I dump it in the washing machine, I forget about it, and days later eventually beg my husband to put in the dryer, which is so far away. (Right next to the washing machine.) And, then, the basket of clean clothes sits in the corner begging me - no - mocking me because I just can't muster the energy to get up and do anything with it. Family members start just picking their items out of the pile, toppling it over and creating a laundry corner of the room. And then while that pile festers, a new one is forming upstairs, where the empty laundry basket SHOULD be, but isn't, because it never made it out of purgatory from the previous laundry load. I mean - it's a total mess as far as I'm concerned. And I just don't give a damn.

This motivation-free cycle of non-laundry compounds. The problem gets bigger and bigger. And the resulting side-effects do not do a thing to push me into action. I mean, you would think a pile of laundry that is 2 weeks old, staring at me every time I turn the corner, would make me stop and say "hey - this will take 10 minutes - do it".....but it doesn't. What happened? Where did I go? How did I lose my mo-jo? And why do I care so much?

I can only assume that everyone experiences this every so often, or maybe more often than that. But I feel like such a daily failure when something like laundry is left undone. It feels like, why should I bother doing other stuff - this laundry can't get done so what's the use? I have allowed laundry to represent my worth as a parent and homemaker. Egads?@*# That can't be what's going on, can it? Am I really allowing laundry to impact the way I feel about myself? I am MORE than my laundry. I am MORE than neatly folded clothing. At least I think I am.

I have no plan for the laundry in the dryer right now, except to ask my husband to take it away when it is dry. I don't have a particularly busy day tomorrow, though I'm sure I will fill it with many tasks. I could fold laundry. Maybe I should embrace the fact that for me, laundry represents more and that to stay on track, I need to stay on top of my laundry-folding game. Maybe it's ok to have something define us. Maybe it's ok to have laundry unfolded. Maybe it's ok to be unmotivated once in a while and just spend some time doing something else.