Dirty Laundry

This is not our laundry though it is the same style basket that we have. Picture courtesy of Google's Picasa Web Albums.


Of all the household chores, I've always enjoyed laundry best. Perhaps because it's fairly easy. You take the basket of dirty clothes. You dump said dirty clothes into the washing machine. You add laundry detergent. You push the buttons to make the machine go, and voila! A short time later, you have clean clothes. I don't think I would have done well living in a time or place where such an invention didn't exist.

I usually do laundry 3 times a week. I think I've mentioned before that we don't have a dryer. Most people here don't have one, as they cannot afford one. We can, however, we have no room in our home for one. So we must hang our clothes to dry.

On Monday, I'd come home to find MIL had brought Raelynn a new shirt. It wasn't too horrible, especially considering some of the shit she's picked out before. My problem with it was that, for one, she'd put it on top of the ample clothing Raelynn was already wearing, so she looked like some hobo baby. For another, it was stained with whatever she'd fed her for lunch and the bad medicine Raelynn had to take for her cold. And seeing as our radiators make it nice and toasty in here, I had no idea why she'd overdress her inside the house. In any event, I took the new dirty shirt and tossed it into the laundry basket.

Tuesday was Christmas and I had off for the day from school. I was busy spending time with Raelynn and Jeremy all day, making special Christmas memories, so I left the laundry for Wednesday. Except when I arrived to work on Wednesday, my Korean boss, Lesley, the one who likes to change everything, wanted us to all go out to dinner after work that night. Since Lesley is moving back to Korea, I figured going to dinner with her was important. So I left the laundry for Thursday.

I should also add that when I came home on Wednesday, not only did my in-laws leave a huge mess for me to clean up, but they also stunk up my house. I'm totally not trying to be a mega-bitch here, but seriously, it was fucking horrible. When I opened the door, I was greeted with a smell that could only be described as 1,000 farts being bottled up and left for dead, rotting away. I gagged. "What smells?!?" I cry, horrified, to my husband who kindly picked me up from the dinner. His face suggests he's also alarmed by the stench. Do you know what it was? MIL cooked that horrible luo bo thing in some sort of disgusting dish. Ugh! She also left more half-eaten pieces of luo bo around. There was one on our dining table and one on the counter behind the couch. There was also a giant half of a luo bo in our kitchen. As if that wasn't bad enough, when I came within a foot of my FIL, he smelled much like wet dog. Was it his clothes? Was it him? Probably both. They need soap. And I need more air freshener. Because I emptied that shit out after they left that night. Gah!

Anyway, now it is Thursday. We had our kindergarten graduation today and it was lovely. I even got flowers from one of my students' moms. My husband kindly picked me up and brought me home. Today, I was delighted that my home smelled like MY home, and not like it had been overrun with gaseous, eye-burning farts. But what do I see? Raelynn is wearing that shirt MIL got her. The one that was dirty on Monday. The one that was in our laundry basket. I ask Jeremy to ask his mother about this because I do not have the vocabulary to talk to her about this in Chinese. I calmly explain to him that I'd put that shirt in the laundry basket to wash this week and now it was on Raelynn again. She tells us she washed it by hand. So, you DUG through our dirty clothes to just wash THAT shirt? Is she fucking serious? Jeremy was visibly irritated by her answer. He stayed calm and seemed to tell her something to the effect of how unnecessary that was. He may have also told her I didn't approve of her digging through our dirty garments though I can't quite be sure. After she left, he actually admitted to me that his parents have no fucking sense whatsoever. Now I feel like we're on the same page about this. I do not want his troll-faced cow of a mother digging into our dirty laundry. Furthermore, the shirt she claimed to have washed was still FILTHY. It was visibly dirty. To prove my point, I threw it into the wash this evening and guess fucking what? Those spots and spills you could see a mile away are GONE! As I've said before, her definition of clean and mine are vastly different.

We got a package of clothes for Raelynn from my folks today. I went to put them into her closet and put away some clothes from the other day that were now dry and what do I find? A pair of dirty socks! She has put them back on top of the other clean socks! Why the fuck does she do this when we have TONS of socks for Raelynn?!?!? Why does she dig through our dirty clothes to pretend-wash a dirty shirt but yet puts dirty fucking socks back in a closet full of clean clothes? WHY WHY WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY?!?!?!? I can't even come up with a theory, other than she's crazy. If you have any ideas as to why she's nuts, or perhaps how we can cope with this dolt, please comment away.