Is It Really Dirty Laundry?
For my daughters, it's a case of one-and-done with every towel they use
I heard the thump outside my bedroom door. And I immediately knew what it was.
There on the floor, on the landing at the bottom of the stairs, and right outside both my bedroom and the door to the laundry room, was a pile of “dirty” clothes that my 16-year-old daughter had just thrown over the railing. The kid’s bedroom is on the main floor of our house, and the stairs go down to a lower-level floor where there are two bedrooms, an office (which is overfilled with kid stuff that the kids haven’t used in nearly a decade) and the laundry room. I wish we had one of those old-school chutes where you could just throw the clothes in an have them slide down into the laundry room, but, this isn’t the late 19th century and we don’t live in the Biltmore Mansion.
I do the laundry in our house. I fold everything up. I put all of my daughter’s clothes on her bed. It is then her duty to put her clean clothes away. And she does just that.
By dumping everything on her bedroom floor.
It’s not like she doesn’t have closet space. She also has plenty of dresser drawers to store her clothes. There is more than enough room for her to put her clothes away like any sane person. She just chooses to pile up her stuff on her floor like she’s prepping for a bonfire.
Somehow, she manages to know which of her clothes are clean, and which are dirty. And it was a mass of those dirty clothes that my daughter had thrown over the railing and which were now at my feet. But, since this is a 16-year-old American teenager that we are talking about, it goes without saying that some of these “dirty” clothes weren’t dirty at all.
And some of them were towels.
Here’s a question for you. How often do your kids use a towel before they consider it “dirty”? If they are like my daughters and, well, the thing might have come right out of the dryer, complete with the fresh scent of Bounce on it, and it will be dirty the second they touch it
I am only slightly exaggerating here, but not by much. My kids will take a freshly washed towel, use it one time, and…There it goes, over the railing and down on the floor with the rest of the laundry. And once that damp towel hits the floor, where all of us, and our three cats have been walking around, it officially does become “dirty”.
One use. One time. And back to the washing machine it goes.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I like a fresh, clean towel as much as anyone who’s getting out of a hot, or even cold shower. I also know that you can use a towel more than once before it has to go to back into the washer. Of course, we dry our “nether parts” with that towel. But, really…If you’ve just gotten out of the shower, you are the cleanest you are going to be for the day. Unless you, say, cut yourself shaving in the shower, which I have been known to do on occasion, and you get blood on your towel while drying off, you can just hang the thing up to air dry until you need to use it again the next day.
That’s not how my kids think.
To them, using a towel more than once is akin to rolling in the filth of the county dump. Once is all it takes for the towel to be contaminated and given over to the Laundry Lord, myself. That is, if it makes it over the railing and into my laundry domain.
I can tell you with 100% certainty that every morning after I get back from taking the girls to school there will be at least one bath towel/hand towel/wash cloth on the bathroom floor. Because, apparently, there are times when life is too busy to huck a piece of cloth over a railing that is all of 10 feet away and they just have
to drop that thing where they are and have faith that their dad, who is running around eight ways from Sunday already, will think to look behind the bathroom door, find their pile of post-shower surprises, put them in the laundry and get everything fresh and clean in time for the girls to do their thing as soon as they get another towel in their hands.
And when I hear that thump on the floor, I’ll know, again, that another load of “dirty” laundry awaits, and the one-time-use towel cycle is ready to begin again.