"Home is harder than work," I said. "Not in a bad way!" I quickly clarified, but he got the point. I went for coffee this morning with Ellen. She went back to work five years after her kids were born. I said work seemed reasonably easy compared to being at home. She laughed.
"It is complete bullshit when people say you are lucky to stay at home with kids!" I said. "I get to dress up and go out to lunch and people are generally respectful and kind."
Ellen laughed again. "Work is the best!"
I know the honeymoon will come to an end at some point, but for now I am content with my delusions.
One major discovery I made about my home life since I've started working is that no one in my family besides me puts the clean laundry away. Jack will fold it, and put it on the bed. When it is time for bed, the laundry then goes back in the basket. Like a sand castle on the beach erased by the tide, folded laundry in the basket resorts back to its original unfolded state. Since I've started working, we have accumulated 400 single socks in the laundry basket at the foot of the bed. I say 400 for exaggeration purposes, but seriously, if we have four people in the family there were maybe twenty pairs of socks per person in that basket which means there were realistically (4x20x2) 160 single socks in that basket. How do we have that many socks? The favorite socks were picked off the top of the pile, while the less loved socks gravitated towards the bottom of the clean laundry basket, like unpopped popcorn kernels in the bowl.
Jack can load it into the washing machine, but just today I realized he was never fully trained on how to operate our new machines we purchased three months ago when our other washing machine died.
"How do I set this again?" he asked. Oh my fucking god, I thought. This dude manages ECMO machines that bypass the heart so kids can have circulating blood and he can't use something as simple as a washing machine? I immediately assume this is some form of passive aggressive behavior, where he believes if he acts as if he can't do this simple task, someone else (meaning me) will do it for him. He did manage to take the clothes out of the washing machine and place them in the dryer. And he did fix the violent rattling that sounds like machine gun fire when the washing machine starts on the spin cycle. He took an old Kleenex box out of the recycling, folded it up a bunch, and stuck it between our stacked washer and dryer. The rattling stopped.
We just bought the washer and dryer set this spring so it probably still under warranty. "We could call Sears and have them fix it," I said.
"One of us would have to stay home from work while we waited for four hours for them to show up," he said. Fair enough. The Kleenex box works.
While we were both standing at the washer, we carried the clean laundry from the dryer to the laundry basket, where there sat the 400 socks. The laundry beast in the basket had overflowed onto the floor. It could not be ignored.
"I'll put the sheets on the bed," Jack announced. Jack always announces when he is about to do a chore. Like a child in December waiting for Santa Claus, he wants to make sure his good deeds are noted.
Like the elves battling the Orcs, you can't stop after you knock down a few of them. We had to empty the entire basket. You would have thought it would have taken hours to sort and put away the 400 socks, but it really only took about fifteen minutes, maybe less. But they are now put away, until the beast comes back.
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