Don’t Feel Bad About...

The Washington Post home section recently ran an article entitled "Don't Feel Bad About Your Laundry Chair."

The article acknowledges that we all have a chair somewhere in our house, usually in the bedroom, where laundry mysteriously accumulates. Instead of feeling bad about this, the article urges us to embrace the laundry chair as a necessary item.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

I found this advice uplifting because I have a laundry bench. Prior to the Post article, I felt shame about the fact that there is always a pile of uncategorized laundry somewhere in my house. It's not dirty. But it's not clean either. It's the sweatshirt you put on because you were cold, then you got warm and removed it, but you may need to put it on again. Hence, the laundry chair, a sort of purgatory for laundry.

Ever since, I've been thinking we (society, et al) need a much longer list of things we collectively agree not to feel bad about. I would like to start the ball rolling with the following items:

Item #1: I Will Not Feel Bad About the fact that booking plane tickets online now feels like taking the SAT.

I just want to book the cheapest, fastest flight to wherever I am going. But now I must choose between Economy Minus, where I can't even bring a bag on the plane, and Economy Plus, where maybe I can bring one bag, but I can't pick my seat. Or Silver Diamond Platinum Gold Bullion Medallion Elite, where I get to pick my own seat, and board the plane before everyone else, but I am still emphatically not in First Class. Instead I'm once again in the middle seat in row 32 surrounded by crying babies.

I just want to get to Minneapolis. And I also need to bring a suitcase for my underwear and toothbrush. Is that too much to ask? Apparently it is. But I will no longer feel intellectually inferior just because Delta.com makes booking a plane ticket almost as complicated as filling out a tax return or taking an algebra test. And if I fail this test, I will spend a $1,278 for a $345 ticket because I've accidentally upgraded myself to First Class.

Item #2: I Will Not Feel Bad About children who will eat any food as long as it is delivered by Door Dash or Uber Eats, and who prefer Chipotle, Chick fil A, Five Guys, and McDonalds to anything I can possibly whip up at home for a fraction of the cost using love, healthy ingredients, and an old family recipe.

Mothers, this is not a referendum on your cooking. It's because you do not have access in your home kitchen to the tasty and addictive magic chemicals restaurants add to their food. I don't know what triglycerides are, but I know I don't put them in my macaroni hotdish and therefore, I can't compete. 

So it's okay if our children reject their own cultural heritage by choosing pretentious, unpronounceable acai bowls over the delicious, Campbell soup-based, midwestern Lutheran church basement hotdishes we've eaten in my family for generations. It's fine. Really. We won't feel bad about this anymore, but hopefully someday our children will.

Item #3: We Will Not Feel Bad About forgetting to pick up our children.

Okay, I know this sounds like one of those things a person really should feel bad about. But don't.

We all love our children. And yes, children are very important. They are the future, as Whitney Houston so often reminded us. But when a federal holiday falls on a Monday, no one can possibly be expected to remember that the subsequent early dismissal Wednesday is really happening on a Wednesday, because your brain and body and your whole self are convinced it's actually Tuesday because there was no school on Monday. 

If you're a mother, you know exactly what I'm talking about. If you're not a mother, don't judge, because if and when you become a mother, you will do exactly the same thing, at least once. And you will feel terrible, except we're not doing that anymore.

Item #4: I Will Not Feel Bad About the fact I need a third party to turn on the television in my own home because the entire system is so complicated that I don't know how to use it and I'm afraid that if I press any button on the remote control, a satellite will fall from the sky and crush someone on a beach in New Jersey.

Item #5: I Will Not Feel Bad About my many, creative definitions of "exercise."

Carrying groceries from the car to the house obviously qualifies as "weight training." Those repeated bending motions you make while unloading the dishwasher? Those are "lunges." Because really, must we all be elite athletes? 

Walking slowly so the dog can sniff every blade of grass and mailbox post with frequent stops to talk to neighbors who are also walking their dogs? This qualifies as a very early stage of marathon training. Because maybe you are planning to run, you know, later, and this stroll with the dog is just a warmup, so you don't tear your ACL or some other body part that only really athletic people seem to have. Peloton and Nike can have their own (excessive, sweaty, ostentatious) definition of exercise, and the rest of us can have ours. 

Item #6: I Will Not Feel Bad About-

Okay. I could do this all day, but we'll stop with five things, even though I can come up with a lot more, because I have to go pick someone up from volleyball now. We'll add to it later. Because a world where we no longer feel bad about things would be a big improvement, in my humble opinion.

Instead, we will end with something I Feel Really Good About. 

I'm getting my ARC's this week. ARC's are Advance Reader Copies. It's the almost-final version of Friend with Secrets. It will have a cover, and all the words inside, and it will be the first time I've ever held a book I've written in my hands. The 4th grade girl who dreamed of being an author is still inside me somewhere, and she's pretty excited :-)

So that's where we are. Thank you to those who've pre-ordered Friends with Secrets and shared the cover on Facebook or Instagram. If there was an Olympic event for Kind and Supportive Friends, you guys would win a gold medal :-) Thank you so much :-)

Here's hoping you see more April flowers than April showers in the days to come. Until next time, thank you for reading Love and Laundry :-)

As always,

Christine

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