Laundry Hamper Headache

My husband is elusive. Just when I think I’ve laid the perfect trap, he manages to escape my grasp. No, this is not some sort of game that we like to play at home. If only it were that simple. In fact, my husband is like the Chris Angel or Harry Houdini of dirty laundry. No matter what I do or where I place the hamper, clothes magically end up in unimaginable places. I’ve tried to thwart him, but to no avail. This is not an attempt to complain about him not doing his laundry, because he does his own and quite frequently. Instead, this is about how one man vehemently refuses to be tied down by the simple domestic pleasure of a laundry basket.

It all started with the purchase of his first hamper. I thought it was a nice manly hamper, navy blue, with mesh sides, and a slight college feel. It was collapsible because I didn’t want him to feel as if he had made a big commitment to domesticity. I was having him dip his toe in the water of home economics, which in my experience with my husband was definitely the way to go. The nice wicker hamper could wait. Still, it was a big day for us. No more, I thought, would laundry pile in a corner inside his closet, slowly inching toward the door until entering became like trying to push open a car door in 15 feet of rushing water. Now, he would be free to peruse his closet unhindered by t-shirts and pants tangling with his feet like slimy seaweed. He could stroll through his closet with wild abandon and without the threat of being attacked by a hidden hanger lurking beneath the piles of dirty clothes. It seemed like a brilliant plan. And it was for about 36 hours. Then, reality set it.

I soon discovered that the lack of a clothing containment device wasn’t the actual problem; it was my husband himself. He was like a whirling dervish of clothing removal. As soon as he strode in the door after work, outfits were pealed off, rapidly fluttering to the floor mid-stride. Most of the time, they didn’t make it upstairs anywhere close to his closet. Sometimes socks were found casually relaxing on the stairs and a sweater might be carelessly strewn across a couch. Other times items were dumped somewhere near our in-kitchen laundry closet. “Somewhere near” being the operative term since there might be used gym shorts or shirts inches from our kitchen table. Yum, nothing whetted one’s appetite like the aroma of sweaty man. I did understand his argument that putting the clothes closer to the washer and dryer made more sense than placing them in the bedroom hamper and then bringing it back downstairs. However, this current textile tornado was not going to work for me. There needed to be a middle ground.

So, I devised a new plan. In my organizational, OCD mind, the clothes had to be confined. They could not roam free in our house like hyenas in the wild. Similar to the hyenas, the items seemed to laugh and mock me from the floor. I did not want to be my husband’s mom and pick up after him and I didn’t desire to become the proverbial nagging wife. I simply aimed to develop a solution that would make him independent and prevent me from losing my mind. Each time I came home, I was beginning to feel like Gretel following Hansel through the woods, except my Hansel dropped a path of clothes to mark his route. Granted, those two frantic children ended up with a witch at the end of their trail and my path terminated at a half naked man watching sports center. Neither were good options.

Therefore, after more deliberation it occurred to me to put a hamper inside the washer dryer closet. Brilliant! Now, my husband had somewhere to place his garnished garments which was orderly and logically located. A little pat on the back for me.

However, shortly thereafter, that pat on my back turned into a desire to kick my husband in the shins. This man was incorrigible. In spite of the fact that he now possessed two hampers, more than the average domesticated human being, it wasn’t enough. He refused to be pinned down. Suddenly, clothes were appearing everywhere but in the hampers. They might be abandoned directly in front of the hamper, but not inside. It was similar to how he put the dishes in the sink but not the dishwasher. One was not harder than the other, but it seemed to be a matter of man-principal. As if the laundry hamper goddess would wave her magic wand and save him the extra back breaking step of bending over and placing his own clothes into its mesh depths. Items of dress would lie on the floor in the bathroom, the man-room, yes we had one of those with the big TV and everything, or back on the closet floor outside of the hamper. I was angry and stumped. It seemed like such a little thing for him to do and he knew how much it aggravated me, but he simply rejected the idea of confining his clothes.

I did attempt to leave the offending items where they lay, but after a day or two it disgusted me and I had to deposit the disrobed duds in one of the hampers for my own sanity. I didn’t want my house looking like a pigsty, but I also did not want him to think that he could get away with this. As far as I could tell, nothing short of placing hampers in every possible spot where he might decide to undress would solve this problem and even I had to admit that this wasn’t a viable solution.

This laundry enigma continued to perplex me and then we moved to a new town. Maybe it would be better here, I fooled myself into thinking. Perhaps having a job with more responsibility will lead to an increase in organization on the home front. This was the same man who had a classroom sized white board installed in our office that he wrote on like Russel Crowe in A Beautiful Mind. He used multiple colors to symbolize different events and categories. Even Rainman would be impressed. Clearly, he could be meticulous when necessary.

Alas, I was wrong and now we lived in a townhouse with three levels. More places for him to discard random objects of clothing! I plotted and I schemed and I’ll admit that occasionally I exclaimed about the state of our house as a result of his clothing chaos. Finally, with my all of my options tried and my energy spent, I gave up. I’d had it. Dirty shorts attacked me in my dreams; hampers played a game of Sudoku with my mind. Enough was enough; I had other issues with which to deal.

I had to make a choice between my husband and the laundry. I felt myself tobogganing down that slippery slope of irritating wifedom and realized that in the grand scheme of things, smelly gym socks in the hallway weren’t the ends of the world. My husband is a good man, he works hard, he cares about others, and he treats me well. While his aversion to the laundry hamper continues to befuddle me, I have not entirely relinquished all hope that someday our house will, in fact, be free of boxer shorts in the bathroom.