I remember when I had to start washing my own clothes. My mom loved me and did what she could to raise me right. My dad loved me and did what he could to raise me right. But I heard a lot of negativity growing up, a lot of griping and complaining, and I learned how to do it myself.
When I was a child, my mother would joke and say that I was the Emperor of the National Federation of Gripers because I would gripe about everything. I was just mimicking what I heard them doing and what I heard on TV and I thought that's how you found your place in the world. What I had been taught was that if you had plenty of things to gripe about you were somebody.
I've learned since then that's not such a great way to live. But one day when I was standing at the kitchen counter talking to my mom, she had washed my clothes again, I was 15, maybe 16. She was folding my clothes on the counter and I complained about how the shirts were wrinkled and how I looked bad when I wore them when I went to school. I asked her if there was some way that I could look better and it hit her the wrong way and she shoved the laundry basket at me and said, "you can wash your own damn clothes." And she showed me how, she showed me how to run it through and how to sort it by colors and how much soap to put in and run the dryer.
We didn't have to hang clothes in the back, but we did have a clothesline that we used for a long time until we bought a dryer. But yeah, that was the time that I griped one time too many and had to start washing my own clothes.
I guess it was time though. And now that I no longer work, I wash the clothes for me and my wife, usually, and I enjoy it.
