The Power of the Laundry Pile

When I was in high school, all of the clean laundry in our house would go straight from the dryer to the bed in our downstairs guest room. I say “go straight” as if it would magically fly there, but the reali

ty is that someone carried it there – my mom, my brother, my dad, or I. We were the ones who put it there.

Once there, the laundry pile would sit indefinitely. I hate to use the word never as an absolute, but it never was completely folded and put away, except I guess, when we were having guests and those circumstances required it.

Most days, I would go into the guest room and pick through the pile to find clothes to wear for school or to find a clean towel for my shower. I think the pile of clothes was generally larger than all of the remaining clothes in our dressers or closets. The pile covered the entire bed.

Generally we kept the door closed, but occasionally it would be left ajar and then our dogs would get into the room and sleep on top of the pile. We’d wonder where our dogs were, only to discover them bundled up in a pile of towels and underwear. It was pretty gross. I’d like to say that the clothes would then immediately be rewashed, but I know that isn’t true.

When I first got married, I remember dumping a pile of clean clothes onto the couch and then walking away. My wife looks at me (you know the look) and says, “You’re not leaving that there, are you?” Hmmm. Uh-oh. So I turned around and folded it right away. Old habits die hard and have to be replaced by new ones.

I came to realize that the laundry pile itself was a symbol of my family’s dysfunction growing up. It was this big mess that we were all responsible for either creating or enabling. Just like my dad’s alcohol addiction, we’d close the door and ignore it, only going into the room when it was absolutely necessary. It was too overwhelming to face it.

We do a lot of laundry in our house now with two kids. I generally do all of my own laundry to avoid mixing my stuff up with the clothes of the three women in my house. When I wash their clothes, I usually only end up getting in trouble for ruining some item, so I stick to my own. If I run out of clean socks or underwear, it’s my own fault.

My stuff doesn’t always get folded right away and I realized about a year ago that my laundry pile was causing me all sorts of stress. I would walk by and look at it, feeling this wave of disgust and yet somehow expecting it to magically get folded. Who exactly is going to fold it? Then I realize the futility of folding it, knowing that it would just reappear a few days later. The entire pattern of family dysfunction gets played out symbolically through a pile of laundry – in a split-second.

This morning I felt this wave of overwhelm as I looked at this huge pile of laundry. Reminiscent of high school. I was traveling last week and a lot of laundry had accumulated over the weekend. I was planning to get to work early this morning, but there was that pile, just sitting there, taunting me, gloating in its power.

Yet my life is very different now from when I was young. Completely different. So why does this laundry pile have that kind of power over me?

It doesn’t. Not anymore. Enough already!

I’m going to conquer this pile. Fifteen minutes later, all of my laundry is sorted, folded, and neatly put away. That’s all it really took to clear out the clutter.

There’s the lesson of the laundry pile. Take 100% responsibility for your own life. Take a look around at the piles of whatever that are bogging you down. Who’s going to clean them up?

What once was extremely powerful is now powerless – and you discover that all the power was within you all along.