I am laundry impaired

Usually, my mother does the laundry. This is only one of many reasons I should be grateful for my life and stop bitching already. Today, however, I got a wild hair and decided I would pitch in. Everyone likes a break sometimes, right? And after a year solid of my poor mother doing every load, I thought I'd be magnanimous and do a couple loads. Plus, I love the word magnanimous.

I actually do wash the diapers usually (sometimes. occasionally.), so I did those first. Having drawn first blood against the laundry onslaught (bear w/the bizarrely exagerrated metaphors here, I'm very, very tired), I got cocky. I moved on to adult clothes. And forgot to add detergent.

Ha ha, right? As I moved my wet but not clean clothes to the dryer and realized my mistake, I had enough grace to laugh at myself. Since I'm fairly dangerous these days, mood-wise, I think self-mockery is big of me. I had already moved most of the clothes when I realized I'd forgotten the detergent, and I decided just to go ahead and dry them. It's not like WE poop in our clothes, you know? And there's certainly some detergent residue or something in the washer. And they were already in the dryer. I put in an extra fabric softener sheet, so we should be good, right?

Then I moved on to my next mistake. Having screwed up the adult clothes, I decided the babies would feel left out if I didn't screw up their clothes. I put the clothes in, then reached for the special no-real-soap-in-it baby laundry soap. It looked a little strange when I poured it out, but full speed ahead, man, I can't be bothered to pause when there's a chance I can compound a mistake! After dumping in the giant capful of liquid, I looked at the bottle. Dreft? Um, no. Liquid fabric softener. What the fuck. I swear to god, I've never used liquid fabric softener. I've never even bought liquid fabric softener. And why the hell is it in a pastel-ly girly looking dreft-like container, anyway? Stupid deceptive fabric softener people, dressing their bottles like detergent and secreting it into my basement while I sleep. Once again, I decided to just roll with the mistake - I added a capful of actual dreft for good measure and started the machine. Those are going to be some soft clothes.

Sometimes I consider that I'm missing, a bit, that sense of accomplishment that can come from an out-of-the-house job with regular feedback and performance appraisal. And then something like this happens, and I'm just grateful there isn't anyone to appraise me, after all.