Is This Post about Sports or Domestic Chores?

This is one of those meaningless random posts that spring from the meaningless random thoughts in my head.

Yesterday, as I was sitting through a baseball double header at the local Little League park another mom and I were chatting. (Gimme a break. I can’t pay attention to the game ALL the time.) She was mentioning that because her son was not only playing on the regular team but also the league all stars team she was going to have to wash his baseball uniform five times this week. I sympathized as I have been run ragged all year keeping N’s soccer, basketball and baseball uniforms ready for action. Multi-game weeks call for multiple washings, often in the wee hours after getting home late from a game.

Today I was thinking about how today is Monday, which to my mom has always meant, still means, and presumably will always mean “wash day” or the one day out of the week that she does laundry. As I was growing up she was mostly a SAHM and devoted much of her Mondays to washing and drying laundry with drying taking place, in good weather, on the backyard clothesline. Tuesdays were for ironing. I can think of no times when exceptions were made to the “Monday is Wash Day” rule.

I guess it is a good thing that FU and I very rarely participated in team sports. I guess it’s also a good thing that when we did we rarely had anything but one game per week. As kids I guess we wouldn’t have cared if we’d been in dirty uniforms. As a mom would she have cared? Somehow, knowing her as I do, I doubt it. It isn’t as if she would be at the game to see (or smell) the griminess. It isn’t as if she valued sports in any way, at least not the kind that are played outdoors and require those who attend to be outdoors. She did, however, value routine; the kind of routine where each day of the week is set aside for certain chores, and those chores are done on that day and no other, the kind of routine where you get up at the same time each day, eat at the same time each day, go to bed at the same time each day. She didn’t, and doesn’t, like to veer off schedule. (Oh, go ahead and say it, a bit of my propensity for rigidness may well have come from her.) Of all sports, she was most likely to attend basketball games which at least at that time were almost always on the same day of the week from week to week. She did come and watch FU a few times when he played in junior high. She came and watched me a few times when I was a member of the white turtle-necked, maroon jumpered pompon squad in junior high. I don’t remember her ever attending a softball game of mine or baseball game of FU’s. I only played one season of softball. I think FU maybe played one or two seasons at most of baseball. We were a family of academics, not athletes. The closest I ever came to being a true athlete was being a member of the high school marching band, and if you don’t think marching in the blazing sun in a wool uniform carrying and playing a trombone while watching out for other trombonists’ slides as they turn your direction requires a certain bit of physical stamina then you would be mistaken my friend, sadly mistaken.

I remember my mom often wondering aloud why some mothers seemed to be doing laundry “all the time.” It was beyond her comprehension why you couldn’t just get it all done once a week. It’s a really good thing she didn’t raise a brood of athletes.

BTW, this post was meant to be all about laundry, it being Monday at all. I’m not quite certain just how it became an exposé of my history with athletics. Oh well, I think we can all agree I was right at the start: this post was definitely meaningless and random.