Laundry: Better to fold and put away than
to take only what you need from the dryer.
LAUNDRY. Late one night I wrote the word in large, sloppy capitals in my journal, then underlined it twice. Beside it, I wrote: Better to fold and put away than to take only what you need from the dryer.
This was clearly going to be my next Best Practice. It had been a long time coming, and I was none too thrilled. Rekindling the spirit of our friendship, talking about things that bothered me, listening to the things that bothered Kristen—these Best Practices were romantic and intimate, and committing myself to them every morning had made me feel redeemed and somewhat heroic. But folding laundry? Come on.
The evening started off casually enough. Kristen and I had gotten the kids to bed, and we were standing in the kitchen, eating M&M’s. The clock on the oven read 8:37. We had the whole night ahead of us.
“What do you want to do?” Kristen asked, leaning into me for a hug.
I slid my hands down the back of her pants and took a minute to mull it over. Then another minute. And another, before she caught on and got annoyed.
We, of course, ended up on the couch, watching a movie. Kristen had done some laundry earlier in the day, and after taking our seats, we found ourselves fenced in by several stacks of loosely folded clothes. A tower of underpants nearly collapsed into my popcorn bowl, so I moved the clothes to the opposite end of the couch; Kristen muttered something and relocated them to the coffee table. I wondered—silently—why she didn’t take the clothes upstairs and put them away. After all, she had separated them, washed and dried them, and folded them. Why not just put in that little extra effort to finish the job? I chewed it over as I pulled the lever to raise my footrest and recline my section of the sofa. I mean, really, what is it with her?
“I wonder if we could commit to being tidy,” I said. “You know, to follow through on chores.”
“Follow through on what chores?” Kristen asked.
Gesturing toward the stacks of clothes on the coffee table, I began digging my own grave: “Putting things away, for instance.”
“Oh-ho-ho,” she said, “that’s a great idea, Dave. Be my guest.” She grabbed the remote control off my chest and paused the movie. “Go ahead. Take the clothes upstairs and put them away. That would be a great start. Thank you so much. I’ll keep the movie paused.”
“What, are you mad at me?”
“No, I’m not mad at all. Come on. Hurry up, so we can finish the movie.” Her voice didn’t sound mad. Her face didn’t look mad. But she sure seemed mad. Even with my rudimentary empathy skills I could see it.
“I’ll just take them upstairs when we go to bed,” I offered, shoving more popcorn into my mouth. “We don’t have to do it right now.”
“Are you kidding?” Kristen asked. Now she did look mad. “Do you know how long those clothes sat in the damn dryer?”
“A few days,” I said.
“Right. A few days. And instead of taking everything out, folding it, and putting it away, you’re in there every morning for ten minutes, picking through the entire load for the one thing you need.”
Kristen was right. I’m not the sort of person who sees clothes in the dryer and takes action. Partly because when it’s time for me to get dressed, I know exactly what I need. The gray boxers. The large white T-shirt. The narrow-ribbed black socks. If they aren’t in my drawer, then I head to the laundry room. Ah, there they are. If they are unfolded, it makes no difference. I just root through the dryer until I find whatever it is I’m looking for. To make things easier on everyone else, I choose to leave the pile in the dryer if possible, which seems preferable to leaving clothes out where people have to sit. I rarely receive gratitude for this measure of consideration.
“When am I supposed to have time to fold clothes?” I asked. “Find the time in my day to fold laundry. Is it when I’m getting ready for work? Is it when I’m at work? Is it when I’m driving home from work? Playing with the kids? Cleaning up the kitchen? Would that be a good time for me to fold laundry?” I was being snotty because she was 100 percent right, and I felt cornered. So of course, I made no mention of the amount of time that I spend in the bathroom, or the two hours that I spend getting ready in the morning before leaving for work, or the blocks of time that I devote to staring out our front windows, internally reciting first and last names. These appropriations of time were totally irrelevant to this conversation, as far as I was concerned.
“Give it a rest, Dave. I’m sure that once in a while you can find ten minutes in your version of a twenty-four-hour day to empty the dryer,” she said. “Or to take laundry that I’ve already folded out of the laundry room and bring it upstairs. That’s all I’m asking.”
Kristen had a good point, but I wasn’t interested in acknowledging it yet, so I said nothing. She resumed the movie, adding, “It would be nice if you were as obsessed with doing laundry as you are with your bathroom habits.”
Crap. Another good point. If laundry were one of my special habits, then I would stop at nothing to ensure that it was done properly: every article would be separated, washed, dried, folded neatly, and put away in its rightful place. Completing the job any other way might cause my head to explode. Much to Kristen’s disappointment, however, the process of doing laundry isn’t something with which I’ve ever been obsessed. Clean clothes, yes. Correctly folded clothes, absolutely. If the alternative is incorrectly folded clothes, I’d rather they remain unfolded. As for caring about whether they’re lying in drawers or in piles around the house, I have my preferences, but they’re not so strong that I’m motivated to do anything about them.
Laundry isn’t the only household task that hasn’t made my list of essentials. Getting the mail, making the beds, tidying up—these activities are all up for grabs. That’s the double-edged nature of my obsessive mind. When it works in my favor, obsession leads to great accomplishments. Free from normal human distractions like opening mail or accommodating the needs of others, I am able to put all of my mental energy into achieving goals that are intrinsically important to me—closing a deal to boost my career or modifying personal behaviors to repair relationships. But obsession can work against me. Certain interests can distract me from successful engagement in useful endeavors. I am likely to focus on perfecting the bawl of a nervous cow, or juggling, rather than mowing the lawn and interacting with my children, respectively. If I don’t obsess about something then it doesn’t get done.
Unfortunately, I’m not always able to pick my obsessions, as anyone who has ever ridden in my car will attest. “Hold on,” I say to passengers as we approach the car. “I’m very sorry, just let me move some things to make room . . .”
He or she will wait patiently, and I’ll sense their eagerness to comment on what would astound anyone: stacks of loose papers with notes, thoughts, and diagrams scribbled across them. Countless unopened envelopes—bills, second, third, and final notices, many of which have also been marked with notes, thoughts, and diagrams. Bowls and plates sprinkled with pepper granules and bread crumbs are stacked five to ten high or scattered across the front passenger floor. Cups with dried orange juice or old tea caked to the bottom are strewn about. CDs run wild and garbage-stuffed Burger King bags serve as a sort of mound on which the passenger may rest his or her elbow.
After I’ve made enough room on one seat or another for the person to sit down and buckle in, I usually hear something like “Wow. You seem so freaked out about everything else, I’m really surprised by how filthy this car is.” Yup.
While we’re driving, the passengers like to blather on and on about God knows what, unaware that I’m busy grouping and transforming numbers on license plates into letters in order to see which words I can spell. Then they are always surprised to hear the same Peter Gabriel songs playing over and over and over. This, to me, is incredibly amusing. “Funny,” they say, “‘Secret World’ was playing in your car the last time you picked me up.” I don’t offer an explanation. I’m too busy timing the blinks of my eyes to when my car’s hood is positioned precisely between two lane lines.
Of course, I’m not the only person, Aspie or neurotypical, with a preoccupied mind or a messy car. I don’t know very many people who open the mail the moment it arrives. The difference is how extreme the preoccupations are for me and the extent to which the associated hang-ups affect me and my family. Most people can have something on their minds without ignoring their families or the world around them. But my brain doesn’t work that way. If I were to stop indulging my obsessions, then my life would be nothing but stress. An odd but analogous situation might involve a person in a full-body cast filled with mosquitoes—all itch and no scratch. All stress and no relief. Completing certain chores doesn’t give me a sense of fulfillment toward an obsession. It doesn’t scratch the itch. So rather than doing them, I engage in activities that do offer relief and pacify my mind: taking lengthy showers, for example, or forcing Kristen into discussions about whether she likes spending time with me.
Fortunately for me and my family, with a lot of discipline and some strategic reprogramming of my brain, I could learn how to manage my obsessions. Transformation is always an option. I simply had to learn how to defer my engagement with a special activity and how to indulge an obsession without overindulging. I had to learn how to respond to the demands of real life without coming unglued.
With Kristen’s help, I had already made some progress in this area during the months that followed my diagnosis. Kristen knew right away that I needed to be shown how to manage myself, so at first she was firm and spelled things out for me as clearly as possible: “Parker just wants you to play trains with him, Dave. You can’t make him wait for an hour while you ‘optimize the configuration of the tracks.’” I’d note her advice in my Journal of Best Practices and try not to repeat my mistakes.
By summer, we were picking our battles together; if I felt strongly about watching the first few minutes of Live with Regis and Kelly uninterrupted, then I’d lock myself in our bedroom and watch until the segment was over while Kristen sat downstairs with the kids. By fall, I had learned that I could simply force myself out of certain habits, irrespective of how critical the habit might seem: My children are downstairs screaming; maybe I don’t have to review the symmetry of my face right now. So I’d step away from the mirror, making a mental note that the sky had not fallen in as a result of doing so. Then I’d go downstairs to tend to the kids before logging the moment as a success. So this is what neurotypicals are up to. Crazy.
Managing obsessive behaviors was one thing; convincing myself to become obsessed with laundry to ensure that it would get done would have been something else entirely. That’s not to say that it would have been impossible. Kristen and I had made cleaning the kitchen one of my special interests, but that was something that sort of evolved. In 2006, about two years before I was diagnosed, I had started an argument not unlike our discussion of laundry. My point had been that I expected Kristen to keep the kitchen clean at all times. “You’re here all day with Emily anyway,” I said. “It’ll give you something to do.” (Sometimes I use words, but I choose them very poorly.) Her counterpoint involved the F-word, and the next day, I became permanently responsible for keeping the kitchen clean. “As clean as you want to make it, dear,” she specified. For over two years, I honored my responsibility under severe protest. This is bullshit. I hate this. But in 2008, with my commitment to restoring our marriage came a new philosophy: Do this one daily chore for your family, and don’t be miserable while you do it.
The inspiration seemed to come from nowhere, although it’s possible that I was just trying to score that day—proof that necessity is the mother of invention. In any case, I gave it a shot one evening. Just clean up and be happy about it. See how she reacts. I expected Kristen to laud my cheery disposition and was surprised when she didn’t seem to notice it. I would have accepted a standing ovation or even a cookie for my efforts, but Kristen’s reward system is far more subtle. Cuddled up together later that evening, I realized my reward was the absence of resentment, and after she fell asleep, I logged the lesson in my journal: Harboring resentment is more fatiguing and less rewarding than simply completing the task. Plus, she seems to like being around you more when you’re not miserable.
The more I practiced cleaning the kitchen without being angry, the easier and more natural it became. I’d begin clearing the table, and an hour later (I never said I could do it quickly), I would have a perfectly spotless kitchen in which I could pace around and clear my head, and my great mood would make Kristen want to spend time with me, which was what I wanted more than anything.
But the question remained: If this sense of discipline is possible, then why can’t I just fold that frigging laundry?
This is the question that Kristen finds herself asking, albeit in different forms on different days. If he can arrange our mail by envelope width, why can’t he just open it? If he can spend ten minutes relacing his shoes so that the strings are of perfectly equal length, why can’t he just put them in the closet when he takes them off? If he can call me on my way to work to ask if I’d planned to make the bed, why couldn’t he have just made it himself? When Kristen enters the kitchen and finds me still cleaning an hour after I’ve started, the answer is clearly revealed: I tend to complicate things.
“Are you still cleaning?” she’ll ask. Prior to my diagnosis, I would hear this question as “Why is this taking you so long? Why are you so stupid? Someday I will leave you because of this.” I would go nuts, throwing my hands into the air like a maniac and barking back, “I’m sorry that what I’m doing still isn’t good enough for you, sweetheart. How’s this?” Then, in an immediate and dizzying rage, I’d slam every dirty dish straight into the dishwasher, some of them missing completely and crashing to the floor, while she stormed out of the room, saying into the air, “I am so . . . fucking . . . done with this shit.”
Now, though, having come a long way in our communication, I take the question for what it really is: natural curiosity about a process—a process that, I like to think, is the product of genius. I understand that she’s surprised, as anybody would be, by how long it takes me to clear a few dishes and wipe down the counter. I usually respond with a nod, if I can pull myself away from my focused cleaning efforts long enough to do so.
Sometimes she’ll come over and give me a hug, and as I freeze in place to accept her affection, I can feel her observing my operation. First, it’s all dishes into the sink, carried one by one from the table and inspected for remnants. Then they are separated by group: plates and bowls in the left basin; glasses, cups, silverware, and utensils in the right. All silverware is then inserted into a single glass, which is filled with water (I call this “presoaking”). Next, the bowls and plates are hand-scrubbed one at a time and deposited into the dishwasher, followed by glasses and silverware. Loading the dishwasher takes me a while—it’s an iterative loop designed for ease of unloading, the goal being to arrange the plates and bowls just as they are grouped in our cupboard: dinner plates, salad plates, soup bowls. Glasses and silverware are subjected to the same organization. All this effort pays off when I unload; I can simply grab entire groups of dishes and place them in the cupboard.
When Kristen loads the dishwasher, the process is far less optimized—it doesn’t matter to her if plates and pots share a row or if bowls mingle with glasses. I find myself having to put dishes away one at a time, rather than in clusters, which is so tedious, frustrating, and unnecessary that my head begins to hurt and I find myself questioning her thought processes, if not her motives. Forks and spoons bundled together? Is she trying to kill me?
After I finish the dishes, the counter gets wiped down, as do the chairs and the table. I leave the cooktop alone most nights because the first minute spent cleaning a cooktop inevitably leads to fifteen more. I wash the sink, line the toaster up parallel to the edge of the counter, wash my hands, and—sixty minutes after I’ve started—I call it a night.
Folding clothes presents a similar set of challenges. Whereas Kristen can fold a shirt, then a pair of boxers, then a towel, and stack them all together while watching TV or talking, I am forced by my own logic to take a different approach.
Again my objective is the most sensible strategy for putting things away, so I stack everything in groups: boxers, T-shirts, pajamas. Because stacks are involved, they must be straight, requiring each fold to be precise and creased hard, like a paper airplane. I can’t have any distractions, and still a basket might take half an hour to fold, or longer if, heaven help me, socks are in the mix. (I only purchase one style of white sock, so those are easy. It’s the dress socks that need special attention—they’re all such little individuals.)
Folding takes me forever, so I just don’t do it. Kristen does, and I’m always hesitant to inform her that she does it incorrectly. Due perhaps to carelessness, her hectic work schedule, or the fact that two children and a fully grown husband are constantly hanging off her and begging for attention, Kristen’s method is much more haphazard—there’s no telling how the boxers might be folded, and my T-shirts are always folded in on themselves, making it impossible to determine the color of the size label located just below the collar without unfolding the whole thing. This is a problem, as I’ve reserved shirts with red labels for casual dress and those with black labels for important occasions. Is she kidding? I’ll wonder as I unroll a white T-shirt. Who folds shirts like this? It would have been easier to pick through the dryer.
I always have the option of unfolding all my shirts and refolding them, so long as I accomplish it in such a way that Kristen never, ever, ever finds out, because if she did, nothing of mine would ever be folded by her hands again. And sometimes, locked inside our bedroom closet after she’s gone to work, I do.
Kristen has often suggested that I try a little less when I set out to accomplish something, that perhaps it would make things easier on me. But that philosophy doesn’t compute at all. Everything I want to accomplish is done with the precision of a military operation. It’s exhausting, but it’s the only way for me. This is where Kristen and I differ. To me, a task is a puzzle comprised of a million tiny pieces that must be arranged properly. Usually I find myself more appreciative of the procedure than of the outcome itself. Kristen, on the other hand, sees the process only as the means to an end. I see the trees, in other words, and Kristen sees the forest. Or, more to the point, I see a handsome genius declining involvement in an excruciating process, while Kristen sees a fully grown, half-naked man, covered in a towel, rummaging through a major home appliance for a pair of underpants.
We were midway through our movie, and the laundry had yet to be put away. Kristen appeared to be enjoying the film, but I was busy ruminating and had tuned it out completely. I was trying to find some insight into my laundry aversion so that we could discuss it further. I knew that folding wasn’t an obsession of mine. I knew that I would make the process painfully difficult for myself. But I also knew that those obstacles could be overcome with willpower. The biggest challenge was this: I couldn’t shake the feeling that I shouldn’t have been the one doing laundry in the first place. That’s her job. This was not the sort of thing a guy could safely announce to his wife, especially during a Hugh Grant movie, but it felt like such a significant factor. I should have let the matter go, but instead I kept digging.
“I’d like to blame this on my parents,” I said.
“What? What are you talking about?” Kristen paused the movie, and now I had Hugh Grant grinning at me from inside my television, as if he were thinking, Right, now this ought to be entertaining.
“The fact that I don’t fold and put away the laundry. I always assumed . . . I mean, I figured that once we were married . . . Anyway, I think it’s their fault.”
Kristen rolled her eyes. “I know you think it’s the wife’s job, Dave. Just say it. And yes, that may have been your family’s system, but you’re an adult now. Right?” She continued the movie—I swear I saw Hugh Grant wink at her—and I returned to my introspection. That went well.
I never intended to live like a male chauvinist. I don’t consider myself to be one, yet prior to 2008 my de facto philosophies on the division of family labor would have suggested otherwise. My childhood seems to have had a lot to do with that.
My parents weren’t chauvinists, but they were very traditional, in the traditional sense of the word. They each had clearly defined roles. They both worked—my dad was a farmer and my mom was an elementary school teacher—but it was understood that Mom was the domestic champion of the family. If women in Mayberry or Stepford did it, then my mom did it: cooking, cleaning, sewing, gardening. My brother and I only had to mow the lawn and help Dad around the farm—that was the extent of our contributions.
My dad didn’t have to do much in the way of household chores. He would repair a toilet or wire a new outlet in the laundry room, but you’d never find him brandishing a toilet brush or sliding an iron across a pair of slacks. Although, in fairness, a few times a year I would spot my dad at the kitchen sink, doing dishes for my mom on the evenings when she could be found lying on their bed, tightly curled in on herself, suffering a migraine. I would stand silently in the doorway that separated the hallway from the kitchen, rubbing my fingertips along the glossy white molding, and watch him. He would first rinse a dish, then scrub it clean with soap and his bare hand, then repeat the process several times, making the dish spotless before setting it delicately and quite deliberately into its designated place in the dishwasher. Cleaning the kitchen after dinner for four people could take my dad all night; it would have taken my mom about ten minutes. Everything done in a certain way—like father, like son.
Then there was laundry. The laundry system with which I grew up was simple in terms of my participation therein. I’d observed that my mom almost never washed items left on my bedroom floor, but the tall wicker hamper that she placed in our bathroom was serviced regularly—at least twice per week, usually more. So when I needed something washed, it went into the hamper, and a few days later it would appear with its buddies on my bed, the whole lot of garments individually folded and stacked into neat piles. If she saw that the hamper wasn’t quite full, she’d go out of her way to find me and ask if there was anything else I needed washed. Later that evening, my à la carte laundry order would be delivered to my bedroom, perfectly folded by my wiped-out mom.
“Here you go, sweetie,” she’d say, handing me the clothes and kissing my forehead. “I’m exhausted. Good night.” Then I’d set them on top of my dresser, knowing that by the same time the following day, as if by magic, the clothes would have made their way into their respective drawers.
That’s what I call doing laundry, and for the longest time, I was puzzled that Kristen didn’t operate the same way.
When we first moved in together, I tried making things easy on Kristen by instituting a hamper system similar to the one with which I’d grown up. However, my married-adult hamper system differed somewhat. For starters, I located the hamper in the bedroom closet rather than in our tiny master bathroom. The other difference was that Kristen didn’t seem to give a shit about my clothes or my hamper.
I would load it up until it became a massive, unstable heap. I’d let a week go by without mentioning it, having learned that people who aren’t my mom get sensitive about demands for personal service. My patience ran out whenever I’d find myself without clothes to wear to work, at which point I’d ask Kristen, “Were you planning to do the laundry at some point?” What can I say? The question always felt innocent enough, though looking back now it seems outrageously manipulative. I didn’t mean to be passive-aggressive. I wasn’t willfully imposing my antiquated worldview on her. I just thought that was how things worked. But how else was she supposed to have interpreted it? Had we known back then that I wasn’t naturally equipped to adapt to someone else’s system, this whole laundry situation might have been resolved sooner. As it was, I looked like an ass. I constantly found myself confused. Am I an ass for assuming she’d do my laundry? Why wouldn’t she do my laundry? The purview of a wife has always included laundry, has it not?
To Kristen’s credit, I’m still alive. Also to Kristen’s credit, she would reply diplomatically to questions like mine, suggesting that if she was washing her own clothes, then I could throw my stuff in with hers. “Or, if you have clothes that need to be washed right now, you know how to do it,” she’d always conclude. Yes, I’d think, standing there in my bottom-of-the-barrel emergency clothes (brown corduroy pants, a tight blue polo shirt, and black socks), I know how to do it . . . but that’s not the point!
Due to what Kristen calls a “ridiculously high rate of sock-changings,” I was constantly finding myself barefooted during our first year of marriage, so I eventually started washing my own clothes. That, too, became a problem. I was washing only my clothes, not hers. It didn’t occur to me to wash everything together—why would it have? I don’t wear her clothes, I wear my clothes. This easily could have been one of the questions on that Asperger’s evaluation: Do you need to be told explicitly to wash your wife’s clothes if you’re doing a load of laundry? The follow-up questions being Do you need to be told explicitly to fold the clothes when they’re dry, even though you can explain the theory of relativity? and Wow, seriously?
Perhaps a more telling question would be Do you find it almost impossible to shed precepts and adapt to new ways of doing things? Thanks to my Asperger’s brain, the answer is an emphatic yes (especially when adapting means I’ll be personally inconvenienced in some way), while an Asperger’s-neutral question such as Does it make sense that a person’s gender dictates how they contribute around the house? would garner a logical no. And yet, there I sat one evening, face-to-face with the lovable Hugh Grant and the realization that I had expected Kristen to do all the housework, just as my mom had.
Later that evening, well after the movie was finished, I would write in my journal, Housework was my mom’s job, but that doesn’t mean it’s Kristen’s job. I’d give serious thought to areas in which I could contribute. I would deem the toy room too chaotic for my involvement and therefore leave it to Kristen, but I would commit to continuing my responsibilities around the kitchen. I would design an hour-by-hour schedule for housework that would help me to stay on track, a list so unrealistic and unwieldy that we’d never be able to maintain it:
MONDAY
7:30 PM—Clean kitchen
8:30 PM—Vacuum and dust family room
9:30 PM—Iron blue dress shirts only
Ultimately, grimacing, I would commit in writing to folding and putting away the laundry.
But that would all come later. The movie was over now; the credits were rolling and I had some damage control to do. Kristen was sitting next to me, and next to her was a motley stack of linens topped with a bra. Because my previous attempts at talking had failed so miserably, I picked up my phone and texted her:
Hey [Send]
Her phone vibrated and she picked it up while I pretended not to look. A second later my phone buzzed:
hello.
I’m sorry I root through the dryer. You shouldn’t have to fold everything [Send]
I’m used to it. :)
Put your hand out [Send]
Kristen slowly extended her hand in front of herself, as if she were reaching for something.
The phone buzzed in her hand and this time she understood. Laughing, she lowered her hand, and I took it.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“For what?”
“For assuming that you would be responsible for all the housework.”
“It’s fine, Dave,” she said. “Everyone has expectations. But you have to understand that there are other ways of doing things, and you need to learn how to open up to them.”
“I will do more around the house. I just need to practice it, that’s all.”
“I’m not asking you to do much,” she said. “I’m just saying that when you see clothes that need to be folded, you can fold them. When you see dishes that need to be washed or put away, you can do that. If there are toys on the floor, pick them up. That’s all I’m saying.”
You need me to be autonomous and learn how to adapt. You need me to be an adult. Ugh.
“Okay,” I said. “I get it. I’m going to figure out a plan and then I’ll get started working on it.”
“I don’t want you to spend a lot of time making plans and worrying about this,” she said. “Don’t make this a bigger deal than it needs to be. Just pick up, fold, put away. Help. That’s it.”
“Okay.”
“Without pouting,” she added.
“Pouting?” I picked up my phone.
:( Fuck you. [Send]