Forgetting To Add The Dryer Sheet

I know right away that I've messed up. I've dumped the clean laundry, still warm from the dryer, onto the couch and I've started folding them. Except the clothes are so full of static cling that they're sticking together and I have to peel them apart. They're wrinkly because they stuck to each other in the dryer machine and dried that way. I try to shake the static out, but somehow that just makes the static angrier and more vengeful. It’s one of those days.

If you're like me and wash your family’s clothes together, then you know that nothing sticks to clothes like baby socks. I think I know where all the stray baby socks ended up. They’re probably stuck inside jeans or clinging to the back of a sweater.

I keep folding the clothes and now the static's picked up my frizzy hair—because of course this happens on a day you have frizzy hair—and now I'm one big electric fuzzball. I admit that when this happens, I'm tempted to start all over again. But that just seems so wasteful, so I hold onto the clingy laundry like some self-imposed shame, my own “Game of Thrones”—except without dragons or angry mobs.

At this point I'm thinking: it's OK. At least it's clean. At least we have clean clothes. They're not soft and now I need to pull out the iron out and they’ll still be too scratchy, but I'm OK. I'm OK.

Forgotten dryer sheets. Spilled coffee. Protective seals that are difficult to remove from jars and bottles. Clogged drains. Paper cuts. Breaking a nail. This is an ode to the small things that ruin our day.

Because this is a comedy of errors, of course I've worn static-filled clothes to a special occasion. We'd been invited to a wedding and in the midst of getting ready, I asked my husband to toss my dress into the clothes dryer. “No problem!” he said, forgetting to add a Bounce® dryer sheet. Since I was running late doing my hair and makeup and getting our daughter ready (insert collective mom sigh), I threw on the dress and we dashed out the door. My favorite dress stuck awkwardly to my body throughout the ceremony. I could feel it creep up and kept tugging it down. So not cute.

I wore the same dress, properly dried this time, to the ballet and both dress and I looked as pretty as ever—a reminder that caring for our clothes plays a part in how we feel in our clothes.

As a mom, I know the laundry is never done, it’s a never ending task in every household. It doesn’t matter if you have a Pinterest-perfect laundry room, a gas dryer, an electric dryer, an old beat up dryer that makes a weird noise, or the best clothes dryer on the market, we all mess up the laundry from time to time. Let this be our collective ode to that shared regret and a promise to do better next time.

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