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How Sorting Through My Son’s Old Clothes Turned into the Biggest Laundry Mission of my Life
Okay, I might be exaggerating a little. It didn’t actually turn out to be the biggest laundry mission of my life. But when I discovered that I needed to do loads of laundry, I catastrophised (classic 🙄) and envisioned that I would be doing laundry for the rest of my life 😂
Here’s what happened and how I kept pushing forward.
The Problem
I started gathering all of my son’s old clothes together, ready to sort through them and vacuum pack what we were keeping, and I noticed a very unpleasant – yet familiar – odour. Yep, that’s right. My wonderful cat Kenneth had peed on some clothes 🙃 I’ve included a picture of the adorable reprobate – because who doesn’t want to see cat pictures!? We have three cats in this house, but I know 100% for a fact that it was Kenneth. He is the only cat that pees in random places.
Of course, my knee-jerk reaction was doom. “Fuck sake, now I have to wash a year’s supply of baby clothes because my idiot ginger cat has decided it’s a great place to pee. I’m not going to be able to finish the task I set out to do today because now I need to wash everything. This is a disaster. I should just stop here. I don’t want to do this any more. Blah blah blah…” I know that you know this doom spiral.
After calming down (a few minutes at most), I convinced myself to persevere. I’m so glad I did this, because I realised that Kenneth had only peed in two bags of the clothes. I went through and checked all of the clothes, and it was definitely only two bags. So in reality, I didn’t end up with a mountain of laundry bigger than I’ve ever dealt with, I only had to wash two bags full of clothes. Which actually, only took two loads of washing (thank you newborn clothes for being so tiny 🙌🏻)
The Solution
As I said, once I calmed down, I continued on with gathering my son’s clothes and taking them downstairs ready to be sorted. I put on the first load of laundry, and started sorting through the clothes that didn’t need to be washed. Just a note so you don’t freak out, when the day comes that we unpack these clothes, everything will be washed again any way. I’m not about to use or donate clothes that have been sat in vacuum bags for Lord knows how long without washing them first.
Anyway… While the first load was washing, my husband and I carried on with the task of sorting through out clothes.
The Lesson
Catastrophising is just that. Just because you think that this has completely fucked up your day, it doesn’t mean that it has. Sure, my progress was slowed down because I had to add the time of two loads of laundry to the task of sorting my son’s old clothes, but the task still got finished (more detail on this in Part 2 of this series). Which is really important, so let’s say it again. The task still got finished. I am definitely taking this forward with me for the rest of Operation Bedroom. If I didn’t persevere, it wouldn’t have gotten done, and all I’d be doing is feeling even more anxious about sorting out that section of the attic space; which would have been made worse by knowing that Kenneth had peed on some of the clothes.
The key take away lesson for me here is: just because something goes wrong, it doesn’t mean the task will never get finished. You can push through, solve the problem as it arises, and save yourself days/weeks/months of ruminating on something and turning it into a bigger problem than it needs to be.
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