The Second Rule of Parenting

The Second Rule of Parenting is fairly straightforward: There is never no dirty laundry. Or in mathematical terms, L (laundry) =/= 0.

"Ali," you may be thinking. "I've seen your house, and I agree with you that you will never have no dirty laundry around."

Pictured: the average size of my laundry pile, with a 2-year-old who's planning to pee in it and not tell anybody included for purposes of comparison.

But I'm saying more than that. I am saying that no parent can ever have no dirty laundry*. Trying to have no dirty laundry is like trying to divide by zero. DON'T DO IT.

This doesn't seem immediately logical, because of course all of us see our laundry piles shrink as we put in more effort. But what we see is merely laundry approaching zero, not actually becoming zero. As illustrated in the following graph: 

(Because I love my family and nerdy friends too much to drive them crazy by failing to label my axes, let's say the y-axis shows laundry as measured in 10s of pounds, and the x-axis shows energy as measured in energy units (EU), with each unit being roughly equivalent to the amount of energy needed to either run one mile or keep an eye on three-year-old twin boys for 30 seconds.)

So what happens if you try to do all the laundry?

1. In the first stage, you wash all the laundry in and around your laundry basket. Nature will try to fight you even at this early stage, usually by causing you to forget to check the pockets. This can lead to an Infinite Laundry Loop in which you continue to wash the same clothes, only to have them come out with marker stains or covered in gum and in more desperate need of cleaning than before.

Assuming you make it through stage 1, washing absolutely everything in the hamper, even the stuff that's been sitting on the bottom for so long that you may as well just burn it all and call it a day - and all that without getting sucked into a loop or overwhelmed by the stench of toddler pee - you may bask briefly in your sense of accomplishment.

But then you as you look at the pile of laundry, you'll begin to feel doubts niggling at the back of your mind. Didn't you have another pair of pants? Didn't your older child have a blue sweater? Didn't the toddler have socks? And that's when you remember...

2. The hidden laundry. For each item of clothing in or near the hamper, there's a dirty sock at the bottom of a sports bag, a wet towel under a bed, or a shirt covered in playdoh shoved into the air conditioner.

A wise person would give up here. But if you're taking advice from me, you're probably not wise. So let's assume you try to push forward. You gather all the clothes from under the beds, from the cracks in the couch, from inside the toy box, the freezer, and the cupboards, from every backpack you can find, and from the neighbor's yard. You find the portal to the Land of Lost Socks, fight the evil Sock King, and bring back all the missing socks you've accumulated (or unaccumulated, really), and wash every last one of them.

Really, if you push your luck that far, you deserve what comes next:

3.

*(In Abstract Parenting, it is possible to talk about all the fun things you could do if in theory there was no dirty laundry. This should not be confused with an ability to have no dirty laundry in day-to-day life.)