Stained Red

Twenty years of life and I don’t really remember the first time I did laundry. I must have been young because my father always told me a girl grows into a woman and that meant laundry was my midday snack. Proper nourishment for a growing girl, like I’ll have dishes for dinner and ill vacuum for dessert. I learned the art of laundering before most kids can pronounce washer. I was folding clothes before my family began folding in on itself. A mundane task, repetitive motions keeping some stability from washing away. The mixed load seeping colors into white. Hues of red blooming on my shorts create illusions of woman hood I was later than most to greet. By the time I did I had learned the old wives’ secret: hydrogen peroxide lifts blood from cloth like a ghost from a grave. The idea that pieces of myself would just drip out was enough to make my skin crawl. But learning to erase and wash away the parts of me that failed to become more, more than just a stain, was even more distressing. Doing laundry was always such a normal part of existing, it was a part of me, so forgive me when I say…this, felt like murder. The sizzling sounds, screams of my womb, untouched by that of man leave me unwilling to justify the act of cleansing. Why must I be taught that I am dirty in my own body no matter what I do? Whether it be the shame which accompanies that of a body touched by too many men, deemed a whore. Or from its natural existence a cyclical reminder of wasted resources. Either way, I, the woman, am made to be the cleanser of all matronly mistakes. As if washing clothes parallels penitence for sin of existence. My undergarments become a symbol of iniquitous behavior. My body a bomb, which in the hands of a man may be triggered at any time, leaving all who stand in the line of fire a victim of circumstance. My clothes become the unlaundered circumstantial evidence. As if to answer the inquiry of: “what was she wearing?” and if “she was asking for it.” All of a sudden, he is all pomp and no circumstance because once again clothing speaks as a predecessor for desire, as if anyone ever asked me what I really wanted. It’s easy to assume that folding up your laundry day in and day out is good practice for folding your emotions to fit into baggage, but you’ll soon find that the weight becomes more than you or I can carry. There comes a time where no amount of water and soap can wash away the stench of unwanted contact. A time where its not just blood from your womb but unwanted semen which hardens into your clothes. Do not look to others for assistance in rinsing and scrubbing out these things. They will only condemn choices you did not make. So, you launder and never hang your clothes out to dry for fear of doing so to yourself. That is the life which I have grown into like that of hand-me-downs. The need to have my soft hands water and rub out the seed men plant in soiled linen is old as time. I am not the first of my kind, this is a task which has been handed down for generations. A right of passage which does not ask if I want to do his dirty laundry, but when I will do it. No matter how many times I explain that my fingers have pruned from hand washing another women’s lingerie, he mistakes me for saying I am a prude. Falling victim to paradoxical name calling that of overly worn socks which go from washer to dryer and back again between uses. Am I the washer or the dryer? A whore or a prude? Or, am I just being used? I suppose socks are the best representation of myself as it seems through each cycle I can never find my match when it comes time to fold. My other half lost in the chaotic cleanse, I do not have use alone but to collect dust at the hand of another woman and so I fold my self into another sock, one which is all wrong for me. I get worn out until holes I never knew could exist begin to  appear. My own stench becomes one which implies overuse and I am once again reminded of why I learned to do laundry in the first place. It is my obligation, my purpose as caretaker, as female. So I sit and I practice the movements of my mother, my mother’s mother, those which indicate becoming smaller while my brothers learn to do big things. I lay down the cotton fabric, moving left to meet right across a vertical axis. Now the top meets bottom across the horizontal axis and the tears come like rain. Drenching hard work with that sorrow. No man is immune to a women’s feelings and if he refuses to acknowledge mine than he will be made to wear them. As my salty water showers his shirt like I once showered him in love, I am reminded of my metamorphosis from girl to woman and that of this shirt from clean to dirty. It is in moments like these I am grateful for another object to relate too. Other times I am far-less accepting of my gendered role. On those days my white shorts are truly died red with taboo and only the detergent brand tide can remove those most heinous stains of red tide. And then one day you become so tiered of rewashing the same white shorts, stained with your blood and his sweat, that you try bleach. And when you drink it, you finally feel clean.