The $5 Laundry Basket

When you are healing through this trauma dumpster fire you decided so courageously to dive into, you want it to be a book you read, a thought you process and end scene. Unfortunately, it is so much more than that. 

The way I look at it, now a year into my journey relates to a load of laundry. Yup, laundry. My life is so thrilling on a Friday night in my 40s. I went to wash a load of clothes, to find a load of clothes already existed in that space, belonging to someone who was working a long shift and wouldn’t be home for hours. Nice Mom side, I grab a laundry basket to do the ol switcheroo and as soon as my hands touched the basket - I was flooded with those super fun, overwhelming thoughts. You know the ones, your heart starts racing, you get immediately warm in the face and you feel the frustration bubble over - most of the time for no logical reason at all. Fuck you laundry basket. 

The funny thing is, this laundry basket was a relic in our house. There is approximately 30% of the plastic sides are now gone. The handles have been gone for over a decade. It is cracked in a few places, more than I would like to admit. This laundry basket in particular, probably cost me about $5 back in 2002. So, it has 24 years of life so far and while hanging by a thread, still hanging and living out her golden years with our laundry. 

But this isn’t just any old laundry basket. It is the first one I bought as a grown up, when I got my first place - all by myself. Freshly married, world is an oyster or something to that effect. I remember picking this one up off the Target shelf and paying cash for it (literally, this element alone dates the whole story). It was so freshly white, so ready for my adult life. This laundry basket would turn into something that I could manage on one hip with a baby on the other. It would be something I would forcibly drop when I was feeling frustrated with something minor and wasn’t grown up enough to recognize it. This basket would be the first place I would fold pretty pink clothes in, and carefully put away. It would be the place I put an oversized comforter warm from the dryer, after I got done washing all the baby puke off of. This basket would become a racecar for two little toddlers to pretend they were racecar drivers and be pushed up and down the hallway while I made my best vroom vroom sounds. It was eventually fitted with an Elmo horn, when my daughter decided she needed to be more aggressive with her laundry basket races. It would become the basket that kids would learn how to fold towels (tri-fold people, don’t be feral). It would later hold baseball jerseys and dance uniforms. It would see another marriage, another house, another state. It would become the water balloon holder and the pulley system for toys into a treehouse. It would be what was used to move little kids books from bedrooms to basement storage. It was a snack hauler for sleepovers and a trash collector the very next day. It would be the miscellaneous sock  catcher and sometimes, this laundry basket - it would actually just carry a load of laundry that was naturally too big for the dryer cycle. It really had a life of its own. Carefully masked in the background as just an object in the picture but in reality, there was so much more to it. It took different shapes, had different uses, it form was ever changing in the cycles of its life. But at the core, it remained the same. 

Years ago, my now grown up kids wanted me to get rid of this laundry basket. They are absolutely correct, the ship has sailed and the normal human thing would be to toss it. But I didn’t do that. I continue to keep it and it continues to be in the background. Maybe less apparent than it was before, but still there. A sense of familiar that my brain craves to hold on to. This piece of plastic that is splintered apart and was so easily acquired continues to hold force in my life. What a beautiful masterpiece to write about such a mundane, seemingly useless piece of myself. Except to me, the laundry basket represents something else - my trauma. 

Something that was so quickly and easily acquired and has been in the background of my cycles of life. It has taken different forms, exhibited different uses (none of which were positive, unlike its laundry basket friend) and been engrained in who I am for 4 decades now. Something that my brain just continues to keep, because it doesn’t know how to erase some familiar. 

This is what healing feels like. The laundry basket that for the life of you, you can’t seem to throw away. It had so much power over your emotions and your thoughts. You relate it back to everything you have experienced, yet it can’t be discarded. You want to, but you can’t bring your mind to agree. The laundry basket just keeps appearing in places, sometimes empty, sometimes with memories but it won’t just leave the space. 

Healing is the moment you can reach within your core, and open yourself up to the power to release.  That basket can no longer hold any pieces of you and you want to experience new spaces. Finding that moment is a hell of a journey. One that is riddled with self doubt, heartache, indecisiveness, and pain. But…for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. For me, that equal reaction is love. Being whole. Believing. Trusting yourself. It won’t be when you want it, but it will be when you need it.