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| Hung out to dry |
Accuse me of airing my dirty laundry in public if you wish (it needs to be), but on Friday my washing was done and it was a major event, as it was for only the second time in more than two months. It's a tad difficult to cope with when all I was able to bring with me was one suitcase of clothes. This also shows you my mother's standard reaction to everything and is just one more example of the absolute impossibility of dealing with even the simplest of everyday things.
First, the chances of my mother being at home and not already doing her own laundry, on a day when the weather is also good enough to hang washing out are only slightly higher than that of finding rocking horse poo on your lawn.
The "right answer" to this, obviously, is for me to do my own washing, but ...
(Also, I should explain that I can't manage to hang washing, so I've had tumble driers for most of the last 25+ years. She will not allow me to have one.)
She uses the washing machine as her dirty linen basket and it's more than my life's worth to touch that, so I've very diplomatically suggested that, if she were to do the same as me and keep her dirty laundry elsewhere (she insists mine must be hidden away), then I could just do my own laundry. No. She says that she has to do the laundry (after all, I'm only 51 and had only lived on my own for 30 years: she doesn't yet trust me with the machine ...) and, that I only have to ask.
But I asked her if "we can do" (note: carefully not "to do") the approx. four loads of bedding that came off my bed in Tenerife on June 4th and went straight into the boxes for the shippers. Nope. Those are still waiting to be washed?
She refuses to change anything to accommodate me, she doesn't want me touching her laundry or the machine (even though she needed me to show HER how to use it), then she storms off, slamming doors and muttering in a stage whisper about how unreasonable I am. What, for wanting clean clothes on a regular basis?
Hang out to dry: (Idiom) If you hang someone out to dry, you abandon them when they are in trouble. And, boy do I feel as though I have been!
