It was at the back of a school hall, sitting on a blue plastic chair, watching my son erratically kick a chest-height dummy while a medley of synth instrumental numbers twanged in the background, that I finally had to admit something I have long suspected: I have issues with laundry.
Like many of my generation, I am caught between late 20th-century social expectations about cleanliness and 21st-century anxiety about ecological impact. I am programmed to believe that I should wash all my tops after a single wear, while knowing that the profligate use of chemicals, energy and water involved in doing so is going to very quickly poison the planet. I dump whole items into the laundry basket where a quick spot wash with a cloth would almost certainly do the trick, and then stand at the riverside and despair at the state of the filth and flooding I have contributed to.
According to National Geographic, the world’s washing machines use about 19bn cubic metres of water annually, and emit an estimated 62m tonnes of CO2-equivalent greenhouse gases each year (by comparison, in 2022, cars and vans emitted 3.53bn tonnes of carbon dioxide globally). I know this. I don’t like this. And so I reach for the sort of hopeless compromise that so many late capitalists do: I wash at 30C and use a brand of eco-friendly laundry liquid that means you might as well be trying to clean your clothes with camomile tea and whispers. When I have 17 hours spare, I choose the “eco wash” setting, and in winter I try to wear a thin base layer, to spare the unnecessary washing of shirts, jumpers and other heavier clothes. But I can still feel guilt creeping in.
At the age of 39, this is a bitter pill to swallow. Since I became a parent, laundry has made up, at a conservative estimate, about 98% of my life. I own three clothes drying racks. But even for years before reproduction, laundry was one of my great tethers to sanity. After a holiday, a night out, a breakup or a job loss, often the first thing that would make me feel like I could cope with my life again was shoving an armful of onion-smelling fabric into the drum and hitting “mixed coloureds”. Putting on a wash told my agitated brain that I was still productive; that there was order in the universe; that some problems (tomato ketchup, armpits) really could be solved.
And now I must cope with the twin tubs of eco-guilt and self-doubt. Watching my child jog around in a greying cotton two-piece, I had to confront the fact that I have never really managed to keep whites, well, white. Similarly, my washing never smells like the heady combination of summer meadow and medical institute that other people achieve. My towels aren’t fluffy and my stains do not disappear.
In possibly related news, I have never in my life washed anything by hand, other than knickers while camping. I never read labels, never use fabric conditioner, rarely adjust the temperature setting; I have never used a dry cleaning service. Essentially, I just throw anything vaguely pale – towels, work shirts, tea towels, silk dresses, toy elephants, bras – into the drum, free-pour a few shots of detergent into one of three drawers (I have no idea which leads where, when – and suspect that neither do the machine’s manufacturers), select “short cottons” and hope for the best. Every other couple of days I do the same with anything that I, that particular day, consider dark.
Still, I am very lucky to live in a place and era in which, as a woman, washing isn’t my primary activity. I remember my grandmother-in-law once describing to me how she washed the clothes for her family of eight, in a council house, without a washing machine; I felt dread creep through my body. According to the Whirlpool Foundation, approximately 60% of the global population relies on handwashing, while 70% of households worldwide depend on women and girls for water collection and laundry. So the very fact that I can toss my bundle of yoghurt-smeared, vinegar-scented pyjamas, pants and pillowcases into a machine is a privilege that I try not to take for granted. Even if what comes out looks like the kind of thing you’d use to insulate a shed.
Nell Frizzell is the author of Holding the Baby: Milk, Sweat and Tears from the Frontline of Motherhood
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