With a baby due sometime during the first week of February, the anxiety level is ratcheting up on a daily basis. I felt it particularly last weekend when the wife spent all day Saturday and Sunday doing laundry. "Doing" laundry isn't a fair description. The house approximated a construction site where the washer and dryer served as the foundation and the dining room might as well have been the foreman's trailer. I've truly never seen anything like it. Clothing that I didn't even know existed was blasted clean in the washer, dried, folded and placed like a wall of bricks along the interior of the dining room.
From daybreak Saturday to sundown on Sunday, she moved with her expanding middle up and down the stairs, pausing often to drink water, tea, and then, of course, to use the washroom. Yes, I did help haul the laundry to and from the laundry room, assisting the construction foreman when directed, serving as a type of bricklayer's apprentice on this job site. So, what about these activities would make me anxious or cause me to react in an odd way, inconsistent with the act of cleaning clothes.
First and foremost, there's going to be a baby in this house in less than three months. That's less than 90 days! Our house is currently occupied by the two of us - me and the laundry general - and her two sons who each have a bedroom on the first floor of our house. The master bedroom is upstairs and so is the fourth of the four bedrooms which serves as an office, guest room, and, most importantly, storage for my belongings.
I told my wife that her laundry project seemed to be the work of a nesting pregnant woman (although I didn't know for sure and was just trying to find a reason why clothes that her kids hadn't worn in two to three years now seemed ripe for cleaning). I actually may have been right. According to PregnancyWeekly, around the fifth month of pregnancy, the "nesting" instinct can set in. This is an uncontrollable urge to clean one's house brought on by a desire to prepare a nest for the new baby, to tie up loose ends of old projects and to organize your world. It appears that she was trying to organize her world, but in doing so, she was unintentionally helping to confuse and disorganize mine.
When I moved into my south side digs 16 months ago, I brought a lot of "stuff." Mostly clothes and personal things accumulated over many years. I had lived in the same apartment for four years and tried to distribute anything I could before moving. Now, whatever I didn't give away or put in the garage or basement is in that fourth bedroom - the room that will house "the baby." This house is not blessed with a lot of closet space and I'm not a clothes horse, but I'm trying to figure out once a baby arrives, "Where the hell am I going to put my stuff?" As a result, my primal, simple reaction was to start going through the dresser drawers and seek to cull out unnecessary belongings. Guys - have you recently gone through your t-shirts? Have you done an inventory on how many you have or what exactly you have stuffed into those drawers?
Men are simple and my initial, base response to this fear of displacement by a 7 pound human human was to see what t-shirts I could get rid of. Good-bye to my Hooters South Beach t-shirt, so long to the Grandma's Best Molasses t, the garbage now holds several Hanes white-t's with yellowing collars (but had not frayed), and gone are two torn Champion t-shirts and a University of Miami Baseball t-shirt that I wanted to keep but, suffice to say, used to fit me.
T-shirt reduction surgery is a delicate process. Just because the t-shirt hasn't been worn in the past two years doesn't make it a candidate for removal. White Sox t's are immune from elimination; anything gifted by my kids or parents (even that Santa Lucia t-shirt my parents brought back last year) can not be tossed. The t-shirt I won at a WSCR, the "Score" trivia contest in a bar is safe even if I don't wear beer shirts.
Then, as I was going through the last group, I found one of the t-shirts that my son had made when he was a senior in high school for his senior project - a charity softball tournament featuring teams from the Evanston Police Department and the Evanston Firefighters to raise money for Juvenile Diabetes. The t-shirt reads "Charity Begins at Home Plate" - Spring Classic Softball Tournament. I realized that I would never get rid of this shirt, but more importantly I realized that if this baby one day organizes a charity event and makes t-shirts, I'll be damn proud of him/her too.
PregnancyWeekly also says, "the act of nesting puts you in control and gives a sense of accomplishment toward birth." While I don't necessarily feel very much in control of this process - the laundry queen can keep that honor - I do feel a sense of accomplishment as a result of my reaction to the nesting. I accomplished a reduction in my t-shirt stock and I realized that I accomplished a little bit as a parent who has helped raised kids who can produce a t-shirt for a cause worth saving.
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Very professional written review of t-shirts. Keep us updated with this sort of stuff always. I will be coming back to read more here.