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April 4, 2014 | Blog |  No comments

Literary Mama Rewind: Spring Cleaning

By Amanda Jaros

Welcome to Literary Mama Rewind! Every few weeks we’ll round up some of our favorite essays, stories, poems, columns, and reviews from the Literary Mama archives relating to a particular theme. It’s time for some spring cleaning. This month we’re sharing stories of laundry, ironing, and all those other housekeeping skills some of us love, and some would rather leave on the shelf to collect dust.

  • Love and Laundry by Yocheved Lindenbaum in Creative Nonfiction

I had an almost primal love of all things connected to laundry. I loved the aroma of the cleaning fluids, probably toxic, at the dry cleaners, and the scent of starch from the Chinese laundry.

  • From Laundry to Literature by Cassie Stocks in Essays

No time has ever passed so quickly as the hour I sometimes manage to gain in the morning to write. It seems I have barely begun and am just getting rolling when it is time to become a mother again, to suddenly wonder if there are clean and possibly matching socks, what will be for breakfast, and what will I take for lunch.

  • Ironing Sheets by Pam Tucker in Poetry

She spoke of ironing sheets and said
her children loved to come and rest
beneath linens pressed to crisp perfection.

  • Ama de Casa by Kate MacVean from the Column Mothering Abroad

I imagine these women with their mountains of wrinkled shirts and pants — since everything is line-dried, even jeans and t-shirts need ironing — and I vow never to become one of them.

  • The Tyranny of Housework by Peggy Hong from the Column Far From Cool

If I give up earthly attachment and retreat to monastic life, if I end up divorced and living in a studio apartment, if you find me in a women’s commune living off the grid, know that it was all for this: housework. I hate it. I won’t do it.

  • The Fix-It Fairy by Deesha Philyaw from the Column The Girl is Mine

Taylor, 8, also looks around in disbelief. She peeks around the corner at the living room and says, “Everything is so nice and clean!”
I laugh. “It’s not like the house has never been clean before.”

  • On Not Learning to Clean by Libby Gruner from the Column Children’s Lit Book Group

She taught my older brother to iron his shirts, but not me. Was this a nascent feminism, making sure that I wouldn’t be the only one to do the household chores? If so, I think it worked.

  • The Feminine Mistake: A Review of Happy Housewives and the Return of Housewife Chic by Jen Lawrence in Reviews

I was apprehensive about reviewing Darla Shine’s Happy Housewives. The book’s premise, written in a chatty “hey, girls” style, is that Shine, a former career woman, has found happiness as a mother through surrendering herself to the domestic realm and embracing her inner happy housewife.

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