Where did all this laundry come from?

The title for this post pretty much says it all, but I'm going to write it anyway.  If there is one thing I do more than the dishes, it's the laundry.  A mother's job is never "done."  We cook dinner, and it gets eaten, and then we have to cook dinner all over again the next night.  We clean the kitchen, which usually lasts about a couple of hours until the kids come back in for a snack.  We give the baby a bath, and sometimes the results of that job don't even last the day.  No matter how many snacks we prepare in a day, there is always someone who wants another, different snack.  No matter how many dishes we wash, there is always another dish waiting in the sink.  And of course, no matter how much laundry we do, there is always more.  A mother can sometimes feel like there is no sense of accomplishment in her job.

Yet at the same time, there is more accomplishment in a mother's job than any other job.  It is a job which is never completed, and yet it allows things to happen in a way no other job can.  I was reflecting on the fact that I've been washing and folding (and sometimes even ironing, but rarely) my children's clothing for over ten years, and I'm still not done.  That's right, after ten years of laundry, there is still more laundry in the basket in my son's room.  You'd think by now I'd be done.  I might feel like I will never accomplish anything at this rate.  But then I took a closer look at the laundry I was folding, and I noticed that instead of size newborn, they shirts were size 10.  I realized that although it seems like nothing was accomplished, so much was.  And if I wasn't folding my son's laundry, and washing the dishes he ate off, and making him another snack, he would never have grown into the boy he is now.

After a day of cleaning and folding, I look around the house and wonder how many hours until I have to start the process over again.  The constant turnover of housework doesn't seem to say much about all the work I've done.  But hidden between the piles of neatly folded laundry is the story of how far my family has come.