Hi, I’m aag, and I have a small problem with hoarding towels.  I’ll pause now to allow you a moment to welcome me to the meeting.

Oddly enough, I didn’t know that I had a problem with hoarding towels until prematurely gorgeous faux-Spring weather descended upon my area this past weekend.  I leaped (yes, I did actually literally leap) from my bed and immediately set to moving a low bookcase-ful of volumes from my bedroom to a larger (read:  higher) shelf in the hallway, because I am tired of asking my children ten-thousand times a day to leave mommy’s goddamn books alone.

They already dismembered my copy of Clarissa.  Some might feel this to be not such a tragedy but I’m not really willing to sacrifice any more of my novels on the altar of toddler curiosity.  Now my bedroom is free from books other than the saucy variety, which live on the top shelf of my closet as pictures of that type  might merit a bit more scrutiny than what was necessary to sunder my pathetic 18th century heroine.

But towels.  Right.  Getting there.

I enlisted the kids’ help in transporting books to their new home, a task which they embraced wholeheartedly.  So enthusiastic were they and so energetic was I that after a quick breakfast we began a thorough cleaning of the basement, necessary because I’m expecting a house guest at some point this week and I have a feeling that she’ll appreciate not having Elmo staring at her every second of the day.  And night.  Or stepping on random Legos, which have been certified by those in the know as The Most Painful Toy Upon Which To Step.

As it so frequently happens, clearing out the clutter in one location made other locations look shabby in comparison.  I moved through the house as a vengeful demon of clean, making two messes for each one I cleaned up until at some point in the late afternoon chaos was banished and I could concentrate only on restoring order.

At approximately 11:00 pm I found myself alone before the final disaster area:  a pair of drawers and a kitchen cabinet which could no longer be closed completely because they were stuffed with several generations of towels.  I discovered early on in this mommy thing that if I depended upon paper towels to deal with the uninterrupted flood of child-produced fluids, I would soon be penniless.  So I turned to small cloth hand towels, which I bought in bulk at discount stores and went through like water, some days washing two dozen of them when the flow of drool, spilled food and dirty counters peaked.

At one point I was preparing three towels for each meal and snack we ate:  one for each child and an additional one for the floor.  And often that number was insufficient for our messes of spaghetti, or cereal, or cottage cheese.

(Oh cottage cheese.  Each curd subdivided into a near-infinite number of smaller curds in the hands of a new self-feeder.  Each curdlet clung stubbornly to the floor, defending itself against attack by continuing to divide until nothing was left but an omnipresent white film of cheesy goo.  Oh how I don’t miss those days.)

From so frequent washing the towels disintegrated at an unbelievable rate.  As they’d fray around the edges and become all but see-through I’d purchase another pile, but still I ran out of them frequently enough (despite daily loads of laundry) that I couldn’t bear to throw them out.  And so they collected in my kitchen drawers and below the sink, pile after pile of decrepit raggedy rags.

And then somehow time passed; I looked up from my usual funk of children, work and naughtiness not long ago and realized that we no longer needed three towels per feeding.  In fact we no longer needed even one towel, as they’ve learned to get most — nay, almost all — food into their mouths.

Oh happy day!

In fact they now can manage towels on their own; when necessary they trot their little behinds to the towel drawer so as to clean up their own messes.  God I love that.  If I keep up this pace of chore transfer from parent to child I’ll eventually have an army of wee surly servants.  I can’t wait.

So at the end of my cleaning frenzy, confronted with mounds of old towels, I did what I had to do.  I bundled them up into a bag and set them out with the trash, minus a few that I held back in case of extreme need.  (Please believe me when I say that they were not suitable for donation.)

Briefly I mourned the passage of time as marked out by towels.  For just a second my poor ovaries, disconnected as they may be, contracted at the thought that I’ll never again be needed to wipe smeary food off little faces.

But in the very next second I thought, Oh.  I can buy more towels.  I can buy nice towels.  I can buy towels that will not be subjected to spaghetti sauce stains and grape juice splatters.  I can buy new towels now.

See what I mean about my little towel hoarding problem?

“We think they like each other so we’re going to try to get them together,” my eldest child reported as she burst through the door after school.

“Orly,” I said.  “How are you going to do that?”

This invited a long explanation of how she and her friends were developing quizzes with which to survey both halves of the potential couple.  “Then we’ll compare their answers to see how much they have in common!”

I asked what sort of questions.  “Oh, you know,” she said breezily, “The usual stuff.  Favorite colors, what kinds of pets they like, do they like blue eyes or brown, which is their favorite subject.  Stuff like that.  We have about twenty questions so far.”

“I see,”  I said noncommittally.  “And how many answers should they have in common for you to push through the match?” I asked.

“Half,” she said immediately and with absolute conviction.  “If they think the same about half the questions they’ll make a great couple.”

Don’t you wish that it were so easy?