Separation

This morning as I walked into the laundry room, I noticed that the three bins that we have are a conglomerate of all sorts of colors and types of material. Well, as a person who suffers from CDO (for those of you who are not into psychobabble, that means Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) I could not bring myself today to touch a bunch of dirty clothes that were not where they were supposed to be.

You see, we have three bins as I mentioned before. One is for all the blues, grays, greens…any colors that predominantly have the primary color of blue. Then the second bin is for the whites: socks, undies, t-shirts, etc. Then the third bin is for the browns, reds, oranges…any colors that predominantly have the primary color of yellow. It’s quite the simple system if you ask me. Nothing too difficult to understand about the instructions: “Put the whites in the whites bin. Put the blues in the blue bin. Put the browns in the brown bin.” Simple enough.

So back to this morning. I walk into the laundry room to put my dirty clothes in the correct bins. But I couldn’t. The bins are all messed up. They are sagging with all sorts of colors in them and they are not the way they’re supposed to be. I ended up separating my dirty clothes in my hands on the floor, called my 12-year-old son into the laundry room and said, “You all cannot seem to separate the clothes properly so now you get to separate them so we can do laundry.”

Now for some who read my blog, this may be a minor issue to you, but it is not to me. Maybe it goes back to the first separation that I felt. It was October 8, 1966, when I was first kicked out of my mother’s womb by my twin sister, Denise. I could not stand to be away from her. It took her eight minutes to finally come out and join me in what we now know as the “real world.” We were once warm and cozy–and a little crowded–but we were happy. It took my parents a while to understand that we could not be separated. Every time they would try to put me in my own crib I would screech and howl and cry and my Denise would do the exact same thing. Once we were placed in the same crib together, all was well: there was no separation.

A few years went by, oh, say around four years, and  we were finally ready to separate from sleeping in the same room, same bed. I think she more so because I was the bed-wetter (it’s a boy thing). She had her room with my eldest sister and I had my room with my two elder brothers. What fun! I was with the big boys! Well, turns out that it was not always that fun. They picked on me and treated me like their football, their rag toy that they threw around, and of course, as the human who was being held captive by the apes (we all enjoyed watching the original Planet of the Apes with Charlton Heston, my two older brothers were the apes and I was Heston!).

We went to primary school, my twin and I. It was Tiny Tot Elementary. It was a private school. My parents thought it best for us to be there our first year of school because we were still very close to each other. Then came second grade. Something happened that has haunted me to this day: Mrs. Spencer! That’s who haunted me! She was my second-grade teacher. I remember the pink lipstick on her teeth and how mean she was. My Denise was in another room with another teacher. The first time we were really separated from each other. We would see each other at playtime on the playground or at lunchtime eating outside. We always sat together or played together, then the separation.

Now as a second grader, I was shy and hated being away from my twin sister. Separation was not good for me. I grew up and then it was time for us to leave the house and again we were separated. I came to Dallas and she was at Baylor University in Waco. Just about every weekend that we could, we would see each other, but then we would separate and go our way. We have always lived close to each other except the time that I lived in Tennessee for seven years. That was hard, but we kept in touch nearly every week.

So back to the laundry: I hate when the clothes are not separated properly so I can do laundry since that is the task that I have chosen. I don’t like for the clothes to be all piled up and mixed up; they need to be separated. There must be some sort of order that I can walk into in the laundry room. Separate the clothes!

Denise has left us. She left June 27, 2014 after battling cancer. The only type of separation that I like nowadays is the clothes in the laundry room.