This is a story about laundry, learning, motherhood and menschlichkeit.

Ever since I became a parent, I have been fascinated with socks. Fascinated ... and frustrated. From the time my children were born, I have been folding and unfolding socks of all sizes. Those baby socks were nonsensical; they never stayed on their respective feet and always seemed to get lost or stuck in the sleeve of another shirt or the leg of a pair of pajama pants. And you couldn’t actually fold them even if you found them; it was more like laying one on top of the other, hoping they’d both make it back to their wearer.

As the kids got bigger, the sockAs the kids got bigger, the sock circulation did as well circulation did as well. It became a time-consuming task: uncurling socks that lay like coils in the hamper, unwinding them, separating the different colors and then turning them right-side out before washing. Soaking and spraying the white ones so the ends and balls of the feet weren’t marked by dirt and dust, trying so hard to bring them back to their original pristine nature. Searching in vain to find a missing one that somehow got lost when it was just there yesterday.

Before children, I don’t have an inkling how I did laundry. I must have just thrown the clothes and detergent into the washer, dried them and put them away (someone once told me that the task wasn’t finished until the clean clothes were back nestled in their drawers; leaving them in a basket or on a bench, even stacked in piles, didn’t count). These days, it can be much like a marathon: piles of darks, lights, colors and whites in the hallway, somehow finished by Friday but then back again in their respective heaps come Monday morning.

After I had my fourth son, I didn’t work for a year. (By that, I mean outside the home.) I took advantage of the time for adult learning, with one educational program geared for parents assigning me a local chavruta, a Torah-study partner, for about one hour a week. We were given particular texts to read together and would then answer questions and start a discussion on relevant issues, all by phone.

I felt I had the very best partner in the lot. Shira had just had her fifth baby, and even though I was a good 10 years older, we had much in common when it came to our family backgrounds and the flow of our lives—two women who had grown up in fairly similar circles, now raising nine kids between us. She was, at the time, more religious than I, and sometimes, I’d tap into that as well.

After we completed our requisite assignment, we chatted about kids and school and our plans for the week. We also swapped stories about how stressed we felt juggling our duties and keeping our symbolic balls in the air. Shira liked to cook, and found relaxation and productivity that way, knowing she made her family happy and healthy with her from-scratch meals. She made dinners and packed lunches not just to fill them up but to bring them joy. I had just moved into a new home and was behind on everything, and even though that hour of learning proved invigorating, I felt bedraggled most other evenings.

How did I make my family feel good, feel special, feel singularly loved by me, I thought?

Once, after our studies and going over those relentless “To Do” lists, she shared how much she dreaded laundry—so much so that she nearly waited until they ran out of clothes to do the wash. I immediately perked up. “I love it,” I said. “It makes me feel … so accomplished. I mean, you have something unusable and make it useful again. You transform it.”

Then I mentioned that I even liked to iron, finding peace of mind as I methodically flattened wrinkle after wrinkle out of all kinds of fabric. How it served as a visual metaphor for life.

There was silence. At first, I thoughtAt first, I thought I’d embarrassed her I’d embarrassed her or made her feel bad. I faltered, thinking of something to say, knowing that her piles were probably twice mine and that unlike me, she wasn’t dabbing the stain-removal stick on shirt lapels or drying fitted sheets individually.

“That’s it!” she said generously. “Do you know how warm and safe you must make your family feel in their clean clothes? It must remind them of you all day long, how you care about them enough to make sure that everything smells good and looks nice on them.” She made it sound like a daily hug.

Those words were a gift. They were lovingkindness in action. Imagine how I would be from now on, tackling this repetitive chore with newfound zeal. In the throes of routine, every inspiration helps. Each hand offered is one that leads you forward.

Even now, when I shake out sand or rubber mulch from a towel or T-shirt—only later to empty mounds of it from the lint catcher—I think of what Shira said that night when I perhaps needed it most. She helped uplift the mundane. In a way, she helped make the scrubbing feel sacred; my part of the ongoing sustenance of my family. Making something, even a garment, whole again.

It harkens back to the Kohanim—the high priests in the Beit Hamikdash, the Holy Temple in Jerusalem—going about their necessary duties. In regard to cleaning the ashes from “the fire continuously burning on the altar” (Temidin uMusafim, Chapter 2), even though it wasn’t considered part of their avodah—their “work” or “service”—they approached the task with gusto; they embraced it. They were even said to “merit” it.

“Any one of the priests who desired would collect the ashes that were brought down [from the altar] and take them outside the city to the ash depository. Taking the ashes outside [the Temple Mount] did not require a lottery. Instead, whoever desired [was allowed to do so]. None of the priests were ever lethargic about removing the ashes.”

And so, Shira literally made my load easier.

It was wonderfully unexpected. It was one of many instances where women plugging through the hours, days, and years of trying to maintain their families’ demands and keep a household in-sync gave me kernels of strength to do the work that had to be done, as repetitive as that often was. I try to pass on such support to others, my part in the spin cycle to make another mom realize that she is just one neatly pressed pillowcase from feeling, in her own way, like she has brightened her small part of the world.