Weird Question

[Rita]

It is not trivial in the least. It's the nitty gritty of standing when your MLCer hasn't or won't leave.

Take it from me. I am an expert after seven years of that. Or read HaWho's threads.

You could also title your thread, "LBS Navigates Daily Life With In-House MLCer" (or in Rejoice-Speak, Stander and Prodigal) because these kinds of questions about daily life come up constantly when your MLCer is in house. Mine included cleaning toilets several times a day because my H is addicted to diuretics.

If you ever have the chance to slog through my threads, I wrote about laundry fairly often!

Based on seven years of in-house MLCer and a love of doing laundry and a hatred of hamper piling up and a Christian desire to be kind to my H in whatever way I could, here is my answer --

Do his laundry because you want to, if you want to. If you are a person of faith, do his laundry for God,if you want to do his laundry for God, and then while you do it, thank God for this grace of learning patience and humility and a way to express prayers for your enemy. If you are doing it because you hate an overflowing hamper, do it if you want an empty hamper. If you are doing it because you have no way to be kind to H except that, do it if you want to be kind to him.

DO NOT DO HIS LAUNDRY to affect him or his behavior in any way. It won't affect him or his behavior in any way. Or it might affect him one day and another day not affect him. He might say thank you one day and tell you you shrank his favorite sweater and have to buy him a new one on another day. Most days he won't notice. He'll just use the clean laundry without any thought of how it got there.

You can insert other domestic duties/verbs in here. Including, "empty his 4-5 wine bottles out of the recycling every three days," "raise his children" and "continue to love his mother and send her birthday gifts" and "replace the money he stole out of D8's wallet." As long as you also insert into your brain/heart the second paragraph about whatever you do having no affect on him.

And after seven years of your doing that, and the eighteen years before that when you were a happy family with a good MIL relationship, you may get a letter from MIL telling you she wants nothing to do with you and your "self-made" problems. Whoops -- did you have an expectation of her too?

The love you show is a victory. Not against H or MIL or anyone else. It's a victory in the battle against evil. It's light. As long as you don't do it to get something -- e.g., your H back. Or his gratitude. Or a change in his behavior. And you might learn that kicking him out is the best way to show the real him, the one from before, love, because you realized that the man you once knew will never climb out of MLC if you keep showing the Alien in His Body any wifely love or even the chance to live under your roof. But it might also be that your love does slowly affect him, I have read those stories here too. And sometimes that happened to me in drips and drabs along the way.

Likewise do not ask him to do his laundry or anything else, at least not with an expectation that he'll do it. You could tell him you can't do it anymore, but see paragraph above on expectations if you do.

Again, do it because you want to, and not because you expect any outcome.

If you take all the clothes and dump them in the basement without cleaning then,or in his car, or at the OW's house or if you take the clothes to a mudpit where pigs are living and pooping, stomp on the clothes for a while, put the now-pig-penned clothes in a shopping cart, break into his office at night and leave the clothes there so that the whole office will stink by the morning, you may get no response, a spew, a call from a lawyer or an apology and a request to be your H again. Or all of the above. (I didn't do any of those things but I am just imagining.)

This is MLC, my friend. Choose who you want to be, and how you want to be it. And forgive yourself for everything everything everything that happens after that.