The Incredible Shrinking Pyjamas

… admittedly this sounds like a sci-fi film for 7-year olds, but it’s an all too accurate description of the state of my clothing. Everything is shrinking. Now before you accuse me of getting bigger, allow me to explain. When I first moved to Rabat, I did all of my laundry by hand – much the same way that Wilma Flintstone did – although no, come to think of it, she had a washing machine. Okay, it was actually a pelican but it was still semi-automatic.

Hand washing has two huge disadvantages over machine-washed. Firstly, nothing gets really clean and, to add insult to injury, my whites just weren’t coming out white. Secondly, I could never master the art of squeezing excess water out of my laundry so consequently, my jeans weighed about 71 kilograms sopping wet and my towels about half that. To compound the problem, I have limited space from which to hang my sodden leaden clothes. There is a makeshift clothesline suspended outside my bedroom window which, on a good day, may support the weight of a few swallows but never a full load of laundry. My response to this was to wash a few things at a time but this was becoming onerous – I was doing laundry every few days – and I am incredibly slothful by nature. It was also rather stressful as I felt compelled to keep a vigil over the laundry lest my black lace crotchless panties (just kidding Mom) fell below onto someone’s parked car. Laundry should never be this stressful.

After a few weeks of this, the pressure finally got to me and I decided to drop my laundry off at a service. For what constitutes one load, I pay about 45 dirhams (@ $6 Cdn) and if the nice girl is working there, she’ll fold my laundry in a reasonable facsimile of how I fold – but would definitely not live up to my mother’s military standards. If the nice but creepy man is working, he’ll leave everything in a small mound so that my clothes dry in a mass of elephantine wrinkles. But, at least he doesn’t fold my underthings so I take solace in that.

The problem with the laundry service is the dryers it uses. They are industrialized mofo’s that belong in a Texan prison, their velocity rivals that of a small jet’s turboprop engine. And everything is coming out slightly smaller. I first noticed this phenomenon when I put my freshly laundered jammies on the first night. Only a few months old, my yellow pyjamas decorated with Curious George were now ankle-length; hitherto, they had been gathering dust as the hem trailed along the floor. As the weeks passed, that cheeky little monkey was visibly climbing higher and higher up my leg. Yesterday, as I folded my laundry (nice but creepy man was working), I noticed that my pyjamas are now, in fact, capri’s. At this rate, by summer they’ll be shorts. Needless to say, it's not just my jammies that are being affected by this blast furnace: everything is shrinking and/or losing its elasticity, buttons, underwire and stitching. I find myself puzzling over my kitchen tea towels – once rectangular – they are now the size and shape of a hanky. This extraordinary dryer cannot only change size but shape – surely defying the laws of physics!

There are 2 possible remedies to this situation: find another laundry service (unlikely since I am incredibly slothful by nature) or take my clean wet clothes home and dry them there (unlikely since I am incredibly slothful by nature). *Sigh* At least my husband can look forward to the fact that by autumn, my Curious George pyjamas will be a thong.