The Invisible & Emotional (& Deeply Sentimental) Labor of Kids Clothes

You know those TikTok “Clean With Me” videos where some woman does a voiceover that’s like, “My anxiety has been really bad lately and that’s why there’s 8,000 loads of laundry on my floor,” and she’s trying to normalize digging through the pile? That’s not what this is about — but I definitely relate to her. Not because I have anxiety or depression or even that I’m so overwhelmed and I can’t stay on top of it. It’s because I have children.

Three growing children, in fact, who each need a new wardrobe every six months because their winter coats from last year are too small and their bathing suits are too tight and their toes are busting out of their tennis shoes. Three children who already have drawers bursting with clothes, but now we need to add more clothes. Which means we need to go through their current outfits. And then decide what to keep. And then figure out what to do with all of the extra clothes: sell, donate, save for a hand-me-down?

I hate the phrase “invisible labor” because really, so much of what we do as parents is invisible, but if I had to pick one domestic task that falls squarely on the shoulders of a mother and nobody, literally no one else, seems to notice? It’s the maintenance of a child’s wardrobe. It’s your partner opening a drawer and finding a whole row of pajamas that are guaranteed to fit your 18-month-old. It’s your kindergartener pulling out their underwear and never having to worry about it cutting into their thighs or falling down in the back. It’s your 3rd grader being able to dress themselves in weather-appropriate clothes because you took all the long-sleeve shirts and pants out and replaced them with shorts and tank tops.

Nobody is paying any attention to the Thursday afternoon where you spend roughly three hours going through everyone’s closets, putting clothes that are too stained to donate in bags, and then spending way too much mental energy trying to figure out if you can make $20 off of Poshmark or Mercari or Facebook Marketplace with a stack of too-small-for-your-kid Janie and Jack outfits. The pile of clothes in the bottom of your kid’s closet? Those are the tiny sweaters you finally pulled off of the hangers in mid-April when you realized they were taking up too much space and nobody would ever fit into them again, but you also can’t bear to toss them or donate them yet because oh my god wasn’t your teeny tiny little baby just wearing them?

You stuff the pajamas they wore on Christmas Eve and the polo shirt they wore on their first day of school and the Halloween costumes into corners of your house, promising yourself you’ll deal with it later. You order Easter dresses, clock picture day coming a mile away. You go through piles of summer clothes, hoping there are decent hand-me-downs for your younger kids, and then you put the rest into a laundry basket in the back of your van and drive around with a pile of 2T winter clothes for six months before you donate them.

And the house piles just happen.

Sometimes you find a shirt they can still fit into, but it’s stained beyond belief and you set it on top of the washing machine so you can spot-treat it later.

Sometimes your mother-in-law buys them new dresses and you pile them up on the dining room table so you can make sure they fit and then cut all the tags and then wash them and then find a spot for them.

Sometimes their pajama drawer is so full you can barely shut it, but there’s no way you’re getting rid of good pajamas that fit, so you just pull a few out and make a little pile on top of the dresser.

It’s an endless cycle of purging and adding, of organizing and reorganizing. Of realizing the system you had when they were babies doesn’t work anymore because their clothes are bigger now and take up more space. Of stepping in when your partner grabbed a 3T romper from your “too small” pile and are now trying to squeeze it over a 5T kid.

It’s the most invisible of all the invisible labor and it’s happening all the time. And if you’re a hoarder with a sentimental heart (c’est moi), then it’s also just emotional terrorism. How can you get rid of the little bunny outfit they only wore once but you bought when you were pregnant and dreamed of them in it? You know you don’t want to keep everything, but sitting down to go through 80 tiny onesies and decide which ones are worthy of a keepsake box and which ones need to be donated would take an entire afternoon and the length of three good podcast eps, which this week you don’t have.

And even if you’re a person who can Marie Kondo her way out of a paper bag and immediately emotionally detach from baby clothes, there’s still the work of getting them out of your house. (And bless you if you attempt to do any of this with your children actually in the house — suddenly that camp t-shirt from three summers ago is the only thing they’ve ever wanted to wear.)

This stuff is hands-down, 100%, part of the actual day-to-day parenting nobody tells you about (possibly because until you live it, it’s deeply boring). And it’s how you then become a freak of nature, a laundry vigilante, a surprising advocate for children only wearing diapers for the first three years of their lives because what are we all doing? So much so that you end up screaming at your cousin when she calls and says, “Hey, I’m going to drop some of my kid’s old clothes off at your house.” Like hell you will.

Nice try, but take your own donations to Goodwill. You can bring me all the empty Rubbermaid containers you have, but I’ve got my own pile of tiny khaki shorts and stained pajamas to deal with.

The truth is, when you’re daydreaming about becoming a mom and you’re nesting with all those little outfits and you’re wandering through Target touching all the tiny baby socks, you can’t see ahead to the actual work of all those cute things. And that’s OK. Maybe we’re not supposed to. Because then who would buy all of the tiny sweaters with ears on the hood that will only fit your baby for two days? Those pictures you texted the grandparents of your baby in their first snowsuit (but you live in Florida), that dopamine rush of finding the perfect first-day-of-kindergarten outfit (that they screamed about wearing), that guilt that maybe you are solely responsible for fast fashion and fabric piling up in landfills (you’re not)... it’s motherhood. And may it always be this fun and messy and overwhelming and lovely.

May there always be gingham dresses in spring and footed pajamas in winter and oversized t-shirts after baths.