The article in The Washington Post pulled no punches.

"You're probably washing your pants wrong," the headline informed me, with no small degree of smugness. "Here's how to do it right."

As a woman and a parent, I am quite accustomed to being told that I'm doing something wrong, so, being thusly addressed, I did not immediately take umbrage.

Perhaps The Washington Post is right, I thought. Perhaps, as is true with the way that I grocery shop, cook, feed and clothe my children, exercise, do my hair/makeup, walk, talk and breathe, there IS something wrong with the way that I wash my pants. Perhaps this august institution's reporters have fed into their great AI beast the laundry habits of all 8.3 billion humans on Earth and it spat out a report on the techniques of every man, woman and child in the English-speaking world. I was among the teeming hordes found wanting in the pants-washing department.

Social media posts and group chats with other mothers are my usual avenues to feeling bad about how I do things, but I found that I was willing to branch out to the advice columns of newspapers renowned for uncovering political scandals at the highest levels of government.

So I clicked.

"It's a frustrating truism of laundry that there are no hard-and-fast rules about how often you should clean a pair of pants," began the article underneath the headline purporting that I, personally, had violated at least one hard-and-fast rule about washing pants.

Intriguing.

The author went on to inform me that some of the "clear signs" that it was time to wash my pants were:

No. 1: Dirt.

No. 2: Odors.

No. 3: That they were "oily or stiff from soil buildup."

I found myself immensely relieved to have been provided with this helpful list, as I, a person who has been wearing clothes virtually from the minute I was born, had not previously achieved consciousness of the understanding that dirt and odors indicated a need to change and/or clean my pants! I've been walking around this whole time in pants so filthy that they crack when I sit down, clouds of dust puffing from them with each movement of my legs, smelling like a Broward County tilapia farm at low tide.

I was further informed that pants exposed to contaminants — blood, urine, feces and vomit, to name a few of the substances commonly encountered in child-rearing — should be immediately washed. I resolved at that point to bury deep within myself the memory of the early months of the lives of my acid reflux-suffering children, when I was "spit up" (okay, vomited) on so many times during a day that I would have had to add new pants to my daily Amazon deliveries if I had changed every time it happened.

But yes, in general, poopy clothes=bad. I'm with you so far, Cleanliness Authority Person.

Now that I knew when to wash my pants, though, it was time for me to learn where I had been going astray in the process.

What, precisely, have I been doing wrong? I yearned to know.

Well, to start off with, we should all be washing our pants inside-out, the laundry expert proclaimed, 100% of the time, in every case.

Other than when we shouldn't.

There are OF COURSE situations in which you should wash the pants right-side out, I was told.

Like when they're dirty.

Gotcha.

At this point, I stumbled on a sentence so infuriating that I had to pause, immediately launch into the measured breathing called "butterfly breaths" my youngest son learned in social-emotional lessons at school and return to the passage only after I had becalmed myself sufficiently. Here is what I read:

"The good or bad news, depending on your perspective, is that even the experts don't agree on how often to wash pants, so treat these recommendations as rough guidelines," the article said, about halfway in.

Mais non! My brain protested to me, the clicker of hyperlinks. This was a violation of the implied contract we signed upon agreeing to consume this drivel. Before we even started reading the story, we were told that the experts DID agree and quite definitively at that. We were told that, in fact, we were almost certainly running afoul on an almost daily basis of pants-washing best practices. We were not by any stretch of the imagination under the impression that we would be provided with vague, contradictory advice that could be adequately described in a Google AI summary as "common sense."

In short, it was a tremendous waste — both of the joules of electricity it took for me to scroll through 1,073 words, as well as of my seemingly-but-apparently-not-entirely limitless stores of feelings of inadequacy.

To correct this injustice, I will save, if not myself, at least you the time and energy of reading the piece and give it a new headline. Decide for yourself whether it's worth a go:

"You're probably doing a just-fine job of washing your pants. Here are some rough guidelines if you are an incompetent boob or have yet to complete the second grade."

To learn more about Georgia Garvey, visit GeorgiaGarvey.com.

Photo credit: PlanetCare at Unsplash