My grandma always called it my Princess and the Pea bed. Resting against the wall—high enough for a stepstool and framed by a delicately painted flowered headboard—its four glorious posters supported childhood and teenage dreams, all under an eyelet canopy. For 17 years I slept there. The bed cushioned me without complaint, absorbing angry tears or whispered giggles of late night phone conversations conducted on a slim pink phone with an actual cord.

Now, something was off. I didn’t need the stepstool any longer and the full-size mattress seemed much-too-full of limbs the moment two bodies fell against the sheets. My pulse quickened and I couldn’t stop myself from staring at the sliver of light under the door, the tarnishing brass knob without a lock. Our wedding rings meant nothing between those four posters; I had a boy in my bed and my parents were 20 feet down the hall. My mom had removed the canopy long ago, but I could feel it that night, sliding between us and freezing my limbs in a position to ensure there was no accidental physical contact.

I’d catapulted from my canopy bed into the arms of my prince, by way of dorm room loft beds, cheap apartments, and the scent of even cheaper beer that helped me wade through all of the non-princes I met along the way. I imagine the the tired parents who purchased the bed breathed a sigh of relief when they were finally finished with the drama of teenage uncertainty and young adult tension as I pushed against the canopy pressing me forever into my childhood.

But then I tumbled home, my prince and our own prince and princess in tow. With another house waiting for appraisals and signatures, this brief return should have been an interlude with the rollicking undertones and perfectly timed laugh track of the 80s sitcoms I grew up watching.

My kids sensed weakness immediately. “No” sounded less final under this roof. Grandma and Grandpa’s patience made mine look even thinner. I found my voice rising at the end of statements, questioning, looking for approval. Twenty years trickled from my age, while pounds of ice cream therapy threatened from the freezer, the perfect way to bite my tongue.

Eventually, it was the laundry that brought me to tears.

My mother and I differ in our laundry philosophies. She believes in hot water and immediate folding from the dryer. I have a top-secret, sacrosanct, sliding scale for water temperatures and I’ve been known to deep clean my clothes on occasion. Deep cleaning, for the uninitiated, involves running the washer a few times when the first cycle concludes, sits in a wet, lonely pile, and is forgotten until the next morning.

I am certain my mother never deep cleans her towels.

With the pressure of a house accustomed to single-cycle laundry, I vowed to keep our laundry under control. If my husband and I were practicing canopy-bed-induced celibacy, I could certainly stop my laundry from breeding and multiplying in the night. I could do a load of laundry each day—two on days when each run through the backyard sprinklers required a complete wardrobe change for both kids. I carried the basket confidently the first few days, balancing it on my hip, the clothes barely visible over the top of the white plastic. The kids helped fold and I considered sending them for laundry detergent commercial auditions because our new house was about to suck their college funds into the ground.

Like any downward spiral, I shrugged off the first missed load. After all, we were doing important things that day. Diego’s tree house needed to be built and I’m fairly certain my expertise was needed somewhere between Richard Scarry and Dr. Seuss. One missed load of laundry for the sake of early literacy? I would just throw in a second load the next day.

The next morning, I lugged the now-cumbersome basket down two flights of stairs. One missed load, raised to the exponential power of a five-year-old with a penchant for costume changes, equals 17 loads of laundry. I needed coffee to tackle a task like that and besides my mom’s single load was spinning around, hot water rushing into the laundry tub like it did every morning.

I walked up the stairs, made my coffee, checked email, showed a Sudoku puzzle whose boss, and promptly forgot all about the towering behemoth awaiting its turn in my mom’s washing machine.

By the time I pranced down the stairs to test the limits of my mom’s laundry tub—three loads can become one if you pack things tightly—the basket was empty. Afternoon sun slanted into the block windows on the west side of the house, casting shadows onto the dryer as it tumbled over and over, gusting hot air into the humidity hanging like a pall around the house. My head spun with my laundry. All semblance of maturity stayed in the basement with my shrinking clothes as I stalked up the stairs.

“Did you wash my clothes?” I demanded, channeling a thirteen-year-old holding a diary with a broken lock.

My mother, who would give anyone in the world the freshly laundered shirt off her back, nodded, happy she had done something to help shrink my task list for the day.

“Did you wash my clothes in hot water?” I could hear my voice approach a whine, but I’d forgotten how to use my big-girl voice.

She hadn’t gotten through my teenage years with only a few threads of gray without practice. Her voice calmly reassured me that there was nothing wrong with washing clothes in hot water. Mentally rifling through the contents of that fateful basket, I cringed at the thought of some of my favorite “wash with kid gloves in ice cold water from the highest point of the Himalayas” items now reduced to American Girl size.

80s sitcom etiquette (and my father) expected apologies but I channeled my fifteen-year-old self for a bit that afternoon, huffing and puffing and embarrassing myself with every moment of misplaced frustration.

Hours later, I’d apologized to my mother for losing 20 years of maturity over one load of laundry. Then I sat with my husband on the edge of my childhood bed, my feet nowhere near the floor and cried. My favorite tank, perfectly ruched to disguise my ice-cream habit, was snagged and just a little too tight. My pride was shrunk to even more miniscule proportions, appalled at how easily I had reverted to adolescent foot-stomping—figurative though it may have been.

“I want to go home,” I whispered, tears sliding onto the soft blanket that had replaced my familiar comforter after I’d left home.

He held my hand, let me cry, and showed me that he would be the one to help our daughter through her teenage years.

“I want to go home,” I whispered.

His eyes swept across the room, our clothes spilling from suitcases and drawers, our lives crammed into 120 square feet of my childhood memories and insecurities. The laundry, dry and smaller than when it started, was crumpled into a basket at the foot of the bed.

“This is it,” he whispered back and gratefulness for my parents crashed through my guilt.

And it was—until it wasn’t any longer and the only person I have to blame for my laundry mishaps looks back at me from our still-unhung bathroom mirror. I miss the canopy now, the way I could feel the people I loved most breathing under one roof. Maybe one day I’ll be able to repay the favor, when my parents are in limbo between their house and their fabulous, imaginary condo on the ocean.

I vow never to deep clean the beach towels.