This column is the latest in a series on parenting children in the final years of high school, "Emptying the Nest."

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As I did what felt like my 18th load of laundry last weekend, most of it belonging to my 17-year-old daughter, I felt a strange catch in my throat.

In a little over a year, my three-decade indenture as a full-time laundress will come to an end. With my youngest child away at college, the only clothes I will be regularly loading in and out of the washer and dryer will be my own. (And my husband's — but at this point he only wears, and re-wears, soccer pants and sweatshirts so the addition is negligible.)

For a moment I honestly thought I would cry. Over the freaking laundry. Where once I would grumble and complain — why am I doing this kid's laundry when she could do it herself? — I take bittersweet comfort from the task.

But that's the way it's been as my third and final child draws ever nearer to deserting the nest, as the role of "mother" becomes less CEO and more consultant emeritus.

You'd think I'd be relieved, excited even. A career in motherhood involves many repetitive and relentless tasks — changing diapers, assembling lunches, keeping track of doctor and dentist appointments, filling out school forms for each child Every Single Year.

But none are as omnipresent and unavoidable as the laundry. Picking up all the clothes, washing and drying all the clothes, folding and putting away all the clothes. Yes, I have learned to remove pretty much every stain the natural world can produce, but the years of my life that I have lost to matching socks alone do not bear calculating.

And soon even that tie to the myriad children with whom I've shared my life — the milky-skinned infants, the bright-eyed toddlers, the scrappy elementary school explorers, the sullen but still suddenly cuddly tweens, the amazingly capable and occasionally helpful teens — will be broken.

My youngest may still panic if her basketball uniform is not dry yet, but it's been years since anyone burst into our bedroom at 11:30 p.m. to demand that I start a load of wash right now because "tomorrow is pajama day and my cute ones are dirty." Even longer since I was informed, mere minutes before the school-start bell, that one of them did not have any clean underwear because all of the used pairs "somehow" wound up under their bed. (For years, I stashed packages of children's underwear all around the house. Don't judge me.)

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