Doing the Dishes ...

Is it just me? or is doing the dishes a major accomplishment for anyone else? I hate to do the dishes. It's my mother's fault.

Poor Mother -- she can't defend herself -- but she had the right idea. I don't have many memories of her doing the dishes. She cooked -- almost exclusively. We helped some; we baked with her and always had a lot of fun while learning the necessary skills to take forward with us in life ... but other than maybe a few pots and pans -- no, she didn't do the dishes. My sisters may have alternative memories to mine.

Imagine, if you will, a scrawny 8 year old, who can barely reach the sink, on the dishes rotation schedule. I was 10. Our big sis was 15. (She liked to "trade" (skip) because she had a boyfriend and had a lot of dates. We resented her for that. We got landed with the dishes. I usually had to wash when the elder sister was out and about because our younger sister could pretty much barely reach the drainer (unless she stood on a chair). She dried. She hated drying, but I hated it, too. Drying was double-duty -- the drying part AND the putting away, which is the worst part. I washed. The baby, 3 years old, did not have to take a turn. (She claims we pushed her off of the back of the toboggan, but that simply isn't true! And she didn't have to do the dishes, either.)

When I was 10, we lived in a really, really old farm house in New Hampshire. Living in the farm house must have been somewhat akin to what my mother grew up with, with the crucial addition of a bathroom. I would daydream about what life had been like when the house was young -- sort of like pioneering. The fireplace was in the kitchen and was huge -- with a great, high hearth. We actually needed a fire for warmth in that drafty house. It was New Hampshire -- not Virginia; winters were COLD. The kitchen was also the largest room in the house. The back door was not lockable -- and was only about a half-inch thick with old-time latches. (Our clever little black siamese cats figured out how to reach up, press down on the thumb latch, and let themselves in.) Across from that back door was a summer kitchen. We never used that ...

Anyway! The stove was an old thing -- hooked up to a propane tank. We had a good supply of Ohio Blue-tip matches with which to start the burners and the oven. You could strike the matches right on the burners themselves then turn on the gas.
Photo by gawain.membrane.com

Lighting that old oven was an adventure; you sort of took your life into your own hands when doing it. We'd strike the match (sometimes on our jeans zippers -- that was cool), lay it just over the flameless pilot light hole, quickly turn on the gas and jump back! BOOM! The oven would light. You could then "safely" get close enough to shut the oven door, without losing any eyebrows, and adjust the temperature. Surprisingly, that oven baked really evenly, though! We made good bread in that old oven.

Picture by blackdogsalvage.blogspot.com

The sink was at least as old as the stove -- possibly older. When we moved-in, we all took note: No dishwasher. Hmmmmm. There was an old porcelain sink with just one bowl and, where the other bowl might have been, a "drainboard." The sink stood alone, so there were no counters on either end and there was no cabinet underneath it. It was a naked, ugly old thing. And it became the bane of our existence. Up went the dishes chart on the door to the dining room. Of course it was designed to be on a rotating basis -- with every third night a night-off. Those nights were coveted. I'm not sure, but I don't think our mother was on the rotation. My current supposition is that when she was a kid, she, too, had to do the dishes. She probably hated it as much as we did -- maybe more, if she had to heat water on a stove that was wood-burning or something really difficult like that!

I don't remember much more about doing dishes until our last family home. By then, it was the norm. The daughters did the dishes. Again, I'm not so sure the baby was in the rotation (she never had to push mow the lawn, either -- and when the rest of us got married and moved-out, our dad got her a riding mower. If you sense bitterness, then you're correct. But only mild bitterness. Really just amusement.

So why do I struggle over the dishes?! In our first home after we got married, we didn't have a dishwasher, either. Newlywed 20-somethings. David was going to school every day; I was going to work. We'd get home, tired, like everyone else -- manage to make some awful, quick & dirty supper -- and then do stuff like golfing or playing tennis or a movie. We didn't make doing the dishes a habit. Eventually, one of us would cave and do the dishes. It was always considered to be a real gift -- an act of unconditional love. How dumb were we!? We could have had a relationship through the dishes. (David's parents do now. She washes; he dries. It's really quite a harmonious, loving thing.) Our next home was a ground floor cave of an apartment. We were commuting into DC, so getting up ridiculously early and getting home late -- eating Domino's and Rice-a-Roni. Ugh. We had an ineffective dishwasher in a kitchen so small we never spent any time in there. We hardly made any dirty dishes.

Then we moved to our first real home -- the house where we started our family. It had a great kitchen (with a dishwasher). We were growing-up -- I was cooking for real. David cleared the table; I did the dishes. I got good at it, doing the dishes right away. I actually was a good housekeeper when our kids were babies. It was following David's diagnosis that I seemed to lose that homemaking edge, though I still got those dishes done. It's really just been in the past few years that I come downstairs in the morning to find dishes in the sink and on the counter (often due to an unloaded dishwasher) and some days I leave the house without handling that! Late afternoon dishes-doing has become a strange norm. The idea of unloading the dishwasher (or the drainer, usually stacked so high with dishes that it's an acrobatic act) can overwhelm me. Isn't that silly!?

But is it? I do remember the first few years after we started the brain cancer rollercoaster when I could make sure David got to all of his medical appointments, get the kids to school, get the laundry done, get the dishes done -- but the insurance paperwork always almost took me over the edge. There were so many explanations of benefits that the stack was over 3" thick. It just tipped my scale.

I think that's what happened with the dishes this go-'round. David had so many surgeries -- then chemo and follow-ups. In and among all of these appointments he was still working some, so there was safety in travel to consider and the coping with decreased income. Lots and lots of worry -- anxiety and stress. For years I had never left dishes in the sink, but I began to put-off doing them. It was so exhausting just getting through each day that I really just needed to rest in the evenings. Life really had no normalcy -- no routine. I think the undone dishes were a manifestation of the disruption of our lives. Nothing was okay about what was going on. Each day was a struggle -- for him to physically prevail, for me to mentally prevail, and for all of us to emotionally survive. And I never established dishes duty rotation for my kids. Fail!

So now, nearly two years into my widowdom when there's just me in the house -- why are there still undone dishes? Surprisingly, I am very busy. I'm no morning person, so I don't get up earlier in the morning than I absolutely have to. I get up, get ready for work or whatever is on my schedule and I go and do that. I don't make time for dishes, laundry, cleaning -- This is a bad habit! Most of the time, I do my dishes right after I use them. It's the unloaded dishwasher that becomes an obstacle. It's the little "normal" things that sometimes become too much to bear. If you have never experienced a true trial or tribution that rocks your world, you may not have any concept of what I mean.

When you've experienced so much trauma -- have lived day to day on such heightened adrenalin and mental fortitude that you aren't even aware of it -- and it all comes to an end, you tend to crash. I crashed. Sort of. (Remember -- resilience. Utility follows after a while ...) A close friend compared my reality after David's death to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Yes, I believe that -- but I also believe that it could have been worse. I might have never gotten out of bed -- might have crawled into a hole and stayed there, but I didn't. I continued to raise my kids, go to work, see my friends, worship and serve the church ... but my housekeeping suffered. I did the big things, but the basics tipped my scale. A dirty bathroom, a sinkful of dishes or a dusty bedroom could make me weepy. Had my mother been living, maybe she would have come and done my dishes, folded my laundry and dusted my dresser, but she couldn't do that -- so it was okay to let some of these things just go.

I'm still working through my recovery. Like picking up a book and actually reading it -- like getting up off of the sofa and writing this blog -- and I do believe that one day very soon getting the dishes done won't be such a trying dang event! I am putting my relationships ahead of clean dishes. Downtime and rest take precedence over a tidy kitchen. Writing is a time-consuming, albeit healing, activity. Dishes keep getting knocked down the totem pole, as they should!

Or maybe I'm just plain old lazy. <groan>