Doing Dishes
Thanksgiving is on the near horizon. It is a holiday well-noted for family, turkey,
green bean casserole, cranberries and pumpkin pie. In our house there are also plenty of
appetizers beforehand, and extra treats served after dessert. All that eating means a lot of preparation
and what seems like even more cleaning-up afterwards. Thanksgiving, I suspect, requires more
dishwashing than any other day of the year.
When it comes to the task of dishwashing, I come from
a sexist upbringing. The only ones I
ever remember washing up all the dirty dishes were my mother, my sisters and
sisters-in-law. I don’t recall ever
seeing my father wash dishes, or any of my older brothers.
That all changed for me when I got married. I would like to say that I volunteered based
on my own personal enlightenment and unending love and devotion towards my
bride. That’s what I would like to
say. What I should say is I vaguely
remember that my wife Michelle more or less had to provide some, shall we say “encouragement”. I don’t recall any big argument about it,
because I’m not sure what my side of the argument would have sounded like. “No one has ever made me wash the dishes”,
doesn’t sound very convincing.
That’s not to say that I didn’t seize the opportunity
to pass dishwashing chores down to my children when they were old enough. At first, it was the two oldest boys, Jacob
and Nathan, that were paired. There were
plenty of nights when it would have been much easier to just wash the dishes
myself during the years when they couldn’t seem to go five minutes without some
sort of disagreement. Or, since I have
already been honest at least once previously in this essay, let’s drop “disagreement”
and insert “fight”.
There was one stretch of several months when I was
able to squelch the squabbles quickly so that the dishes were all washed before
the water turned cold. That was when we
rearranged the furniture in the living room.
I found that from my new vantage point I didn’t even have to get up from
my chair to referee. What the boys didn’t
realize is that I could see their reflections in the kitchen window over the
sink. If one began picking a fight, I
just spoke his name, and they busied themselves again as they wondered where my
new superpower had come from. Much to my
dismay, Jake figured it out one evening when he realized that he could see my
reflection as well.
But, it still served as a deterrent, because as the
two youngest became old enough to help out, we paired them off in two teams
consisting of one older and one younger child.
If we had just paired off the two younger ones together, I suspect that
their loving older brothers would have let them figure it our for themselves,
but since they were each paired with an older, wiser brother they were set
straight right off – “And no messing around because dad can see you in the reflection
in the window.”
The boys have all assigned dishwashing
duties to their own children. I’m pretty
sure it’s because they now understand that it teaches responsibility and a way
to contribute to the family. A couple
of them even have shared on the down-low with me that they have used the
reflections in the window trick to monitor progress as necessary. None of them seem to have made it about
revenge for their own years of household drudgery. My daughter’s time is coming; it’s just that
her children are still too young.
My wife would have to admit that I turned out to be
relatively trainable. We take turns with
the cooking and both share in cleaning up afterward. The only exceptions are nights like tonight
where there only enough dishes to wash as would fit in the dish rack, so I gave
her the evening off. I know she has
trained me well, because I even felt good about that.
“Rather, we wanted to present ourselves as
a model for you, so that you might imitate us. In fact, when we were with you, we instructed
you that if anyone was unwilling to work, neither should that one eat.”
2 Thessalonians 3:9-10
His Peace <><
Deacon Dan
Photo by Port Morien Digital Archive on Unsplash
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