My little one has taken a liking to doing the dishes by hand. At first, I was skeptical, but like all good things we have forgotten in the rush to be "modern" there is a simplicity and a joy to washing dishes with a person standing beside you with a towel in their hand. An elegance to the moment. with it's patient pace, it's evening quietude, and it's intimacy.
I think I hated doing dishes because I did them alone my whole life before I had da Firstborn and a house.
Being a child abandoned in a dark kitchen while the adults have gone upstairs to the televisions of their choice, alone in the creaking downstairs with the dog, left to do dishes on the rare occasions when we were all home and she cooked something, was an indelible painful mark in my memory. I hated them for hating each other so much that she left us, hated them for fighting from the time she'd come home on the rare weekend until the very moment we were waving goodbye as the gravel crunched in the driveway under her tires as she left finally and there was again the stubborn silence of discomfort and rage.
Dishes meant she had been home.
Other nights we just ate at McDonald's.
I remember though, being very small, and living in a neighborhood. I remember other people's houses, and food that was cooked by "old-fashioned" women, the ones my militant feminist mother ridiculed in her march toward "independence from men." Those kitchens were warm, they smelled good, and you never found a kid standing alone after a meal washing the dishes while the adults went off to fight some more. You found brothers and sisters loudly laughing and the occasional broken dish crashing and water splashing. Even on calm nights, there was talking and verbal sparring and the clatter of comraderie.
She deprived me of brothers and sisters. She deprived me of companionship in the mundane tasks of life and deprived me of the revelation that mundane tasks are the fabric through which life is learned and shared and woven together. I try to forgive her, but I hit this wall sometimes. She was selfish and ambitious and self-indulgent.
"Old-fashioned" women raised families. It was not some archaic throw-back. It was and is life, shared and lived together. Cooking (the kind where you start from ingredients, not the kind where you heat something some factory produced) and cleaning things the long way pass the time in a manner that, if done as a collective activity, make life more bearable. Less isolating.
When we install the new dishwasher, I plan to also buy a dish drain. When life is rocking hard against us and time is short, we will eat frozen things we prepared in calmer times and throw the dishes in the machine, but when life is slower (like summer), we'll stand together and laugh and talk and I will wash and he will dry. I only wish I'd figured this out long ago...my apologies to the Firstborn, who did many dishes alone while I rested from cooking alone. Lil' bro will have a new set of memories and I promise to be present and cheerful and patient.
Toodles
