I hate washing dishes. Especially on melted cheese night. My kids are melting cheese on everything.
I’m like, “Don’t have so much cheese. How about some vegetable soup?”
“Oh yeah!”
And then they put cheese in that.
And then not a single person soaks a thing when they put it in the sink. It’s just rock-hard cheese on a fork.
In most families, the responsibility of dishes falls primarily on one person. It’s not like multiple people can stand around the sink, or get some kind of trough. Supper’s over and everybody gets to retire to whatever else they do that is very important, and one person is stuck in the kitchen.
Nobody else wants to think about dishes. The existence of this job is blocked out of their heads. You just put things in the sink, and then magically they’re on the drainboard.
With most other household chores, you can walk around or sit down, but not this one. You have to stand in one place, leaning into the sink at an awkward angle, while everything is trying to get you wet.
And while you’re washing dishes, you can’t hear anything that’s going on in the house, and you’re missing all the post-dinner conversations, and your guests are always gone when you’re done. Or else you hang out with your guests and push off doing the dishes until you come into the kitchen to close the light before you go to bed, and say, “Oh.”
Or else people decide to come in and start conversations with you, and nobody raises their voice because they don’t realize that when your head is over the sink, it’s like a loudspeaker projecting upward, in case you want to hear nothing but water. They can hear you just fine. It’s like having a conversation wearing headphones. The other people can hear you okay, and they don’t know why you’re yelling.
And then your nose always itches, and then you scratch it and your nose is wet the whole rest of the time and it has a couple of bubbles on it that the person talking to you has to pretend not to notice.
And you’re constantly unclogging the sink or doing that thing where you have a race to finish the dishes before the sink fills all the way to the top because someone decided you should wash an entire gravy boat of fried onions that has also covered everything in a thick layer of meat grease, which can win any battle against dish soap. Meanwhile, you’re trying in a panic to find all the silverware that’s hiding in the murky water, but also not get stabbed.
And then you have to walk back and forth with this drippy sink strainer, doing trips to the garbage, and suddenly everyone decides that this is the time to be in your way. All these people you couldn’t find a minute ago. They’re all coming out of the woodwork.
Why is there no bag in the garbage?
No one else will take the strainer from you either, because it has food in it. People say, “Eeweeweew!” because they might accidentally touch a piece of wet food that’s probably cleaner than anything they normally touch because it’s had hot water and soap running through it for 20 minutes.
And once we’re on the topic of Eeweeweew, I’m constantly questioning the cleanliness of my sponge, because it never smells amazing. Basically, washing the dishes is an assault on all your senses. And it’s every day. Even if I decide one night that I don’t have time and we’re using paper plates, there is still stuff to wash somehow. Even if we eat out, there are dishes somehow. Also, we’re not eating out three meals a day.
And it does not help that my kids believe that if four of them are having cream cheese sandwiches, there have to be four knives in the sink. Sometimes five.
“Yeah, I started a new container.”
Nobody’s allowed to share a knife.
“Ew, that’s disgusting. You don’t share forks; why would you share a knife?”
And knives are easy. Forks have crevices, and spoons wash you back. And don’t get me started on those chains of measuring spoons.
And nobody appreciates that the dishes are washed. They don’t think about it. To the person who makes the food, people say, “Thank you for supper,” or “Everything was delicious.” But there’s no, “Thank you for washing the dishes from last time.” They only complain when it’s not perfect. It’s all, “My cup smells like soap.”
So I did a good job cleaning the cup, but not a good job cleaning up from cleaning it? Should I
smell you after a shower and say, “Hey, you still smell like soap! Go wash again!”
And Heaven help you if you forget to wash the back of a plate.
You don’t get credit for anything. Somebody in my family makes muffins, and I have to wash the muffin tin that they helpfully sprayed down with cooking spray before they started—inside every indentation that they were going to put papers in anyway—so now I have 12 indentations full of oil, and the faucet can only reach five of them.
And they say, “I made the muffins! No one helped.” No one. What do you think happened to the muffin tin, by the way? Not to mention all the separate measuring spoons that a person uses
when they’re not the ones doing the dishes. If the recipe says, “three tablespoons,” they’re using three separate tablespoons.
Sure, you can divvy up the responsibility. You can say that whatever each person uses, they have to wash. But if you do:
- No one will make muffins.
- Everyone will always leave everything soaking. All of a sudden, everyone will know what soaking is. It’s something you have to do for a full month, or it doesn’t work. You need to have things growing in this water, eating the food.
The point is that if you ever see somebody doing the dishes, don’t take it for granted. Come in and start a conversation. But make sure to speak up, because we can’t hear you over the water. Also, offer to scratch our nose.
Mordechai Schmutter is a freelance writer and a humor columnist for Hamodia and other magazines. He has also published eight books and does stand-up comedy. You can contact him at [email protected].
