Washing dishes (a saga)

I don’t actually remember how old I was when my parents started making my sisters and me do dishes regularly, but I am sure it was a black day. I believe the system was that Anna did dishes Sundays and Wednesdays (thus very fortunately getting hers all out of the way by mid-week), I did them on Mondays and Thursdays, and Robyn did them on Tuesdays and Fridays. If I’m not mistaken, these were Our days of the week anyway, which meant that when we were younger and the family all said prayers together, whoever’s day it was got to pray first AND (this was the especially good bit) got to choose what godly song to sing at the end. Tuesdays and Fridays were bad because Robyn — who in her defense was young and may not have known better — used to choose “I love you, you love me” for her song which was permissible even though God is not in it because it is about Love. Though really it just conjures up memories of a really horrific purple dinosaur who had no business taking Lamb Chop’s time slot on the TV.

But I digress. So we would all do dishes on our nights, and on Saturdays my parents would do them. And there was some system for who had to clean up the kitchen and wipe down the counters and vacuum, but I can’t remember what it was. This was, at least in theory, a superb arrangement for my parents, and my father showed it by sometimes coming to help us with the kitchen.

By “help”, of course, I mean that he made completely tyrannical and unreasonable demands on us, above and beyond the usual call of duty. He would say, “Let’s get this kitchen looking really nice for Mom”, I suppose in a vain attempt to appeal to our filial feeling for darling Mum, though in fact I think we just felt that if Mum didn’t want to see the kitchen in a mess she could easily avoid it until the next day when it was no longer expected to be clean because people were using it again. So he would come help us do the dishes,which was totally ghastly because it meant that he made us dry and put away all the dishes in addition to washing them. Seriously. We couldn’t just leave them in the dish-drainer, we had to put them away. (Am I still appalled by the bizarre injustice? Yes. Yes, I am.) And sometimes he would stand over us while we were washing, and every dish we handed him to dry he would inspect and say, “You missed a spot” and hand it back to us. Over and over if necessary. And then we’d have to put the dishes all away. Put them all away! In the cupboards! When there was a perfectly good dish-drainer to leave them in to dry on their own overnight! It was just so against reason!

The subject of washing dishes really makes me cross with everyone except my mother, whose name was often invoked but who really seems to have come on my childhood dish-washing scene very rarely. Anna, on the other hand, was a terrible dish-washer because at the outset, she never put away the dishes from the night before but simply stacked newly cleaned dishes on top of them. So the next night, when it was my turn again, I had double the amount of dishes to put away. And she didn’t even stack them in an organized fashion! She just sort of chucked them in there! And furthermore, if whoever was cleaning the kitchen up didn’t get the dirty and hard-to-clean pans put on the counter by the sink before Anna washed dishes, she just didn’t wash the pans! She just left them there until the next day.

Actually Robyn did this too. And Robyn also got persnickety about moving her feet in order to allow the kitchen-cleaning-duty person to vacuum around her. Our kitchen is relatively small, but there’s a tricky bit of vacuuming underneath where the cupboards jut out a little, and you have to sort of ram the head of the vacuum in there really hard in order to convince it to vacuum up the crumbs or whatever under there. Well, Robyn used to stand at the sink and if she was mad at you refuse to move her feet to let you vacuum.

And my whole family (except for saintly me) was responsible for the cups. I don’t know how it could be that a household of five people could use so many cups in the course of one day, but we used to have (probably still do) something like eighteen cups sitting on the kitchen counter at the end of the day. I don’t know who the main culprit was, except that I know for sure it wasn’t me. I have one cup a day and that is totally it. I do not need more than one cup. If I become thirsty, I go to the kitchen, fill my own particular cup with water, drink it, and set my own particular cup back down again ready to be drunk out of again as the need arises. Cups are hard to fit in a dish drainer. We have eight little hooks on the side where cups can go, but when those are used up it is difficult to find a convenient place for them. I used to have to DRY them and PUT THEM AWAY. This should not be a necessary step of washing dishes.

Anyway, all this dish-washing misery to which I have been subjected all my life by my well-meaning and beloved family, it has finally culminated in my being told — by a nun! — that I was a very thorough dish-washer. Indeed her exact words were, “You’re very thorough. Full marks for the washing-up. You must tell your mother I said so.” And she is a nun. So if you’re ever moved to tell me that I am bad at washing dishes, you are wrong. Wrong. A NUN says. So.