The Life Cycle of Dish Washing

When I was a kid, it was my job to do the dishes. I wasn’t asked to do any hard labor, scrub any floors, or make any dresses for any of my evil stepsisters. We had a dishwasher. This job was not difficult or even particularly inconvenient to me, but I hated it.


My mother had a very clever refrain she used to sing at me: “Trish! Do the dish!” which I dreaded hearing. She did her best to make it fun for me; some nights she would do hand dishes and we would play Dish Fairy. She would place the clean dish next to her on a towel on the counter, and I would grab it and dry it as quickly as I could. While I was putting it away, my mother would pretend like she couldn’t see what I had done. “Oh!” she would exclaim. “What has happened to my bowl? A fairy must have put it away for me!” I loved it.


The first dish washing experience I was forced to endure without a dishwasher was my first year of college. My mother was two hours away and so there was no one to play Dish Fairy with. The amount of dishes I used myself generally were limited to a plate, a couple of pieces of silverware, and maybe two or three cups. There were sinks in the laundry room and bathroom of the dormitory where I lived and there were very strict rules regarding unattended dishes: there was a sign posted in each room which read sternly, “ANY DISHES LEFT BY THE SINK WILL BE THROWN AWAY.”

I always wondered who would enforce the law laid down by these obviously serious signs. Were we supposed to throw away any dishes we came upon that were unaccompanied? Were we supposed to report any instances of loitering dishes to the RAs or the dorm mom? One evening, in one of those silly moods that comes with late night studying, I formulted a plan. I was in possession of a computer and printer, and also sticky tac and a couple of cheap cups from Wal-Mart. I replaced the severe signs with ones of my own, the font and formatting the same, the last two words replaced with the phrase “GLUED TO THE CEILING.” That weekend, I witnessed visitors to our floor giggle and point at the sign and at the blue cup stuck to the ceiling in the bathroom. My amusement lasted for about a week, when my clever signs were taken down and replaced with approximations of the originals, at which point I retrieved my cups from the ceiling. I never was sure why those unattended dishes were not thrown away...

The third stage of my dish washing life was The Roommate Phase, which consisted of years of my roommate and I looking at each other and saying, “were you going to do the dishes or do I have to?” Needless to say, dishes languished in the sink, growing mold and stinking for as long as possible before one of us gave in and washed them. It did not help that around that time I was working in food service, and being paid to stand around at 3 AM with my hands in a huge sink ringed with grease, washing various pieces of restaurant equipment until there were none left to wash. I felt that since at home no one was paying me the luxurious sum of $7.20 an hour, so the dishes could damn well wash themselves.

The Roommate Phase lasted through the first several years of my marriage as well, only my husband and I had acquired a tiny freestanding dishwasher that was honestly too big for our minuscule kitchen. The ‘We’re Still In College and Have Too Much Homework to Avoid Doing that We Don’t Have Time to Do the Dishes’ phase was just me scooting the dishwasher into the center of the kitchen, sandwiched between the small oven and the sink, and blocking off access to the refrigerator and microwave (which was of course shoved onto the top of the refrigerator). I would then load six or so things into the dishwasher (because that is all that would fit), plug the appropriate hoses into the sink, and turn it on. The next step was to ignore the clean dishes for days while dirty ones piled up in the sink. After that there were several days of my husband I getting annoyed with at one another for not taking the initiative to just get the dishes clean and get that stupid dishwasher out of the way so we could get to the refrigerator.

The Battle of Wills would be won (or maybe lost) by whichever of us finally gave in and cleaned the dishes. If it was my husband, he would huff and just do the dishes by hand, As God Intended. If it were me, I would spend a day or so on the weekend loading and emptying and loading and emptying and loading and emptying the itsy dishwasher, and then getting a large pot (and a good portion of the floor) dirty while emptying the hoses of water, and finally scooting the dishwasher back into the corner of the kitchen where there was, for some miraculous reason, room for it.

The Domesticated House Daughter-in-Law phase came next. My husband’s parents, with an endless supply of patience, invited us to stay with them after we graduated from college, so that my husband could look for employment as an engineer in the job-rich area of Denver, Colorado. We moved from the Desert of Engineering Jobs that is Lincoln, Nebraska, and into the basement of my in-laws’ house. Despite the fact that we were there for almost three years, we were treated as guests the whole time. I would ask for chores, feeling terrible that I was as good as being waited on hand and foot, but the response was always similar to “don’t worry about it; go ahead and do whatever chores you like if you want to, but if not that’s okay, we’ll take care of it.”

Whenever I loaded the dishwasher, I was always thanked graciously, but I didn't do it often, probably not even as often as once a week. Not because I didn’t want to, but because by the time my dirty dish-sense picked up that there were dishes I could do, they had usually already been cleaned. There were times that I found myself wondering whether I would be able to do housework once we moved out, my housework-doing initiatives were in a state of atrophy.

This morning, standing in the kitchen of our new apartment and staring at the open dishwasher, I realized that I am now The Adult. 

In the two months that we have been in our new place, my husband I have never fallen into our college habit of realizing belatedly that we have nothing to eat for dinner and instead of making something just giving up and going out to eat. We have never let the floor go unswept and unmopped for weeks on end. And the longest that dirty dishes have languished in the sink is a day.

I thought, this morning, that this must be how my mother felt when she would sing, “Trish! Do the dish!” to me. Housework has to be done, and I am the one who has to be doing it. There isn’t any superior above me, glaring down at me, making me do anything, so there is subsequently no one to complain to about these tasks. 

My daughter makes a mess, and I clean it up. The laundry piles up, and I shovel it into the washing machine, into the dryer, and then fold or hang it up. And several times, as I have been just about to go to bed, wandered into the kitchen, moaned, and said aloud, “Ugh, I don’t want to do the dishes,” but then I have done them anyway.

I’m really looking forward to the next phase, Playing Dish Fairy with my own daughter. But she’s already got it better than I had it: there’s no way I can possibly rhyme the word “dish” with “Cora.”