Dinnertime used to be my least favorite part of the day, for a gazillion reasons – I wanted our meals to be as healthy and delicious as possible and so I knocked myself out to make meals that dazzled. In part because I’d worked so hard, I stressed about how much of this food actually made it in my kids’ mouths. Because my kids were small and needed to be in bed by about 7 or else they were total basket cases, I wanted the preparation and the consumption to happen in a timely manner. And then, there were the dishes. Oh, the dishes!
My husband and I had a basic understanding – whoever cooks doesn’t do dishes. Perfectly reasonable, right? The thing is, my husband is a soaker. He actually says, “I come from a long line of soakers.” Which is code for, “Sometimes I do the dishes, sometimes I just stick them in the sink.” Which means I’d emerge from putting the kids to bed and often see the kitchen in the exact same state as I had left it. This bugged me to no end.
Here’s what typically happened: I would start doing the dishes, hastily, feeling sorry for myself all the way. “Why do I have to do all the work around here? Why doesn’t anyone else care if our house is a mess?” It was pretty pathetic.
Then I got pissed off. I still did the dishes many nights, but now I did it noisily, hating my husband in my head. “This is wrong and you are a jerk!” I’d think to him in my mind. Once or twice I said things to this effect to him, and we had a big fight that didn’t leave either of us feeling any better.
Want to improve your relationships? My podcast, How to Be a Better Person, can help.
Now, I’d like to make it clear that I do love my husband. Even when I occasionally hate him. 🙂 I did not want to fight with him and I knew he wasn’t trying to torture me. So I thought about it and realized, having the dishes done is important to me. And while I still prefer that my husband do his fair share of the cleaning, my feeling either defeated or ticked off wasn’t serving anyone. So I started accepting that sometimes I did the dishes.
I wasn’t enthused about it, at all, and while I was doing the dishes with this mindset, I’d spend a lot of my mental energy thinking things like“Scott is working like crazy at the moment to support us,” or, “He doesn’t value cleanliness in the same way I do, but since it’s more important to me, so I’ll just do it.” It was an improvement, but I was still spending a lot of energy on rationalizing why it was OK that I was doing the dishes.
