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 people who put cheese in their vegetable soup don’t put in a tiny amount of cheese. They use it as a salt.
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.
Water temperature is an issue too. Especially in the winter. You turn on the water and it’s too cold, so you have to stand there and let it run for a bit to warm up while you’re doing other things, like people do with the shower. Until it’s as hot as you can handle, but not TOO hot.
And then sometimes, while you’re washing dishes, people decide that that is the time to wash vegetables, by sticking them under your face. And you yell, “No!” and quickly adjust the temperature, because water that is hot enough to get dishes clean is not healthy to put on vegetables. Just plates. And then you have to spend time finding your ideal temperature again. And these people sigh, like this is what you’re doing for fun when they have vegetables to wash.
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 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 that can win any battle against dish soap, 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 for them 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. I’m always wondering if I’m making things dirtier. So sometimes, I wash things without a sponge, and my wife is suddenly standing there like, “You’re not using a sponge?”
When my wife does dishes, she always uses a sponge. And gloves. That way, not only do her hands not smell, but she can handle hotter water.
I’ve tried gloves. I only ever remember about the gloves after I’ve started washing, and by then my hands are wet. As will be the inside of the gloves.
And don’t get me started on the smell that comes up when you uncover a double sink.
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 is somehow dishes. Also, we’re not eating out 3 meals a day.
And it does not help that my kids believe that if 4 of them are having cream cheese sandwiches, there have to be 4 knives in the sink. Sometimes 5.
“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?”
Or they all wanted to make their sandwiches at the same time. No waiting. Just multiple knives plunging into the same container in a rush from different angles. It’s like a safety nightmare.
And they do that thing where they leave the knife halfway over the sink.
“I might get back to this.”
And knives are easy. Forks have crevices, and spoons wash you back. And don’t get me started on those chains of measuring spoons.
There’s just always dishes. Every night, there are dishes. It’s in your nightmares.
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.” “Thank you for cleaning the thing that I made dirty.” “Thank you for being brave enough to touch the disaster that I put in the sink last night that I forgot to dump in the trash first.” They only complain when it’s not perfect. It’s all, “This plate is wet.” or “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! And your hair smells like shampoo! Go wash again!”
Oh, 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 directly reach like five of them.
And they say, “I made the muffins! I want full credit! 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, “3 tablespoons,” they’re using 3 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. And you’ll have to wash your stuff by navigating around pots and pans full of water standing halfway over the sink. Because soaking, scientifically speaking, only works if you do it for a full month. You need to have things growing in this water, eating the food. And mosquitoes breeding in it.
You can also try turns, but I find that with turns, nobody cares about the next person. My kids take turns emptying drainboards, and everyone complains that the person before them put things away by kind of just leaning it up against the door of the cabinet so it’s the next person’s problem.
I’m not sure why I’m complaining, though. There’s no way that dishes are not easier today than they’ve ever been in history. People kneeling over a bucket of suds and washing every dish in the same water… People going down to the river… Standing under a waterfall with a spoon… I actually don’t know what they did back then, and I can’t research it, because my hands are wet.
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 weekly humor columnist for Hamodia, a monthly humor columnist, and has written six books, all published by Israel Book Shop. He also does freelance writing for hire. You can send any questions, comments, or ideas to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
