The War on Dishes

Cue hands on her hips and eye roll.

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I clean this teapot with the kind of attention I would have, were I giving the baby Buddha or Jesus a bath. Nothing should be treated more carefully than anything else. In mindfulness, compassion, irritation, mustard green plant, and teapot are all sacred. -Tich Nhat Hanh

My daughter and I were in a sustained battle over doing the dishes. Shelby flat-out refused to do them. I was convinced she was guarding some deep secret reason that would make her insolence make sense to me. I pushed her for an explanation. In the condescending voice teenage girls reserve only for their mothers, Shelby told me she didn’t care. She didn’t see the need for her participation either. Cue hands on her hips and eye roll. My daughter also informed me, that she didn’t get why I got so mad about it.

And I did get mad. Stuttering mad. And at times – most embarrassingly - raging mad.

I believed my expectations around kitchen chores were obvious to anyone with even a remote sense of fairness. The facts:

1. We were the only two people living in the house.

2. We did not have a dishwasher.

3. We both dirtied the dishes.

4. Therefore, we should each do the dishes half the time.

5. So obvious!

The epic battle started years earlier with her older brother. Fighting and bickering were the status quo despite a simple chore schedule. I assigned Thomas to do the dishes on odd days as he was born on the 1^st of the month, and I assigned Shelby the even numbered days as her birthday landed on the 16^th of the month. Easy-peasy, right? Nope. Any interruptions in their schedules, like visits to see their father or school events, triggered negotiations of epic proportions.

Amazingly, sometimes my son washed the dishes without my asking. Dried them. And put them away, too. His tactic worked surprisingly well to gain my favour until I noticed a pattern. First, Thomas would rise from the table and cheerfully collect our plates, cutlery, and glasses. He made a great show of his labour too; squirting the dish soap into the hot water with a flourish and wiping off the stove and counters before lobbing the washcloth in the sink as he left the kitchen whistling. He wasn’t above singing along to his MP3 player as he swished and rinsed. I still smile when I hear the saxophone player’s opening riff to Macklemore and Lewis’s “Thrift Store” on the radio.

Afterwards, Thomas would settle on the couch beside me, equipped with his most winsome smile. He would place his hand on my shoulder and give me a reassuring squeeze. His eyes sparkled, “Hey Mom, do you think you could…” lend him money, extend his curfew, or give him a pass to skip out of school for something he deemed more important than studies.

For a while, I pretended not to clue into his methods, because I was so damn relieved to get an evening of peace and quiet. However, I came to employ a slightly more sophisticated tactic in response to his cunning - an intermittent reinforcement schedule. I don’t know if Dr. Pavlov had child rearing in mind when lab testing reinforcement theory, but I knew it was worth a try.

Thomas moved out to live with his father just as he started grade 12. I hoped that things would be different because my daughter, now entering grade 9, would no longer have her brother to argue with. It didn’t occur to me, that I would soon replace her brother as a sparring partner.

My daughter was a delightful companion to plan meals with, and sometimes, she started cooking before I got home from work. Dinner would pass in a lighthearted conversation. Shelby recounted her school day, and I shared anecdotes from work.

She only became irritable when it was time to clear the table and do the dishes.

To this day, I don’t understand why I couldn’t get my daughter to perform this simple task without hysterics (hers and mine). And, of course, both sets of her grandparents, when I sought their counsel, could not relate to my struggle. Pursed lips and furrowed eyebrows punctuated their identical responses. “Hummpf! In our day, kids did as we told them.”

Thank God Shelby called a ceasefire when family or company joined us for dinner, “You visit Mom, I’ll clean up.”

It seemed to me, that my daughter would only relent if I raised my voice or uttered threats. Or if she could see the steam coming out of my ears. Behaviour that resulted in guilt hangovers (on my part) and temporary reprieves granted (on her part). I sought solutions from parenting books, advice from other parents, and the internet.

I also tried not to care. But frustration would soon surface and prompt me into battle again. I didn’t know how to detach. But they say that when the student is ready, the teacher appears.

When my daughter was in grade 11, I participated in a “40 Days of Meditation Challenge”. My untrained mind wandered a lot, my thoughts travelled a well-worn path. Sinks full of dirty plates, pots, and pans, cluttered my interior landscape. I knew it was ridiculous. Visions of undone dishes were far more distracting than work problems or even my financial worries. However, after the first 10 days of my early morning meditation, I achieved a tentative quiet in my head.

Gradually, my focus improved. I felt calmer and more relaxed. My positive state of mind even lasted as I drove to work. I barely noticed honking horns or police sirens. A few days before the class sessions ended, I knew I didn’t want to stop practicing daily meditation.

On the final day of class, before I opened my eyes and the silence had faded away, I noticed a question lingering at the edge of my consciousness. What if there was a peaceful way to end the war on dishes?

I contemplated an alternate set of facts:

1. The other warriors had all left the battlefield.

2. I was only at war with myself.

That very night, I came home to find an astonishing array of dirty dishes and fridge contents strewn on every surface in our tiny kitchen. Shelby had made herself a tasty afterschool snack and then retreated into her room to enjoy it.

I stood frozen in the middle of the kitchen. I said nothing. Instead, I took a breath. A long inhale and exhale. I noticed my raised shoulders and hands on my hips. My pursed lips.

I took a few more belly breaths and dared to believe I could recover the calm of my early morning mediation. It didn’t take long. A gentle thought rose from deep within. What if I took on doing the dishes as my daily meditation practice? I could choose to accept reality as it was, right in front of me, in this moment. I could radically accept full responsibility. I could choose, not to ask my daughter to do the dishes again. Cue slow inhale through my nose, exhale through my mouth.

You better believe this shift in my attitude required a monumental modification to my parental DNA. The voices of my parents yammering inside my head would need to shut it. And the voices of my former in-laws, too. I would need to focus much less on what they thought of my parenting.

To mark the beginning of my behaviour change, I taped a blank calendar on the cupboard door above the sink. There were no assigned tasks and no assigned names. No failures and no blame. All that appeared on this calendar were tiny circles around numbers which marked each passing day. Wash, dry, put away. Repeat. This simple act became an amen to my shift in attitude.

I soon stopped listening to music while doing dishes. Sudsy moment, by sudsy moment, my new practice took hold. And I stopped listening to podcasts while at the counter with dish towel in hand. The allure of distractions had faded. And so it was that doing the dishes became my daily meditation. Wash, dry, put away. Repeat. Adopting this simple task as a sacred practice made for a more peaceful kitchen. At least half of the time. Peaceful enough that my daughter would venture in just to talk. And sometimes, as I washed, rinsed, and silently placed our dishes in the drying rack, Shelby causally picked up the dish towel to dry and put the dishes away, in tandem with her storytelling.

Wash, dry, put away, repeat.

On these occasions, I wished for a bigger stack of dishes.