In another two months, my only daughter, The Lass, will be celebrating her second wedding anniversary. Nearly two years after the blessed event, I can say with certainty, pride and joy: I did not lose a daughter, I gained a dishwasher.
That’s right, a dishwasher.
The Lass’s husband has many attributes. He’s smart, he’s devoted, he’s handsome, he’s kind, he eats his greens (in fact, that’s all he eats, since he’s a vegetarian). And he is also a tremendous dishwasher. He’s a man who, when he cleans the dishes, actually gets them clean. He washes the inside and outside of pots; he scrubs not only the fork itself, but also its handle.
He’s a man who boasts of his dishwashing prowess: “I’m the king of the finishers.”
And that’s important, being the king of the finishers. For those of us who in principle don’t own a dishwasher – the principle being that The Wife says that if we did own one, the clean dishes would sit in it forever, as I’d be too lazy to stack them in the shelves – there are many stages in the dishwashing process.
There is the rinsing, soaping, drying and overall sink and counter cleaning. And The Lass did very well: she found someone who can do it all.
She is not the only one. Each of my married children found partners who are great at clean-up duty. My daughters-in-law bring me nearly to tears when – after spending Shabbat with us – they put The Wife and I to shame with their ability to make our counters sparkle, our drinking glasses shine, our tough-to-get-clean pots and pans free of all the accumulated grease and grime we could never remove.
I like to cook in the grimiest-looking pots and pans when they’re coming for Shabbat, knowing that when the daughters-in-law get done cleaning them, they will look spanking new.
It’s like when you share a meal with friends and bring over a home-baked cake or side dish: it’s always smart to bring it in a dish you were unable to get clean, knowing that if they clean it the Pyrex dish will come back spotless because they will be too embarrassed to let those well-worn burn stains remain.
“Honey,” I asked The Wife the other morning when a friend left a dish we had brought to her house on our doorstep. “Is this ours? The inside is completely white. It doesn’t look like ours.”
WHEN THE children-in-law come to our home for Shabbat, they leave the kitchen looking better than when they arrived.
At first, I thought it was all just an act, a way to win us over. This skepticism was not just a product of innate cynicism, but the result of having once been young myself.
I remember the first time I met my future in-laws – at their house for Thanksgiving – I made it my business to jump from the table, clear the dishes and offer my hand cleaning up, whistling all the while.
Why? Because I wanted to leave an impression on the parents of the woman I just started dating. I wanted them to say to their daughter: “Now there’s a good catch – he might be without means and rather homely, but he’s a polite young man who not only did the dishes but seemed to enjoy it.”
The Wife, too, pulled the same stunt on me. I can’t say that I remember in detail many of the conversations we had when we were courting over 35 years ago – except for one.
No, not the one where we decided to get married, nor when we discussed moving to Israel. Rather, the one where – after I invited her for a meal at my apartment and we argued about who would do the dishes – she said, “Doing the dishes relaxes me.”
Wow, I thought, this is the perfect package. Everything I could ever want, plus someone for whom doing the dishes was the equivalent of listening to Mozart.
Except, of course, it wasn’t. Nobody finds doing dishes relaxing. But we were courting, and when you’re courting you say the darndest things.
SO WHEN my future son- and daughters-in-law all volunteered, while they were courting my kids, to do the dishes, The Wife and I swapped knowing glances that said, “Been there, done that.”
Yet here we are, two, three and even four years into their marriages, and when the children-in-law come over, they still help clean up, and do it remarkably well and with great alacrity.
One reason this impresses me so much is that it stands in such stark contrast with how my children always approached the chore. Dish duty in our house was a constant source of friction, perhaps the single biggest cause of fights between the parents and the children, and among the children themselves.
To this day the kids, even though married, still bicker about whose turn it is to wash up, or, whose spouse should act as their proxy.
With the children all raised and reared, I’m finding myself thinking more and more about what I would have done differently had I had it all to do over again. One thing: I would have tried to make cleaning the dishes less traumatic, spent more time looking for a creative solution to keep this from being a constant and bitter battle.
For instance, I probably would have revised the rule about those in the army or national service not having to do the dishes on weekends at home. Though meant to give those serving the country a break, it only caused resentment among those left to pick up the slack. It made doing dishes seem like some horrible chore, and that getting out of it was a huge prize. Unwise parenting.
Watching my son- and daughters-in-law wash up without kvetching showed me there is another way. It also forced me to re-evaluate one of my basic beliefs: that the shtick you have in your house exists in most other homes as well, and that if your kids fight over dish duty, kids in most other families probably do the same.
Except that might not be true. So where’s the solace in that? Knowing that some of the sources of conflict in other homes don’t exist in yours. At least one hopes.