War of the
Dishwashers
by Linda Barber
My husband is type A. I’m
something else. We’ve been married since
1976, and we’ve always had a “dishwasher”
problem. When we were at my mother’s house
the other night, he insisted on loading the
dishwasher for her. If I had loaded it, she would
have been off to the den, but as John performed
his magic, she watched his every move, gushed
that she didn’t even think Jesus could load
that many dishes in a dishwasher, and then kissed
him on the cheek. I told her that she’s
never kissed me on the cheek for loading the
dishes. She said mine aren’t artistically
inspired like his, and I don’t get all
the dishes in there. But I am blindingly
fast!
I wouldn’t care if he
loaded every dish in every dishwasher until the
end of time, but he never stops there. He
literally checks my dishwasher and reloads
it. He takes every dish out just to get two
cereal bowls in. Shifting a dish or two is one
thing, but unloading everything to pack in a few
more dishes seems a bit obsessive. I told him
once that my perfectionist father would never let
me do anything without taking it out of my hands
to do it the “right” way, so when John
reorganizes my dishes, the message I get is that
I did it wrong, He told me, “Yep. That’s
right. You did do it wrong.”
Last night I went ballistic.
As I was sitting on the couch, I could hear him
reordering my dishes and I said, “Honey,
just put the extra ones there in the sink. I’ll
put them in tomorrow’s load.” Then
right before bed, I went in the kitchen to put
the soap in the dispenser to wash them. It looked
artistically inspired. I stomped upstairs and
intended on not speaking at all, but then I blew
up, pursued him into the bathroom and ranted like
a banshee. You would have thought he had killed
my first born. At first, he just squinted his
eyes at me wondering whether I had lost my mind.
But then he said the worst thing possible. “Something
else must be bothering you. Maybe we need to talk
about it.” Then, I just went into an
extended orbit. “No, it’s not about
anything else. It’s about the goddamn dishes.
Don’t touch the goddamn dishes in my goddamn
dishwasher!” He hasn’t loaded a dish in
that dishwasher in two weeks, and I’m
mightily suspicious that I won the battle but
lost the war.
|
