My Mom Never Had Dirty Dishes In Her Sink
Motherhood and the Mundane (for my daughter)
I never want to clean the kitchen. And also, by my calculations, I spend about 8-10% of my awake hours cleaning it. This has to be love.
Eventually I give in, and clean the kitchen.
I check to see if the dishwasher is full. I am surprised if I find something other than the dishes I loaded the night before. I open the door all the way, and pull out the top rack.
I flash on those times you would sit on the door staring up me like you’d climbed Long’s Peak. You were so small, hair going every way it wanted, not even walking yet. Pushing me to be more proud than afraid. Distracting me from deciding if it was even safe - for you, for the dishwasher door, all of it.
You were always trouble the way most surprise loves are trouble: a set up for a fall we aren’t sure we’ll survive; a dare without any promise of a happy ending. I wrote last week that your brother taught us how to take love for granted; you taught us what a risk it all is, how we must take nothing for granted and say yes anyway. You taught us to be brave.
I put away the small mugs first, the speckled pastel ones I got your mom for her birthday after she pointed them out to me at World Market: “I would like these for my birthday.” I have always appreciated direct instruction. I like the way their handles feel when I wrap my fingers around them, the weight, the cold ceramic, the heart. Also I can carry many of them at the same time. Motherhood is making use of every efficiency.
I open the cupboard above the two half-functional coffee makers we currently own, and set the mugs on the left side. I keep the cupboard doors open and return to the dishwasher.
Then, the other mugs, the random ones. We have tried over the years to keep the random mugs out of rotation, but there are always more showing up, and we grow attached. The dumpster fire mug. The Tea mug. The Keep Calm mug Nancy got us when none of us were sure that we could be calm, let alone, carry on. Now we have two shelves of random mugs that I need to go through and assess if the attachment has waned or endured.
Sometimes I think there should be a whole class of time off we agree is just to be able to clean out shelves and closets of stuff we grew attached to.
Next, there are the plastic drinking glasses, the sort we used to get one or two at a time before you were born, big enough to sit beside you all day, back before water bottles became a thing people carried around. Once you were able to drink out of a regular cup, we realized we were going to need to buy more at a time, as you’d leave them all around the house, certain you might soon become dehydrated. This was actually one of your earliest big words: dehydrated.
I stack the tall ones first, then the little ones, put them in the right side of the same cupboard above the coffee makers. Maybe by then I am done with the cups, or maybe I skip ahead to the little bowls. Ice cream scoop or snack size, or I’m-not-that-hungry size. We bought them partly because we were so tired of finding the bigger bowls on our dryer, half-filled with food you didn’t eat.
Only in the last few years did you start to ask me to get your food specifically because you had a hard time understanding how much to get. It’s a problem for most of us, deciding how much is enough, but maybe especially when you start off so hungry the way you did, so without enough food.
I grab a stack of little bowls and carefully open the cupboard beside the microwave. The little ones go on the bottom right, mixed in and around the bigger ones, those you use for cereal or tortellinis, or the fruit salad you convinced your grandma to make you. The plastic ones in pastels, or the bigger plastic ones in burgundy, or the ceramic in cream.
We don’t find them on the dryer too much now; they get carried down from your room in stacks of 4 or 5, often by your boyfriend, still often with food leftover, but not as much. You or he set them beside the sink, and I try not to roll my eyes thinking of the few times you’ve done the dishes and started a family fight over how none of us washed out our bowls before just leaving them there.
At this point, I am definitely considering (if I have not done it already) opening TikTok. Cleaning the kitchen isn’t really compatible with TikTok, but sometimes (often) I try anyway. It reminds me of the times I tried to feed your brother while also scrolling Facebook. He was so cheated of eye contact already, it was a set up for guilt and dissatisfaction for both of us. I still tried.
Motherhood is filled with moral quandaries like this, played out in the most mundane moments where no one is watching, except you, and your child, and the space between you that is my best understanding of God. Later when your kid lists out all the ways they hate you, how they want nothing to do with you, you may wonder if it was due to the fact that you didn’t give them sufficient eye contact.
At least, however, you will not have to wonder if it is the alcohol their birth mom drank, or the drugs, or living on the streets and teaching them too soon about not having enough food. Of course, there will be the things your child inherits from your birth parents, the trauma that they say just keeps getting passed on. Plus whatever unique challenges are their own. Love cannot fix or save everything, we know this. But these are not small wins that we have made together, these things you will now take for granted. In this world, especially in these days where it can feel like we are so powerless to change anything, these victories are a kind of salvation.
Most often I give into the TikTok impulse and I get distracted for 30 seconds to 8 minutes, before turning on music and returning to the task. I sort utensils: cooking ones to the container, serving ones to the drawer. I don’t know if anyone but me realizes I’ve established this organizational distinction.
Maybe there’s a small strainer remaining on the top, or some other random thing, but usually this has done it. I close the top rack and pull out the bottom one. It has plates in an assortment of shapes, and colors, and pans and knives we know we shouldn’t put in the dishwasher, but we do anyway.
There was a time we had matching plates (dinner and side), bowls, and mugs. But then you and your brother liked the plastic dishes, the ones that don’t make “that noise” when the fork hits, the ones you love finding on clearance at the end of a Target aisle, the ones that don’t break - so they came into the rotation, and also we stopped caring about uniformity.
To say it plainly, sitting down at a table for dinner became for us, for a while, a place of danger. For any reason, the food could be thrown, or dumped, or smashed, or refused. Maybe it was too spicy. Or your burrito came apart and everything fell out. Your rice was too cold, too disappointing. There wasn’t enough food, you were sure, or the sauce got on your fruit.
Do you remember when you took everything out of the pantry in a rage? I was at a Board meeting, and your mom was texting me the whole time. I came home to the kitchen covered in food, apples dripping from the walls, cereal in every corner, sugar and flour on every counter. Chaos and grief everywhere. You were crying in your bedroom, sorry. You were never not sorry. Your heart has always meant to love us, not to hurt us. You could just get so afraid, so angry. You had so much hurt inside you to work through.
We started sitting in the living room for dinner during the pandemic. After all that time together, the idea of sitting down and talking more at the dinner hour just stopped being worth the effort. Most of the time, you went to your room, and that was ok too. Sometimes I think the low pressure of the pandemic saved you, the lack of stimulation for such a long stretch of time.
It is so hard to track, what happened in those years, we were all so caught in our own disorientation. After years of fighting for you to go to school, it all just stopped. You could stay home. We all could.
And somehow, by the time we got to the other side, the danger had mostly passed, for all of us. Something in your body has settled, finally. Some trust in yourself, in us, in life has emerged, a trust that had been for most of your life, inaccessible. It is both clearly a result of all the work that you and we have done, and also a complete mystery. Like your name, it is a gift.
What I am trying to say is, what does it matter if our plates match, or don’t match? We have food. We survived. We are surviving.
I pull all of the big plates at once, stacked if I can, and then the little ones, a mess of blue and black and white and the red special plate. I put them in the piles beside the bowls, on that same bottom shelf. I pull out the pans, all new since we got the induction stove last year. I keep thinking, sometime soon things will be settled enough, we won’t need to put them in the dishwasher.
I made a whole organizational scheme for pans during my last sabbatical, bought all the dividers, carefully put it all together. The part for the lids stuck, but mostly it turns out disorganized piles work the best for us. I open the cupboard to the pans, toss them in, more carefully placing the lids, and close up the doors before things slide back my direction.
I finish with the silverware, which I find weirdly satisfying in its simplicity. Laying down the spoons, the forks, the knives in each their little section, I always flash on the many different silverware drawers I’ve had in my life:
In my parents’ house, right off the eating bar where I knocked out my front teeth in 3rd grade. The drawer was small, with a brown divider, reliable.
In the playhouse (with all theatre students!), where I’m not sure there was a divider for any of it, let alone a full set, let alone any of it matching. It’s been 30 years and my mom still will go off on the chaos of this house if you give her a chance.
Senior year, with all-female roommates and someone’s mom’s hand-me-down silverware, laid over floral parchment.
First year of grad school, living in Boulder with two Virgos, one of whom was an obsessive vegetarian. There could be no bacon cooked in the house, and no crumbs in the silverware drawer. Every knife always faced the same way.
The high-rise apartment, also in Boulder, where I started baking and AOL-messaging your mom. I remember this drawer the least—I was distracted.
Our first house downtown Denver where we brought you home at two days old. We had painted the kitchen yellow because it was your mom’s favorite color, and the silverware drawer - which was to the left of the sink where my mom and I gave you your first bath - was wonky the way all the cupboards in that house were wonky.
The brick house you’ll remember—east of downtown, a small kitchen. We moved the drawer during our DIY remodel. This is where you climbed the dishwasher.
Our rental for our first two years in Fort Collins, aka the best kitchen we’ve ever had. Each time I pass by that house now, I imagine them all happy in their kitchen. The silverware was next to the fridge, although by then we had a safety plan so we knew to put the knives further away.
Finally, I grab the pans that I try to fit in the drawer under the oven, forgetting that this new oven is too small to fit much. I try to decide if it should go with the cutting boards, or the random small kitchen appliances (the slow cooker, the instant pot, etc.). I try the former and if that doesn’t work, I go with the latter, in a similar style to how it went with the pots. Close the doors quickly, hope for the best. Speaking of doors, if I haven’t already by this point, I shut all the cabinet doors. It’s time for re-loading.
I don’t know that it is exactly true that my mom never had dirty dishes in her sink, but she made it feel like she didn’t. It helped a lot that we were able to sit down for dinner almost every night, despite swimming and gymnastics, tennis and church. She even managed to sit down with us most of the time, even more than just the perch that moms learn to keep, ready to get up for the thing that is needed, planned or unplanned:
The towels for the milk that will spill into the oven fan;
The preferred salad dressing;
The ketchup for the hamburgers;
Anything else?
This is what I learned it meant to be a mother: to be ready to respond to anything that happened, over dinner, over life. To be watchful, ready, responsive.
Mostly I think this is how we have been, too. It’s just, the range of what might happen, what we needed to respond to - it was unpredictable in ways my mother would have never been able to manage, or understand, or love her way through. Wait. Maybe that’s unfair, because who knows, really. We never know what we will be able to handle until it is the thing we are handling.
Motherhood means learning who your kid is and then becoming the mother they need you to be. You had some different needs than what would’ve worked with the model of motherhood my mom gave me. But baby, we all have different needs, and that’s good. It’s life.
So when it comes time, remember, you only need to be the mom your kid needs you to be, not whatever model or message you might think of as ideal or right. Not even the mom they think you should be. Even when they keep trying to tell you how you’re wrong, or it’s not enough - like you said, a thousand times. Your job is to let your love be bigger than their small ideas of who you are to them, to be unfazed by their disinterest, undeterred by their testing. Keep being the mom you know they need, whatever they say.
I start with the cups again. I gather the cups from every room, dump them out quickly, and fill the top rack. The mugs come later as they often need rinsing of coffee stains. I throw away trash that one of us has piled near the trash can, rather than in it. Soda cans get dumped and recycled; I concede defeat in our campaign we’ve waged most of your life against half-finished drinks.
I scrub the bowls, mugs, and small utensils before putting them in the top rack. I’ve lived in three houses without dishwashers—I know all of these would be clean enough already. But your brother insists: only scalding water for three hours counts. When you buy your first dishwasher, remind me to help you find a shorter running cycle. Three hours is ridiculous, especially if you need bottles cleaned right away.
My mom would always have us scrape and rinse our plates off at the end of dinner, and most nights we would also help load the dishwasher. She would definitely come behind us and re-load. For this reason it took me until you were in middle school before I trusted I knew how to load a dishwasher (I’m still not all that great at it).
For this reason I have rarely re-loaded your attempts, despite some days of extreme inefficiency. It is a balance, how much to teach your kids that there is a way to do things, vs. letting them stumble through. Mothers’ voices can be so long-lasting, so constraining in ways that keep you from yourself, but also we are all always at risk of feeling abandoned.
I push the top rack in, and pull the bottom back out. After I scrub them, I put in the silverware and the plates in as much of a line as I can, in between Tupperware lids and water bottles and the bowls that wouldn’t fit on the top. Then, whatever pots or pans have piled up in the sink, or maybe haven’t even made it to the sink because they are still on the stove - I scrub them all and empty into the garbage disposal, running it a few times.
I didn’t grow up with a garbage disposal, which means my mom didn’t know anything about how they are supposed to work, as evidenced by the time she cleaned our kitchen when you were very young, and she dumped a bunch of rice down the garbage disposal, thinking it would just…disappear. Instead it clogged everything. We even had to call the plumber. “You don’t put rice down a garbage disposal,” he shook his head at us. We knew.
As you have reminded us, and will be reminded, moms, even those who are very good at cleaning kitchens, do not know everything. We’ve often felt clueless, especially in those early days, and in the hardest parts of 6th grade. What’s amazing however is that, in motherhood, lack of knowledge or aptitude does not exempt you from responsibility.
You just have to keep choosing, acting, making all these decisions where your kids are watching, decisions that will have consequences for them, maybe for the rest of their lives. It helps to remember that the intention to do your best matters a lot of the time, more than anything else. The loyalty to your kid, your want for them.
By now you may have realized, I’ve gotten seriously bored of the task. Aren’t you bored reading about it? I’ve probably pulled out TikTok a few times, or called my mom, or my sister, or a friend, put them on speaker as I move through the room. No matter how many times I clean the kitchen, it is always boring, often disgusting.
Especially when you were younger, there were many days I could not get to the kitchen, missed meals, relied on your mom to cover while I was learning and proving myself in board meetings and theology classes. You would leave me voice mails saying good night, and I would miss you, but I would also exhale with a certain relief that for that day, these parts of the night routine had passed.
One of my therapists used to say that growing up is about increasing your tolerance for uncomfortable, annoying, even painful things. Sometimes another way I think about this is to say that adulthood often comes down to your capacity to repeatedly complete extremely boring tasks. I know a lot of people would say it doesn’t really matter how clean your house is, but a clean kitchen makes so many other things possible. It isn’t love, but it can make love more apparent.
I keep going. Not because there’s some age at which you don’t mind cleaning the kitchen - or whatever it is you discover is the boring task motherhood requires of you that you least want to take up hours of your life. Maybe for you it will be laundry, or bedtime routines, or putting away the groceries. There will be something, maybe many things, that you will find exasperating and exhausting, and when you feel that way, just know that’s normal. Your irritation is real, but not special.
Take a deep breath, and call your mom. And then get on with packing the dishwasher with as much as you can fit, tossing in some dishwasher soap, and get it running. You’re not done yet.
Once the dishes are going, it is time for the counters. I use a paper towel, mostly because growing up my mom used a dish rag and I can still smell how terribly it would stink after even just a day or two. You won’t have the same sense memory, so it’s definitely better to use a rag, less expensive, less wasteful.
In the middle of all that was ours to hold, I am ashamed at how many ways we let go of questions of waste, or sustainability, or care for the earth. You always had enough room in your heart for these questions, but there was only so much we could require of ourselves, of you, your brother.
In some alternate life, I have set up bins for recycling, and compost, and I have taught you to always bring a mug when we get coffee, and we are careful with how much water we use. I realize now, I wanted you to believe there would always be enough water, in a way not that different than how some parents want their child to believe in God. I wanted you to trust, you will always have what you need.
I spray all the surfaces down, starting with the ones nearest the sink. I wipe out the sink, and all around it, and stack in neat piles whatever dishes didn’t fit in the washer. I make sure to get out all the food from the side without the disposal; that was another hard-won/expensive lesson, just how not good it is to have food repeatedly end up on the non-disposal side.
I use Windex all-purpose spray on every surface. I scrub and spray and wipe up the water. There are almost always dishes in the dry rack to be put away; I mostly ignore these. Another thing about adulthood is deciding what you are going to ignore, and what’s worth engaging, even if you would prefer not to.
I turn to the surfaces by the stove, and the stove. I wipe the fronts of the dishwasher, fridge, microwave—all their handles. Often the light switches too, the door handles to the backyard and garage. I hear my mom’s voice, reminding me not to miss the fingerprints. I glance at the archway your brother hits with his hand every night—it’s darkened with smudges now. Sometimes we grow attached to messes, too.
Finally I head to the surface where the coffee makers are. I throw away trash that has accumulated, put away medicines that have been left out, and often look over at my oldest niece’s 2019 school picture randomly pinned there on the side of the fridge. Right next to the dinosaur magnets, for which our attachment apparently endures.
When I see the trash is full, I undo the bag, tie it up, and take it out to the garage where the big bin is.
I come back in and immediately put in a new bag. It is not worth delaying this task; someone will always throw something disgusting into the bag-less trash can, and you will definitely be the one that will have to pull it out.
I look over the whole room one last time. Wipe down anything I missed. Notice the errant water glass, or soda can, food that needs to go back to the pantry, milk or butter that someone has brought out in the meantime.
Everything, for a moment, is put in its place. Everything, for a moment, is in order.
Let’s be clear, however, it’s not clean in the way my mom taught me to clean. She used to scrub the floor with a Mr. Clean-soaked dishrag if she thought it needed it—and often she decided it did.
But then I remember, we were never allowed a dog, and I have three.
My mom didn’t work outside the home; Carri and I have big jobs that keep us so occupied.
In these and a thousand other ways, I am not her. Just as you will not be me, or Carri. You’ll find your own balance—your own kind of order that makes space for your love to come through.
Some cultures talk about Kitchen Gods, and even place little statues or cut outs near the stove to signify their presence. I used to think they were for protection. Now I think they’re there to witness. They are there to say, all that happens here, it matters. All of these mundane moments that happen over, and over, in the course of a life, they count, and they require their own courage.
All of these small victories -
and the fact that they are all repeated with such regularity -
this is a kind of gospel.
The good news that it is regular and normal to clean up every mess, and start again.
It is hardly ever easy, and we do it anyway.
We persist through the boredom and the mess of everything.
and we say, this too is worthy of attention, of praise, of love.
And then, most days, after all of this is done, I pull out the pans and the oil, the garlic, the salt, the pepper, and I do it all again.
PS:
I am on sabbatical, where I have the luxury of writing every day, often following a prompt from one of many sources I’m tracking. This one was inspired by Ross Gay’s prompt to write about life’s most mundane tasks in great detail.
I’d love to hear how you encounter the sacred in your everyday tasks, or the things you do repeatedly even though you hate them. What helps? Anything? Feel free to leave a comment or share with someone else who might need a reminder about all the ways the small things matter, or is trying to keep saying yes to a love that has no real guarantees.
Finally in case it isn’t clear, I’m so proud of my daughter, in all the ways she has fought for her own stability, and advocated for herself and the support she needs, and for all the ways she cares for people, especially when they need help. She’ll turn 20 this year, and she is working so hard at growing up. She has the biggest, bravest heart of anyone I know.