Blessings of a Full Sink

On a recent morning, as I was standing in my kitchen thinking, Dirty Dishes, how I hate you, I had a kind of epiphany. A small one, but it helped. How does our kitchen get to this point: dishes piled in the sink and on the counters, no room to clear the table from the most recent meal? As a fairly competent person overwhelmed by the realities of full-time parenting and domestic engineering, I felt like a failure.

Just a couple of weeks earlier, I had attained what I had imagined was a 'normal' kitchen: cleared and clean counters, empty and shining sink; the dishwasher, with just a few dirty items inside, lay in wait for the next meal to end. And from this oasis of clean in the whirlwind of chaos that is life with two boys under the age of four, I reached Dishwasher Level: Maven. With clean counters, it was possible to unload the dishes in half the time! Instead of contorting myself around precariously balanced towers of baking dishes and cereal bowls waiting their turns to be washed, trying to reach the coffee mug shelf, the pots and pans cabinet, the cooking utensils caddy like some kind of mad octopus playing a nightmare game of Tetris® -  I could stack like items together: dinner plates, plastic containers, sippy cups and lids, then make one trip to each location to put everything back. It took two minutes to unload and less than a minute to put away. Plus, with newly found space and flat work surfaces, preparing the next few snacks and meals was a breeze! I was amazed. I started fantasizing about a blog post titled “Keva and Kavanah in the Kitchen” wherein I would describe my transcendent dishwasher-unloading experience in terms of the Jewish principles of  Keva (mastering the mechanics) and Kavanah (expressing heartfelt devotion.) That sense of pride, the blog fantasy, and my clean kitchen had all lasted about thirty-six hours.

And now here I stood, surrounded again, doing a mental inventory of the past couple of days. Had I gotten lazy? Had I gotten bored? Perhaps. How did we make such a big mess again?

Then I stopped and looked at the objects of my derision: a large mixing bowl was soaking in the sink, previous home to the from-scratch macaroni and cheese I'd made, to the delight of both my kids. One box of ditalini pasta, Smart Balance® , cheddar and American cheese, milk. Slightly healthier than the powdered orange kind, but more important: we'd had all the ingredients in the house after we'd run out of the prepackaged stuff, and I was able to please at dinnertime. I looked to the counter: the cutting board, dotted with crumbs from a multigrain bagel, a few cucumber peelings dried and stuck, and a ringed stain that I  knew to be raw egg that had dripped over the side of the glass bowl I'd used to make sure I didn't get any eggshells in the scrambled breakfast. There were nine or ten sippy cups, some with spouts, some with straws, some with rings of watered-down orange juice  in the bottom.

I looked further, to the dining table where evidence of yesterday lay: a blue plastic bowl with blue plastic spoon soddered to the bottom with cottage cheese, because three-and-a-half-year-old son is a stickler for matching flatware, if not for finishing his lunch; slivers of crusts from whole wheat toast with cream cheese;  an impressively almost empty bowl of applesauce that the younger child had fed to himself. Next to my own breakfast dishes was a notebook and the children's Passover Haggadah I'd been vetting for possible use at our seder this year: evidence that instead of unloading the dishes while drinking my tea and eating my toast, I had taken a few moments to actually sit down at the table to multitask. Also everywhere were empty mugs with spoons sticking up out of them: warning signs of possible caffeine abuse by the adults in the house. I laughed at this thought, and the following one: we need it. It's part of the job to stay alert.

That's when it hit me: the mess wasn't the enemy; the mess was part of the job. This utter and almost immediate demolition of the neat, clean, 'normal' kitchen, this constantly encroaching chaos: it represented the care and feeding of my family. These hated piles of dishes were tangible proof that I had managed to feed every hungry mouth in my midst. I had peeled grapefruit, sliced cucumbers, mashed turnips, microwaved dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets - and the result was two healthy, happy, growing children, and two adults who were fueled enough to get through another day of taking care of our family. The reason I was standing in the middle of the kitchen drinking tea from a mug that is not one of my favorites, stirring the sugar with a soup spoon is because I love my family and work hard to make sure we have everything we need to get through the day, and sometimes   - a lot of times - that means letting the dishes pile up while I go tend to some more immediate need - of which there are many. Like any other job well done, perhaps it is worth taking a moment to acknowledge, to even take a bit of pride in, the effort and the results that are often overlooked on our way to check the next thing off the to-do list. Is life easier when the kitchen is clean? For a few moments, yes! Will I keep trying to recapture that little bit of peace on my countertops? You betcha! But as spring gets more real and the outdoors beckon with mud and worms, and chalk that somehow survived the winter outside...I will try to see the mess not as representative of failure, but as quite the opposite: evidence that heartfelt, devoted work is going on in our home.