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.
