I Used To Hate Doing The Dishes

But now that James cooks I kind of love it!

My husband James and I have been together for more than 30 years, and we’ve lived together nearly that entire time, including most of the 4 years that we dated before we got married. For nearly all of that, I’ve done both the bulk of the cooking and the bulk of the cleaning up afterward, although when he was still in grad school he did some. I started out really kind of liking cooking, particularly after I stopped working outside the home to raise our son. I never enjoyed doing dishes however, until recently that is.

Dishes are one of those thankless jobs of keeping a home. Just as soon as you’ve done them, there are inevitably more. It’s like Sysiphus pushing the same rock up a hill day after day. After every meal, once any leftover food is put away, what’s left is to wash the dishes. I guess I shouldn’t complain because every place we’ve ever lived has had a dishwasher, so it’s not like I had to do them by hand, over and over again. It’s just that it was such a thankless and never-ending job. You really only noticed its impact if you don’t do them.

My dad used to jokingly say that the worst thing in the world was a dishwasher full of clean dishes because now you have to put them away before you can put anything else in. He wasn’t wrong. Dad had taken over dish-duty in middle age, and he actually found it quite therapeutic. This is something that I’ve actually come around to embrace as well.

About 10 years ago my enthusiasm for cooking had pretty much run its course. Cooking 2–3 meals a day, day in and day out will tend to do that to you over 20 years. Also, I had started working as a life coach at about that same time and was building my practice. I still enjoy cooking if I’ve got plenty of time and have nothing else to do, but that doesn’t happen very often these days, particularly now that I’m also so active on Medium.

Fortunately, about this same time, James got really interested in cooking. He said it was his mid-life crisis where he was finding a form of creative expression, but it may very well have been in self-defense because at that point I was kind of phoning it in. James started making all of the weekend meals and eventually took over the holidays as well. All I had to do was set the…

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