Visiting my family reminds me of my love-hate relationship with doing the dishes.

Flashback 1:
Angry mother
In our old farm kitchen, my father stood at the sink, elbow-deep in dishwater.
Supper was over. Of the seven children, the older ones were in the barn doing the evening chores. My mother was upstairs, putting the littlest ones to bed.
This was before my time―I was the eighth child. My sister told me this story. She was the middle one, hiding around the corner, watching and listening.
Grandmother―my father’s mother―came into the kitchen behind him. She was visiting from Virginia.
“John! What are you doing? A minister of the Gospel washing dishes! Shame on you! Why isn’t your wife doing that? A man―washing dishes!”
Hearing about it as a teenager, after both Grandmother and Father were dead and buried, I sucked my breath in sharply.
“What did he do? What did he say to her?”
“Nothing. He didn’t even look at her. He just kept on washing the dishes.”
We sit together in silence, imagining the scene. Our father, the ultimate authority in our young lives, washing dishes. His mother, whipping him with her angry words. My sister, the secret witness.

Flashback 2:
50-50 not always fair
We agreed our relationship would be an equal partnership, fifty-fifty. But what did that mean, exactly? What if we both hated washing dishes, what then?
In his previous marriage, he never did the dishes. They had a dishwasher. So we must too, he said. The cost of the machine must be split fifty-fifty, even if he earned twice as much as I did. Was that fair?
I closed my mouth and acquiesced, feeling lucky to be with a man who didn’t expect me to do all the housework alone.
Our evenings were governed by a rigid routine. Supper, we took turns preparing: He, one day; me, the next; my son on day three. The person who made supper loaded the dishwasher.
We never did any of this together. It got done, but it was never fun.
He died some 20 years later. One of the first things I did? Get rid of the dishwasher. I was living alone then, and just cooking for myself.
It was a relief to be one hundred percent of my partnership.

Flashback 3:
Boys’ toys
My antipathy for dishwashers of the mechanical kind dates way back. I guess I was in third grade when our reading book fed us a story that confused and enraged me.
A brother and a sister had a certain rivalry, the story went. He thought boys were the bees knees. Boys had all kinds of new machines that girls were not allowed to use. A lawn mower. A tractor and wagon. A motorcycle.
Sister was jealous.
Then she got her own machine―a dishwasher!
Now Brother was jealous, but Sister wouldn’t let him touch it. Only girls were allowed to use it, she insisted.
This was unbearable for Brother. One afternoon when Sister wasn’t around, he sneaked into the kitchen to try out the dishwasher. But woe! When he started the machine, a great clatter arose and scared him out of his wits.
Sister heard the noise and came running. With an air of calm triumph, she opened the dishwasher and discovered a loose cup rattling around among the plates.
Moral of the story: Only girls were allowed to operate dishwashers, and it was a privilege to do so, a privilege denied to boys, whose birthright was, however, all kinds of other motorized toys.
I seethed in silence. I remember standing in the kitchen facing a pile of dirty dishes, full of rage.
Rachel Garber is editor of the Townships Sun magazine and writes from her home in the old hamlet of Maple Leaf, in Newport.