Life is Short

We are in the final weeks of a kitchen remodel. One of the inconveniences is, of course, not having a kitchen sink. After each wonderful meal, prepared by my more culinary-inclined husband, I wash the dishes in a plastic dish pan that one of us lugs down to the laundry room.

Don’t get me wrong, I have fond memories of dish washing going as far back as my memory can go, back when I could barely reach the dishes in the drainer. My assigned station was usually dish-dryer. I remember how those big items I would need to hold tight against myself to dry them properly. My shirt would often be far wetter than the dish towel.

This daily chore usually included a lot of talking, some amount of teasing, loads of laughter and perhaps even singing – before I realized I really can’t sing. I estimate that I have ten years of good memories under my belt, beginning from the age of six all the way to age sixteen.

I can only ponder why it is that the single most frequent memory that has come back to me each night as I wash and meticulously dry our dishes these past weeks is not a memory from any night out of that precious decade. Instead, the memory that plays over and over in my mind, as if a tape is played in a continuous loop, is the memory of a single night with me drying and my step-mother washing when we lived in the double-wide trailer in the foothills of Colorado during the time my father slowly built our house with his own hands over weekends and the precious hours before bedtime.

To set the stage, my step-mother some nights would be bubbly, engaging and conversational. Other nights, she would vacillate from being non-responsive to my attempts at conversation to being angry, dismissive, and openly hostile, often slamming cabinets and stomping from one end of the kitchen to the other. Decades later, I learned that “she” suffered from bipolar disorder. I don’t know how much she suffered, but I can certainly attest to the suffering she inflicted upon others in her path.

That night of my recurring memory, I can tell you that I tried hard to do everything right. But, she had been in one of her stormy moods, and after holding my breath, counting the minutes before I could retreat to my bedroom which was the room on the other side of the thin kitchen wall, I was relieved to dry and put away the last dish. I closed my bedroom door to study and get ready for bed. But, that night, I heard a sound that made me stand stock-still, my hand still resting on the door handle. It was the sound of dinnerware being taken down from the cupboard, and one by one, each item was slowly placed back into the cupboard. It wasn’t difficult to visualize what actions could possibly accompany the sounds that I heard, especially since I had survived this unstable environment by attentively listening for clues to her mood so that I could better anticipate the raging storm that might come my way.

Why would she do that? Was my drying of the dishes so inferior that she needed to re-dry each piece that I had touched? Was it so difficult to correct my “technique” so that I could meet her much higher standards? 

“Gaslighting” is a term made famous by the 1944 MGM movie ‘Gaslight,’ and seems to describe my step-mother’s behavior and other various behaviors witnessed during my teenage years living under the same roof with her. Gaslighting is the practice of convincing a mentally healthy person that they are going insane.

What I did that night is no longer important, because truly, there was no “right” answer. Anything I might have done in response would still have resulted in her declaring her actions as innocent, even virtuous. Certainly, she suffered from a terrible disorder, one that still has no known cure. But tragically, the victims of these disordered individuals rarely receive mention and seldom understand how they also need help.

These past few weeks, when every night I would dry each plate, each utensil, each pan and its lid meticulously to ensure that no drop of water remained, all the while replaying the same stupid memory over and over, it finally occurred to me that I continued to give her power over me, long after she has departed this earth. So instead, I now choose to call to mind any one of my positive memories, I try not to obsess over the dishes, and I look forward to our wonderful new kitchen and our new appliances. 

So, my advice:

1) Choose the memories you want to play in your head.

2) If you have a family member or loved one who suffers from a personality disorder, seek help and download the book Out of the Fog by Gary Walters

3) Tell someone your story. 

4) Life is short, let your dishes dry themselves! (Evidently air drying is actually more sanitary. Who knew!)