It isn’t about dirty dishes.

Maybe it’s just me, but I like to clean the dishes off the table when a meal is done. Even if we were just going to sit around talking for a while, I’d rather do that without being surrounded by greasy plates with bits of gristle and breadcrumbs on them. I’m not talking about washing the dishes, I’m just talking about clearing them off the table, putting the uneaten food in the ‘frige, dumping the inedibles down the garbage disposal and stacking the stuff by the sink.

Each night I go to do that, the Professor accuses me of being obsessed by it. “It can wait,” he always says. And, more often than not, it does wait. Often until the next morning. Sometimes until the next evening, when I have to clear off the old plates to make way for the new. It’s been festering in me, especially since I’ve not been asking him to clear off. I do it myself – just let me do it.

Last night, when he was done eating, the Professor got up out of his chair and lay down on the dining room floor to play with one of the cats. I figured that was my signal that dinner was over. It annoyed me, because the action was so abrupt – it was if he’d just gotten up and walked into the next room without so much as a “by your leave”. Annoyed, I started to clear the dishes off the table. “Can’t you just leave those?” he started in again.

Something inside me snapped. He wasn’t even SITTING at the table, for Pete’s sake, and he’s picking at me again for clearing off. I made a crack along the lines that I figured he was done since he’d left the table without even a comment. I finished clearing off the table, and he got back into his seat. He just wanted to talk, he said, and relax after dinner. Why did the dishes have to be taken to the sink right away? He’d take care of it later, he said.

And suddenly I was angry. Not hurt, not frustrated, but angry. “Because I can’t be comfortable sitting at the table surrounded by all this work that needs doing. Besides, if I left it for you, it wouldn’t get done.” It was cruel I know, but I was angry.

Ironically, that is a breakthrough of a sort for me. Always before, when I got angry, I swallowed it. I spent the last years of my marriage swallowing my anger. And all I could see was all that crap starting all over again.

OK, I can hear your reactions now. “I don’t believe it. She’s going on about the dishes again. But it isn’t about dishes. It’s about responsibility. It’s about procrastinating. It’s about hopes I had about my life when I left my marriage, that I’d be able to turn things around. I’d no longer be surrounded by unfinished jobs. The bed was going to be made every day, because I love a fresh bed at night, with all the wrinkles pulled out of the sheets. The dishes were going to be done as soon as the meal was over. I was going to get eight hours sleep a night, so I’d stop feeling like shit 24/7. I was going to have control over my life again. And instead I get grief when I try to clear off a lousy dinner table.

The Professor knows what my marriage was like: The only bathroom in the house was torn apart for renovations, and six years later the new sink and wash-stand are probably still in their boxes in the dining room of the old house. The twelve-foot long dining room table is probably still covered in piles of paperwork, newspapers, mail and ongoing projects. The roof is probably still leaking over where I used keep my computer – the same leak from twelve years ago. The barn (yes, a real, full sized Virginia style barn that was supposed to be a garage/workshop) is probably still so full of crap that you literally cannot walk into it without climbing over things. The barn itself is in such dilapidated condition that I fully expect to drive by one day and see it collapsed on top of all my ex-husband’s belongings. Because the barn is so full of trash, there is insufficient room inside to store all the tractors that my ex purchased over the years, and they litter the driveway (we owned a one-acre lot; what need did we have for so many tractors?). The barn was so full of crap that when I left, I had to leave my bicycle and my croquet set behind; they were buried under his trash and I had no way to even find them. That was the twenty-year marriage I walked away from. That was the procrastination and the accumulation and neglect I turned my back on. And I see the dishes on the dining room table in my tiny apartment, and I realize I’ve lost control again. That I’m dancing to yet another partner’s procrastination. I didn’t leave anything. I just repeated the same goddamned mistake.