An Empty Sink, But No Relief?

In our family, dishes are my job. And they never end, because we have six people and we cook almost every meal we eat. And dishes cause me so much stress, because you can’t really NOT do them — our sink is small, the food sticks when it dries, the flies come in the summer…you know these reasons and more.

I feel an unusual, perhaps unhealthy amount of relief when I can retire for the night with a mostly clean kitchen.

But not this week. Robyn took the kids up north and I couldn’t take the time off work, so I stayed home with our dog, Riley. I didn’t need to run the dishwasher once. But there was no relief.

I wanted to see them, hug them, talk to them. I missed them, so intensely. The image of an empty sink was a gnawing, perpetual reminder that they weren’t home.

I met some dear friends for dinner this week, and my friend Katie was talking about a simple wish: not having to hurry through everything. Because even though chores are annoying, the feeling of hurry is what makes the daily grind insufferable. Doing dishes is easy, I’ve done it thousands of times and I can do them without mental effort. Packing lunches is similarly easy. Doing laundry is easy. Taking the kids to soccer practice is easy. These are not difficult things.

But we are pressured to do all these in a day, on top of jobs that many of us are tethered to through phones and laptops we are never more than 100ft away from. We move from one thing to another as if every task in our life were a medical emergency. Because we cram, we are in a perpetual state of hurry — and the hurry is the dreadful part.

It became so obvious to me that a sink full of dirty dishes, and the hurry that comes with it, was worth it ten thousand times over if it meant my family was home.

What if I could relieve some of the crammed pressure I feel?

I can give the kids some grace even as I ask them to clean up their perpetually messy bedroom. I can give them some grace that our front hall looks like the Tasmanian devil tornadoed through with their shoes and backpacks. And I can give myself some grace if the dishes aren’t done sometimes.

Because that grace is what creates the space for some joy — for five unhurried minutes, for being with Robyn, or the kids, or Riley, or friends, at a natural pace instead of one dictated by Zoom calls and deadlines. We cannot let the hurried, frenzied pace of our culture rule us completely. We have to do the dishes, sure. But the relief of an empty sink is incomparable to the joy of five unhurried minutes with the family who made the mess.