Dishwashing: or how to prevent a divorce

But when we all pitched in with the dish washing, despite the initial moans and whingers such as “I did them last night”. “Again!”. “It’s not fair!” we usually got well into them and the games almost made them fun. I can only feel sorry for the kids who grew up with automatic dishwashers. The communication and language skills they have missed out on is a tragedy (haha).

Actually there was a statistic that 60% of all divorces since 1995 had automatic dishwashers in the house. Why should that statistic matter? Now take it that the information took a year of collection (probably only during a major census), another year of analysis and then random interpretation, The statistic must have been relevant for a year or so around 2000. The statistic has however a reconcilable (and almost believable) basis. If you think for a moment that if a house has an automatic dishwasher, then there will be less time taken up with washing dishes, and it can mean one of two things. That the parents who might normally have done the washing up (together perhaps?), might spend the time talking about the day. Or, while they had the children do the washing up, they could discuss the day. The important factor was that either way they could have had some alone time, outside of the bedroom. That was the extremely important part. Time to discuss issues etc. With a dishwasher, that time, that ‘alone time’ away from the ears of the children, ended up being in the bedroom. The worst place to ever discuss any serious issues. In the words of Pepe le Phew®, (and other great romantics)“It is the place only for romance, n’est pas?”

Hence the eventual build up and tension of issues leading to divorce.

Apart from the dishes, (we never had an automatic dishwasher) as with any family, there was also the basic ongoing requests of my mother and father, to clean our room, which became demands, which became arguments and sometimes became further deposits in the fair/fete box if not done. It was always difficult to clean the room, because sharing a room with three other brothers and managing to get us all to put things away would have been a minor miracle (and I mean that in every sense of the word). That we managed to keep it even slightly tidy was amazing. Our room was a narrow long room with two bunk beds and a wardrobe, a few crate boxes of toys and a small desk. If just a few toys were out on the floor it would instantly appear messy. Add to that, clothes, school books and school bags, filling the rest of the space The room was ‘chokkas’ as we used to say.

(Continued tomorrow)