“Hey, babe, this dish soap is awful…”

My husband, always doing the dishes.

I only complain when he washes, dries, and puts away something I wasn’t done using yet. After years of frantically searching the kitchen for where my prep knife went, I’ve learned to just check the knife block. 

From top to bottom, he faithfully cleans the kitchen, organizes the cupboards, and reprimands me if I dare do more than rinse something off. What could be a moderate case of OCD (the verdict is still out on that) has evidently become a show of love — an act of service. He can’t drive me to dinner, run to the store, squash the spiders, or take the girls on a walk, but he can do all the dishes. What he thinks is a meager contribution, I consider a huge reason for why I thoroughly enjoy my time spent in the kitchen. I love fixing up home-cooked dinners, meal-prepping, experimenting with new foods, and nourishing my family with whole foods and simple ingredients.

“I married that,” Mac’s dinner table refrain. It doesn’t matter if he’s chomping down on chicken and rice or if we’re clinking our glasses of local chardonnay before dining on homemade smoked salmon linguine. 

And so we dance.

I make the food, he does the dishes.

I make the food, he does the dishes.

I scrub at the spots on the cupboards and shine the faucet, he tells me he already did that.

I tell him I did it for the aesthetic, he harrumphs like a camel.

The other night, I shoed Mac away from the sink for a sec so I could find the wood oil in the cupboard under it; it was time to treat the butcher block again. I searched our cupboard for the bottle several times without finding it. Where could it be? I found the crappy dish soap and pulled that out to toss in the trash. I’d bought another kind and refilled our soap pump a couple of days ago — problem solved. Soap bottle in hand, I shuffled out of Mac’s way and he began scrubbing at the dishes again.

“Babe, where’s the butcher block oil? Oh, and here’s that awful dish soap… I’m going to toss it…,” I looked up at Mac. He’d shut off the faucet and turned around to face me.

“I think I know where the oil went. I thought I’d tossed the dish soap awhile ago...” 

Holding what was clearly the “crappy” non-toxic dish soap, I looked down. It took me a moment before I realized what had happened. Smiles broke across both our faces as Mac went back to the sink and I wrote oil on our shopping list. Maybe that dish soap wasn’t as crappy as we thought it was…