Brin (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
brin_bellway) wrote2021-01-28 12:39 pm
brin_bellway) wrote2021-01-28 12:39 pm
Entry tags:
if you want something done right you have to do it yourself
[cw: venting, unsanitary]
nothing motivates you to wash the dishes quite like knowing that if you don't get there fast enough your brother will wash them, and he will wash them *very badly*, and then he will put them away half an hour later while they're still wet so that you don't get a chance to inspect them, and then the next thing you know there'll be visible bits of gunk on the fork you just pulled out of the cutlery drawer and your pasta will be covered in flecks of four-day-old curry from the pot it was boiled in
for some unfathomable reason literally nobody else in this household thinks this outcome is bad, everyone (including but not limited to my brother) thinks I'm making a big deal over nothing, so I'm pretty sure my only remaining feasible option is to beat him to the dishwashing sink whenever possible and count the days until he moves out or at least resumes full-time work (and therefore has fewer opportunities to wash our dishes)
(well, I say count the *days* until he moves out: he doesn't have a firm date yet but it's something measured in *years*)
nothing motivates you to wash the dishes quite like knowing that if you don't get there fast enough your brother will wash them, and he will wash them *very badly*, and then he will put them away half an hour later while they're still wet so that you don't get a chance to inspect them, and then the next thing you know there'll be visible bits of gunk on the fork you just pulled out of the cutlery drawer and your pasta will be covered in flecks of four-day-old curry from the pot it was boiled in
for some unfathomable reason literally nobody else in this household thinks this outcome is bad, everyone (including but not limited to my brother) thinks I'm making a big deal over nothing, so I'm pretty sure my only remaining feasible option is to beat him to the dishwashing sink whenever possible and count the days until he moves out or at least resumes full-time work (and therefore has fewer opportunities to wash our dishes)
(well, I say count the *days* until he moves out: he doesn't have a firm date yet but it's something measured in *years*)
no subject
(Washing dishes well by hand takes longer than my back will put up with, which is why I am always willing to pay extra for an apartment with a dishwasher, so I can feel confident things will be sanitary. Not that that's a relevant solution for you, more just... sympathetic noises? Like how do people *live* with gunk on their forks, let alone *old food in their new food* jesus fucking murphy. Wow. *headshake* I can sooort of see it with your brother, because so many cis guys have that wiring where they either ignore or don't perceive A Dirt, and then they fuck up common household chores because they think a vague swipe with a sponge is "washing" and sort of making a star pattern in the middle of the carpet is "vacuuming", but one expects parents who have to be at least in their 40s to have a baseline of "here is what cleanliness looks like".)
(I haven't taken my meds or eaten yet this morning so this comment is nowhere near as well thought out or as... assumption-checked as usual, sorry about that, happy to accept corrections as usual)
no subject
I don't know how gender-correlated it is or why, but yeah Dad (age 58) also has the thing about ignoring and/or not perceiving A Dirt. Mom (age 59) used to be good about this but has lost a *lot* of executive function over the last few years†, and apparently is so grateful to have somebody else [doing the dishes she no longer has the wherewithal to keep up with] that she's willing to overlook a ~30% failure rate in washing them correctly.
Unfortunately, because it was a work night I cooked the batch of pasta multiple hours before everyone else's dinnertime: as such, *their* pasta was *rinsed* to cool it off before sticking it in the fridge for a couple hours, and they didn't see any flecks in theirs. I stuck my bowl of (unrinsed) pasta uneaten in the fridge after about the dozenth fleck I picked out of it (there were still more), in order to decide what to do with it later: on Mom's advice I composted it a couple days later, but apparently *nobody else looked at it* in the meantime, and since like an idiot I didn't take a photo I now have no evidence.
Around the day I composted it, I tried to get Mom to stage an intervention because I thought she stood a better chance of pulling it off than I did. She casually mentioned to me at bedtime that night that she had brought it up with Brother and had *framed it as a thing that was problematic only because it upset me, including mentioning that two other people (one of which was Brother himself) ate the pasta without issues*, which is to say practically begging him to brush it off (which of course he then did).
I spent the next hour or so in bed crying and shaking with barely-suppressed violent rage. In desperation I tried going back and seeing if I could at least get Mom to apologise in hopes that this would help me sleep: it did not go very well.
(edit: to be clear, I did not actually assault her, even if you ignore all the other reasons not to do that I don't have the guts)
---
I feel like this is especially rough during a plague? Like, this is the one place in the world that actually has a chance at being clean, and having that kind of sanctuary is extra important right now, but apparently that is Not Happening.
---
†she insists that this is unrelated to going on an SSRI, although I personally find anxiety very motivating ↩
no subject
I speculate that the thing about not perceiving dirt is gender-linked on the vector "chores are Women's Work = boychildren are not taught to do chores = men have not been trained to perceive when a chore needs doing or when it is satisfactorily done = only girlchildren are raised to develop the skill of Perceiving A Dirt". I don't know how much this would actually apply in a family that perceives itself as leftist and feminist though. But in like... mainstream families, I often notice that pattern where the boys simply expect things like clean socks to manifest, and if left to their own devices will not necessarily notice if clean socks have been provided or not. The same boys will often fuck up simple food prep well into their thirties, and then there are tumblr posts about "he's doing it on purpose so you'll stop bugging him to help because it's quicker to carry his deadweight yourself", but... I don't know if I'm just still having unwarranted faith in humanity in some regards, but it's such a common problem that I'm really dubious of whether *all* the manchildren are being deliberately manipulative that way. It makes more sense to me that there's some... type of intelligence that has not been developed in them, but which is so obvious and universal among women and girls that it seems incomprehensible that half the species should simply lack it.
Idk if I'm making any sense but these are thoughts that have been brewing for a while... I've never run across a report of a girlchild with quite that particular complete unconcern towards A Dirt. I don't think our society lets us be wired like that. (I am using the gender terms basically in reference to "what gender the child was raised in" as I think that's most relevant to the influences the child would have had. Of course there are probably overlaps among trans boys trying to be How Boys Do, and possibly trans girls as well...)
no subject
Mom and I both sometimes wonder if Dad is doing this, but it doesn't seem to explain Brother: if that were what he was doing, he would have declared victory and stopped washing dishes.
---
>>I don't know how much this would actually apply in a family that perceives itself as leftist and feminist though.
As I understand it, their view is that husband-as-breadwinner/wife-as-homemaker is not the *only* permissible division of labour, but that it is the one that they *personally* chose to do.
Notably, Mom has definitely talked (she's only ever said this to me while Dad wasn't around; I don't know what she's said to him while I'm not there) about feeling betrayed by Dad's lack of breadwinning. In particular, she has never forgiven him for quitting that remote San Francisco job: he says the boss was very demanding and there were tons of tight deadlines and he couldn't take the stress, she says he needs to learn what he should have learned in [the youthful-retail stage of work that he skipped over] about how to buckle down and do what he has to do even if it's shitty.
(I'm not entirely sure which side I'm on in that argument. Part of me feels like it's too easy to say somebody *else* should suffer so I can have food on the table, too tempting to downplay how horrible an experience it was for him. But also, in every *other* way it was the perfect job for him at this stage of his life and he's never going to find another one like it. He doesn't have the spoons for a full-time job anymore, and part-time programming jobs (let alone with flexible hours) are very rare. Furthermore...like I said, it was San Franciscan. Its wages were normed on the (insane) San Franciscan cost of living, which meant you didn't *need* very many hours to cover an Ontarian household.)
I wonder sometimes if that's at least part of why she does so little cleaning these days, if (not necessarily consciously) she feels like if he's not holding up his end of the bargain she shouldn't either. Maybe that's a cause for hope: maybe the household cleanliness level will get *better* when I start working full-time rather than worse, if I can get her to see it as a renewal of her contract with me taking the place of the breadwinner.
(What *really* scares me is the possibility that the loss of executive function is simply *aging*, that it's only going to get worse for both of them. I worry that all the benefits I've enjoyed as a member of a (tiny) commune will turn sour and twisted, that I'll find myself having to run a three-person household single-handedly because I'm the only resident with any spoons. I worry that Brother has the right idea by getting the hell out right around when they're entering their sixties.
*God*, I do not want to have to move. I need stability! But I also do not want to be a nursing-home worker (which I would be terrible at), and I'm not sure I can keep having both.)
no subject
no subject
... yeah it occurs to me that this is in fact a pretty standard modal for why the modern atomic family child wants to get out of the household eventually. (Along with my previously suggested "Standard parent-child relationships have too much authoritarian blood of one sort or another to be worth trying to re-settle into equal positions" and the various versions of "Actually it turns out that me and my parents have fundamentally incompatible value systems")