Please welcome today’s guest writer, Austin Kanis. Austin graduated from Calvin in 2021 with a degree in writing. He lives in Grand Rapids and works for Green Wagon Farm. He enjoys riding his Honda scooter around town.
Last February, I moved into an apartment with my mom. It was a leap of faith for the both of us: her returning to Grand Rapids after eight years in Ohio, me moving back in with my mother after eight years of adulthood.
In the first month or so of our living together, a plastic basin appeared on the kitchen counter. This could be our dirty dishes tub, my mom said, for washing dishes without filling the whole sink up with water. Feeling protective of my minimalist vision for the kitchen, I relegated the tub to below the sink, to be taken out only when there were dishes to wash and returned promptly afterward. That way, there would never be dirty dishes piled up. Seeing this, my mom told me I was being idealistic, that it was far more practical for the tub to stay out on the counter as a place to keep our dirty dishes. In life, she said, we often have to sacrifice our ideals for the system that actually works.
So the small black tub came to dwell permanently at the end of the kitchen counter, the centerpiece of our new dish washing system. Moreover, we struck a deal, me taking on the bulk of the house chores, my mom agreeing to cover all the utility payments. Surprisingly, with the dishes now officially under my jurisdiction, I didn’t rehome the tub. No, I found that my relationship with the dirty dishes tub had begun to change.
Throughout my life, my dishwashing system has been nothing more than piling dirty dishes next to the sink. But that always felt like a mess, a nagging prompt to clean up and restore order to the kitchen. The dirty dishes tub never nagged. It offered a liminal space for the dishes, a waiting room of sorts—every dish in due time.
But despite trying to see patients at regular intervals—a thirty-minute load every day—my waiting room was constantly on the verge of overflowing. As such, I spent a lot of time arranging and rearranging dishes within the tub, making sure that the dishes were consolidated as efficiently as possible. It just seemed easier than actually washing the dishes.
I’d also often miss doing the thirty-minute daily load, and soon enough, the supply of plates, bowls, and silverware was running totally dry. My minimalist vision for the supply of silverware didn’t help either. To eat or drink, we washed the necessary dishes on-demand. My mom kept a supplemental collection of plastic cutlery.
Despite clearly failing to uphold my end of the chores-utilities deal, my mom was gracious. And by summer, the deal was over. My step-dad had found a job and was ready to move from Ohio and join my mom in Grand Rapids. They found a condo to purchase and my mom moved out. The dirty dishes tub, something I never wanted but now couldn’t live without, stayed on the kitchen counter.
***
When I was young, my mom, sister and I would take spontaneous trips to the Holland beach for the sunset and Captain Sundae. My mom would pitch the idea during dinner and we’d jump in the car as soon as we finished eating, leaving the responsibility of cleaning up in our dust.
I struggle to live that way, with determining the ‘exception to the rule.’ How do I know when I’m leaving responsibility in the dust for a good cause or simply enabling myself to be undisciplined? How do I know when it’s okay to abandon the system?
Months after my mom moved out, I did free myself from the grips of the dirty dishes tub, only to fall prey to another minimalist vision, a dishwashing system with methodology borrowed from Toyota’s manufacturing philosophy. But these days, more often than not I find myself just piling dishes beside the sink and doing my best not to think about it.
Systems are good: they help us bring order to the chaos, and can serve as a source of direction, comfort, and creativity. But if we expect the enormous scope of our day-to-day human experience to always jive with the systems we’ve thought up—or worse, if we never leave responsibility in the dust for a good cause—we risk misunderstanding ourselves and risk limiting our lives.
I don’t believe my problem is striving for too lofty a goal—I think it’s failing to embrace failure as an outcome totally natural to my humanness. I think it’s a ‘yes, and’ situation. Yes—I’d like to maintain a dirty dish-free kitchen, and a kitchen with some dirty dishes beside the sink is just real life. It’s me being a human.
