Daddy stood up and pushed back his chair. He addressed my brother, Billy, “Time for us to get going. Our cows are waiting to be milked.”

Glancing around at all the used supper dishes on the table, Mom addressed my sisters, Betty and Mary, “Time for us to get to work, too. The supper dishes need to be washed.”

I turned to leave the kitchen, but Betty stopped me in my tracks by demanding, “What about Kathy? Why do Mary and I always have to wash and dry the dishes? She’s old enough to take a turn!”

Grabbing a kettle filled with kitchen scraps off a kitchen counter, I announced, “I’m taking this out to feed the pigs.” Everyone in my family knew I absolutely hated washing dishes and threw a fit whenever I was forced to do it. I usually got away with this avoidance tactic because I was the spoiled baby of the family. Besides, up till then, there had always been plenty of others to do the jobs that I hated. Unfortunately, the dynamics of our family were changing now that the oldest siblings were leaving home.

Mom sighed and nodded. “Kathy, I’ll help you do the dishes tonight.” Mary and Betty disappeared before I was able to melt down into full tantrum mode.

It’s frustrating when a newborn baby cries because they can’t tell their mother what is wrong. However, even when a child is ten years of age, they are sometimes still unable to explain why they hate something so much. All I could ever say when I tried to explain to Mom why I hated washing dishes so much was, “It makes my hands feel terrible.” 

That evening, Mom quickly gave in, saying, “It’s okay. I’ll wash. The warm water makes the arthritis in my hands feel better.”

It took me until adulthood to find the right words to properly describe what made me act like such a big, spoiled baby. Having my hands submerged in hot soapy dish water removes the natural oils in my skin. Therefore, when my hands dry off, the sensation of my parched skin touching something like a dry towel is the same to me as hearing a fingernail being scratched across a blackboard, or having the dentist shove a dry log of cotton into my mouth. Remembering the sensation still makes me shudder and my mouth to water!

The remedy to my revulsion was so simple, but I didn’t discover the solution until I was well into my teen years. A dab of hand lotion while my hands are still damp restores the natural skin-oil feeling!

When I got married, I thought it would be sweet to work together with my young husband in the kitchen. I pictured us romantically talking and enjoying each other’s company. When I asked him to help me, his response wasn’t very romantic. He flat-out refused, saying, “I did too much of that sort of work while growing up because I was the oldest in my family. I hated doing it and promised myself to never do that kind of work again if I could help it.”

It’s a good thing I didn’t hold my breath until he joined me at the kitchen sink!

A strange twist of fate in my life was that my husband was the eldest of eleven children. Starting when I was nineteen and freshly married, after each Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter meal with his family, his parents and the older boys left the house to milk their cows. That left me behind in their farmhouse with several of the younger kids and a sister-in-law who married into the family the same year I had. Suddenly, I was the eldest in the family! My sister-in-law and I were expected to lead the charge in clearing their massive dinner table and washing millions of dishes, pots, and pans.  

When we finished the gargantuan job, I would go searching for hand lotion in their bathroom. If I couldn’t find any, I’d swallow hard and with a mighty shudder, find the tube of ChapStick in my purse and rub it all over my hands to get rid of the nauseating sensation of dry, Velcro-imitating skin.

Feeling thankful

I’m feeling thankful for feeling thankful! Some people are not so fortunate. Happy Thanksgiving!!