When I was 13 or 14, I was carrying a huge stack of plates from the dishwasher to the wall unit in the dining room next door. My mum called my name, and, in shock, I dropped the entire stack on the hard kitchen tile, where they proceeded to shatter, the way only dishes can. The plates were in pieces and I felt awful.
They were nice dishes, too, belonging to my grandparents originally. With 6 kids, and probably acclimatised to disasters like this, my mum shrugged it off. But I still remember the feeling of standing there, aghast, with shatters of porcelain washed across the kitchen floor.
Married and bright-eyed, I was walking through the cavernous Bed Bath and Beyond with my husband of 2 weeks, and getting swallowed up by the sheer magnitude of the floor to ceiling products. The challenge: finding dinnerware sets we both happened to like.
A challenge indeed when faced with two strong minded people floating around a giant homewares store that drains your energy faster than you can say, “Let’s do this another time.” Mission complete, we walked out with two different sets – one for meat and one for milk.
On an intensely hot LA day, with the sun beaming down without mercy, we painstakingly dipped each individual plate into the ritual Mikvah, to make them usable according to Jewish law. A mother and daughter saw us with our suitcase of crockery and the daughter smiled, and said, “You must’ve just gotten married,” with a wistful lilt in her voice.
Yes, we had. It was joyous and exciting, nerve wracking and stressful. And with that came the unfortunate knowledge that my husband and I equally hated the act of doing the dishes. “Dishes always look worse than they are,” was my mum’s old favourite line.
To us, the dishes always looked terrible, no matter what state they were in. To say marriage is a learning curve is probably one of the truest statements of those early days.
This past week, we celebrated our 5 year wedding anniversary. Five years! It sounds like a significant chunk of time when you say it, and feels like a lifetime and yesterday rolled into one when you’re living it.
Someone I know once described being married as an old pair of worn-in, comfy slippers. If marriage is likened to a pair of cozy slippers, dating and the first few weeks of marriage is like tip toeing around in high heels.
And while I’m proud to say we have conquered the ultimate dishes dilemma, thanks to a double drawer dishwasher, I’m more proud of us for conquering ourselves, too.