The Unexpected Joys of Solo Parenting
When you’re already used to carrying the emotional and mental load, solo parenting can feel… liberating
The day before I asked my husband for some time apart, we had an argument about the dishes. Is there anything more cliché?
It might have been the first argument we’ve ever had about the dishes. My husband has never liked doing dishes. He says it irritates his hands. He cleans the rest of the kitchen — historically, to sparkling standards, though those standards have noticeably decreased as of late — and leaves the dishes for me.
Of all the things I’ve minded over the course of our 16-year marriage, doing the dishes has not been one of them. It’s a chore I find satisfying, and I’ve never found it to irritate my hands.
But I did mind when he told me to leave the dishes for him to do in the morning. This happened because he disappeared downstairs after dinner, then ended up scrambling to clean and felt bad that it had gotten so late.
I minded when he told me that he’d do the dishes in the morning because we both knew he had no intention whatsoever of doing the dishes in the morning. This left me with three choices:
- Give him a chance to follow through, then when he inevitably didn’t, do…
