Contamination

Bit of flotsam bobbed up, keeps happening. Need to leave it here, as is my wont.


Aunt Peggy got a dishwasher. My mother grumbled that it was so foolish to spend all that money, and she still had to rinse all her dishes first anyway. When Aunt Alma got one as well, I heard it all over, such a waste, such an extravagance, when it didn't save work anyway. Ridiculous. And my mother liked both of these aunts.

I often heard her complain of other people, judgmental at a near moral level, for matters of taste and preference. Aghast at how much Aunt Alma spent on food for the two of them, when she could feed five of us on less. How my SIL wore her hair, what her mother ate for breakfast (oatmeal? How binding, how foolish) what some people's children wore to church (pants on little girls!)

Knowing no different, I rather assumed most people held such opinions about people around them, at home, in private. I also assumed my mother would hold me in equal disdain for liking any of the things she complained of in others. So, I held my tongue. I was ridiculed enough for liking purple and long hair. Funny, it didn't seem so bad at the time, but now I write this out, it's pretty dreadful. If called on any of it, she would exclaim that she never meant it that way, and surely she never said that, why do people twist her words so?

And I think at the time, although I couldn't have expressed it, I realized she was expressing frustration at her own life and choices, and had to live with the bully she married. Nothing wrong, in principle, with the Sour Grapes method of coping. Disdain what you can't have so you don't grow greedy and envious. Up to a point, which does not include disdaining the PEOPLE who have what you want.

I've had a dishwasher in apartments for the best part of twenty years, and I think they are wonderful. Given how hard my job is on my hands, how often I wash them, not adding dishpan hands to my cuticle woes is quite a blessing. Yes, I have to rinse dishes off, which is far less work than meticulous cleaning, rinsing and drying. Nor do I have to dry them, a chore I detested, and my mother considered mandatory at a very high result level. I consider wiping a cloth over my dishes to be a method of contamination.

My mother also didn't use any bleach for the dishwashing, nor cleaning the kitchen, because her husband told her she couldn't. He hated the smell of it in his sister's kitchen, she used it with extreme liberality, since that was a family who figured if one was good, two was better (to include medication.) He also would not allow her counter top canisters, which she wanted, but he didn't like them on the counter. For a traditional marriage, that she would allow him to mandate what she had in her kitchen, seemed contradictory. But, he was a bullying bastard.


So, the clean looking kitchen no doubt grew some nasty bacteria, but at least she didn't have a ridiculous dishwasher.


Addendum: A useful article about Complaining.