Convincing.

Coffee and I have a rule that states: The person who makes dinner does not have to clean up. It’s a good rule, generally speaking, since the person who made the meal does all the chopping and slicing and assembling and cooking and baking and whatever. The other person gets to reap the rewards, and so it makes sense for them to load up the dishwasher and handwash the knives and such.

In the past, if I made dinner, Coffee might not clean up the kitchen until around noon the next day (for example) and sometimes I’d get frustrated by trying to make myself breakfast/lunch on a cluttered countertop – so I’d start loading up the dishwasher and cleaning things up. Sometimes I’d be crabby about it, but sometimes I’d just do it because I needed the space. We don’t have a hard rule on the timing, anyway, except that it had to be done the next day (i.e., nothing gets to sit there for four days rotting or getting ickier.) Any time that I’d do this cleanup myself, Coffee would feel bad – and would tell me that I shouldn’t DO the cleaning up, and should tell him to (or should continue to leave it sitting). This spawned a few arguments in which I’d assert that it wasn’t my job to TELL HIM to clean up, and that if it was in my way I was most certainly going to do it myself whether it made him feel bad or not. Sometimes I was even able to say that without snarling. Heh.

Lately, Coffee has been cooking dinner most of the time and I’ve been the one in charge of cleanup. We wake up in the morning, drink some coffee, eat some breakfast, and generally I get up from the sofa and tidy the kitchen just before the dogs come down to eat their breakfast and wreck everything in the house. I load the dishwasher, I wash the various items, and sometimes I just slack and take forever to do it just as Coffee had, on occasion, in the past. The nice thing is that Coffee isn’t prone to snarling, unlike his sometimes-maybe-occasionally bitchy wife. ;)

Whenever Coffee would complain that he felt bad about my cleaning things up, I’d lecture him about how he COULDN’T feel bad because I was technically helping him out, and I was doing it because I wanted to do it or because he was busy, or for whatever reason. I had given up on my “I’m angry and cleaning” and replaced it with, “It needs to be done and I’m standing here, so I’ll do it.” (Which is a much healthier attitude, I might add.) Over time, he started to believe me because I kept telling him that I didn’t mind doing it when I was up and about. But, unexpectedly, I started to believe his perspective. So he was getting used to “Don’t feel bad when your wife helps out” and I was starting in on, “I feel bad when my husband helps out”.

This morning I was supposed to clean up the kitchen, and was planning to do so at my usual time. Coffee decided to make some crockpot stew for dinner, which needed to be started early in order to be finished at a reasonable hour. He got up and started cleaning the kitchen without me noticing, at first. I looked up from my laptop and suddenly realized he was unloading the clean dishes from the dishwasher and replacing them with dirty ones and said, “DUDE! That’s my job!” and he simply replied, “But I needed the kitchen to be clean so I could make the stew.”

And people? I felt like shit. So I said, “You’re supposed to TELL me when you need the kitchen cleaned up earlier and then I’ll do it.” and felt like the biggest asshole in the world for not doing “my job”. He looked at me, and said, “Didn’t you tell ME that *I* wasn’t supposed to feel bad when YOU cleaned up the kitchen after cooking?!” Umm, yeah, I did.

Clearly, ONE OF US needs to stop being persuasive in our arguments. I vote for him. ;)