The Dish Fairy

The water is so hot it burns my skin and paints my palms pink. Grabbing another dish, I press the disintegrating sponge harder into the chipped plate. Perhaps it is because I cannot scrub away the mistakes in myself, so there I stood again, hyper-fixated on my third round of dirty dishes.

There is a reason my wife calls me the dish fairy; it is because, without a dishwasher, I have to do them constantly to keep them from drowning us. As the chronically ill and unemployed part of our partnership, it is one way I can contribute to the running of our household. My wife keeps the roof over our head, and I keep things somewhat tidy and the food cooked. Still, my body is like an aging iPhone with a battery set to die quicker than it should, and I’m tired, hurting, and lost in my own life.

As a people pleaser, it is already in my nature to want and help those around me, but also being from an evangelical home and the only adopted daughter, there were high standards to be met. It created a need to be tidy in all areas, from the way I wore my hair to whether or not I had my face waxed because I was ‘too hairy’. Everything about our family image hid imperfections and highlighted achievements. So when the messiness of life still came barreling in, I hid my tears by crying into the spray of the shower or in my high school bathroom. I didn’t ask for help because it meant taking up space in life I felt I was not entitled to have. So I made myself small like the bubbles in my sink, barely there and easy to destroy.

Too nice, that was what everyone called me, too nice. I was soft, sensitive, and always feared how others were feeling because the pain I felt was so deep when I was in the wrong. I wanted no one else to feel as terrible as I did. Thus, even if I was the one being hurt, I never fought back and took any jagged insult, criticism, or action as just, true, and warranted. Being born as a mistake simply meant I was a mistake and thus should be grateful for the fact that I was wanted at all. Thus, I shouldn’t push my luck and ask for little else from those around me.

I could end up alone.

A dish crashes into the sink with a loud crack as it slips from my hands, the already chipped glass breaking properly into two jagged halves. The pressure builds in my chest, and the salt stings in my eyes. One simple task, that was all this was, a simple task, and I couldn't even do that right. Blood runs with the burning water as I pass my palm beneath the faucet, my fingers trembling.

Once, when I was ten, I tried to reach for a crystal butter dish on the highest shelf in our fridge. Being under five feet as an adult meant that I stood no chance of easily reaching the thing. In a pursuit for a bit of buttered toast, I perched up onto my tiptoes and managed to grab the side of the square dish. Then, it slipped and fell right at my feet. The thing with crystal is that it shatters far worse than a ceramic Ikea plate. I was frozen with tears in my eyes as a thousand tiny shards of glass and some rogue chunks of butter surrounded me.

“What did you do?!” Mum shouted at me, instantly making me sob. She huffed and snapped, “Don’t move.”

“Okay, I’m so sorry.” My voice was a whisper, legs trembling as I couldn't lower my heels. Perhaps all those ballet classes had served a purpose for once.

“Step onto these,” She ordered, taking my hand and guiding me toward a pair of her slippers. Following orders, I managed to get my feet in and couldn’t stop crying even as she sat me down on the couch and went to work in a scary silence.

She used silence when she was angry, which always made me fear it and fill it instead with incessant babble and apologies. That was what I did while she cleaned until my Dad appeared and whispered, “She’s only angry because she was worried about you, it’ll be okay, it was an accident.”

An accident. Oh, how much I felt like my entire existence was made up of unfortunate accidents.

My body was like broken dishes that could never be put back together again, and yet there was nothing else there to use, so you eat of them anyway. The reality lingers as I stay in the pink swirls dancing in the soapy water in the sink. Footsteps echo within our house, and I feel my wife before I hear her. A shaky breath and a palm on my shoulder bring me back to my present.

“Hey, what happened?” Tasha turns off the running water.

How does one convey that they feel half of a human?

That I feel nothing more than a broken plate left to sit in the dirty dishwater of my failed potential.

Pressing my face into a dishrag, my sob was stifled as Tasha turned me toward them. Drawing the towel down, I managed, “I don’t know how to fix this.”

“It’s a cheap plate, bub, it’s fine, we can always get another,” Tasha started.

“No,” I interjected, “I don’t know how to fix me. I miss who I was before I got sick, what I could do. I’m so tired and I don’t know what to do.”

Tasha held me and said nothing, because this wasn’t scary like my mother’s silence; this was a silence that simply held me. In its arms held the knowledge that I was finally somewhere safe.

My wife would never promise the impossible, that my body would get better; they wouldn’t lie just to ease my hurt. Instead, Tasha held me up from the waters of my sorrow so that I could take a gulp of air. Even if it didn’t stop the current that pushed and pulled me at its pleasure, my wife's hold kept me from drowning in the undercurrent of my own body's war with itself.

“I’m sorry about the plate.” I managed after a while.

“It’s just a plate, I don’t care about it. I care about you.”