Oct 23 2005
The Silent War of the Oatmeal Bowls
My father-in-law lives with us. He has since shortly after my husband and I said “I do.” It was a temporary situation that has been, temparily, going on for over a decade.
I have a love-hate relationship with the whole thing.
Love - I love that he cuts the grass and putters around outside planting flowers and such.
Hate - I hate that I cannot park my car in my own fucking garage because of all his fucking tools and fucking supplies and fucking crap all over.
Love - he has been a great care-taker for my girls and they love the heck out of him and, let’s face it, the price is right (free).
Hate - now that he’s getting up there in age, I’m thinking that my 18 month old sits around and watches Matlock reruns and The History Channel with him all day while I’m at work. No more “fun grandpa”, now it’s just sit-around-and-do-nothing-grandpa.
Love - well, now, I’m plum out of things that I love. But you just watch… I can go on and on and on with the other list.
I’m tempted to list all of the things I hate; to talk about how I want my basement back along with my garage and, maybe, perhaps, my SANITY, too. I could go on about how he hides food in his room or how he turns the TV up too fucking loud because his hearing is going and he can’t hear Murder She Wrote over the boisterous noise of the three children who LIVE HERE. I even considered complaining about his insomnia and how it means he’s wandering the house at all hours and how I hate hearing him while we’re doing the nasty. But, no - I’ll spare you those sad facts because, really, the whole situation can be represented simply by telling you about the Silent War of the Oatmeal Bowls.
The man is nothing if not consistent. He eats his oats every morning. He uses big, plastic bowls to cook them in the microwave (that way, they won’t spill over the edge when they boil) and then, once cooked, he transfers the oatmeal into a regular bowl. He then puts the big, plastic bowl into the sink and runs water in it. AND LEAVES IT THERE.
The rule in my house is that we don’t leave stuff in the sink. If we’re really, really being good household citizens, we will put our dirty dishes directly into the dishwasher. But usually we rinse well and stack neatly on the counter by the sink so that later MOM can put it in the dishwasher. WE DON’T LEAVE IT WITH WATER IN IT SITTING IN THE SINK. We all know this rule because MOM has covered it a million times to the entire household. And we all know that MOM becomes a raving fucking lunatic when we leave stuff in the sink.
These big and plastic bowls do not go into the dishwasher because, well, we make a lot of dishes here and dishwasher real-estate is precious. We don’t use it up for BIG stuff. Big stuff is hand-washed in this house. So when I do dishes, I load up the dishwasher and then I hand wash the rest.
ONLY I’M NOT FUCKING HAND WASHING THOSE BIG PLASTIC OATMEAL BOWLS.
So I leave them on the side of the sink. I don’t load them, I don’t wash them. All I do is dump the water out and set them aside.
The next morning, it all starts over… his oatmeal, the microwave, the big plastic bowl in the sink. And I dump the water out and stack it into the bowl from yesterday. Repeat, repeat, repeat.
The current record for how many days this will continue for is SEVEN days. That means seven oatmeal-encrusted big plastic bowls stacked up on the side of my sink. That means that for seven days, he goes and gets a new plastic bowl instead of just fucking washing out one of the ones on the side of the sink. That means that seven times he leaves that damn thing in my sink with water in it.
When I tell bitch and complain to my friends, I know it all seems very simple to them.
“Linda, why don’t you tell him to cut it the fuck out? Wash his own bowls every day.”
“Hey, Linda - throw away all but one of those damn big plastic bowls, will ya?”
“Linda, time for the temporary living arrangements to CHANGE.”
Yes, I know. I fantasize about all of these things. But I don’t have the balls to do anything about it. I talk to my husband “Time for you to have a talk with your dad, honey.” He keeps promising he will, but it’s a lot harder than it seems. His dad is the most passive-aggressive person I have ever met and there isn’t a chance in hell that he’d be honest about his feelings.
But there is a light at the end of the tunnel. In six months, my baby turns two. And at that time, she will be eligible to go to the same AWESOME school as her sister, Jadyn, goes to. By then, Jadyn will be four and Sarah nearly ten. They can all go to that same center and it’s a place that I love and trust. I’ll probably have to sell a kidney or something to keep them all in that program week after week, but if it means the end to the Silent War of the Oatmeal Bowls, I’d sell them both, really.
My prediction is that by this time next year, my father-in-law will move back to his childhood home where his sister currently lives alone. He’ll putter around her garden and she’ll happily wash his oatmeal bowls every morning. When he leaves, each of my 3 little girls will have her own room and, for once, I might have enough closet space for their stuff. My husband and I will be able to park in the garage and the kids will be able to rollerskate on the unfinished side of the basement on cold winter days. We’ll pay some punk neighborhood kid to cut the grass. Maybe we can even use the dining room table for exciting not-in-the-bedroom monkey loving in the middle of the night some time.
And we’ll never ever buy oatmeal again.
And we’ll live happily ever after.
The end.
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