I Just Cleaned the Kitchen. Again.

Right before Christmas, Kevin had umbilical hernia surgery. He’s fine now. Let’s start there. He’s good. He’s moving around. He’s starting to do normal things again. No long-term drama. But recovery did not go the way either of us assumed.

Sure, I’ve taken care of him when he’s been sick before. That kind of sick usually lasts a few days. You sleep a lot. You still shuffle around. You’re annoying but functional.

This was different.

When you can’t use your core, you can’t get up and you can’t move easily. Standing hurts. Sitting hurts. Everything hurts. And the idea, the researched, optimistic idea, that he’d be back at his computer typing after a couple of days?

That was stupid.

We both thought this would be “a few days.” Kevin even prepped a couple days’ worth of food ahead of time, which felt responsible and reassuring.

When I used the last bagged salad and had a quiet, horrifying realization:

1. Oh crap. I have to go to the grocery store
2. And this is not ending anytime soon

Here’s the thing most people don’t see—Kevin runs the household.

He’s a writer. His schedule is flexible. He handles meals, dog food, errands, kitchen maintenance, everything that allows me to sit at my computer all day and do client work without thinking about where my next meal is coming from.

While I knew this intellectually, I did not understand it in practice.

A few days turned into a week. A solid week.
A long, grinding, why-is-everyone-always-hungry week.

And here’s the real betrayal: Unlike people who are sick, Kevin still wanted to eat three full meals a day.

Three. Breakfast, lunch, AND dinner. Like a raccoon with a doctor’s note.

I had this very confident, very stupid idea that I was just going to work around my new chores. I would keep odd hours. Work early. Work late. Fill in the gaps. That would fix it.

Spoiler alert: It did not fix it.

The kitchen is a system designed to aggressively generate more kitchen.

You clean it. It’s dirty. You clean it again. Five minutes later you walk in and find dirty chopsticks with peanut butter on them lying on the counter, a half-used glass, and a rogue spatula.

I look over and he’s unconscious in a recliner, snoring. He told me he can’t move. Do I have a ghost with a peanut butter problem?

This is bullshit.

Oh, and the dogs. Maybe because Dog Dad was down for the count, they took it upon themselves to bark at everything outside. No mailman too commonplace, no falling leaf too small. Every bark woke Kevin up.

He needed to sleep as much as possible. An awake Kevin is a hungry Kevin and I needed him to sleep as much as possible too. I set up paired speakers with brown noise and built a heavy-duty doggy prison gate to keep them away from the front of the house. It helped. I only had to yell “shut up” fifty times a day instead of a hundred.

I also discovered that I am not, in fact, better at this.

You know those little arguments couples have? Like not putting vegetable peels down the disposal? I thought that was nonsense. We have a nice disposal. It can chew up a chicken bone. Surely it can handle a cucumber peel.

It cannot.

We have a similar argument about the dishwasher. I like efficiency. I use the slots. I fit more dishes. Kevin says, “Leave space between the plates or they won’t get clean.”

Why, then, are there those little plastic standy-uppy things?

Guess what I learned? If you don’t leave the space between plates, they don’t get clean.

Next, I tried to save time by washing the entire pack of blueberries ahead of time. “Don’t do that. They go bad faster,” he told me from the living room recliner. I didn’t believe him. Two days later, after they went bad, I found myself looking it up online to confirm he knew what he was talking about. *grumble*

Dogdammit. Being wrong is becoming a trend. Sigh.

It turns out that when someone does something every single day, they might actually know what they’re doing. He’s a pro. I’m an amateur. The confidence I had was wildly unearned.

Meanwhile, I couldn’t get two uninterrupted minutes of work done.

Every time I sat down, I had to get up to do something else:
Clean the kitchen. Feed the dogs. Feed Kevin. Water Kevin. Clean the kitchen. Run the washing machine. Feed Kevin. Water Kevin. Clean the kitchen. Run the dryer. Get the mail. Feed Kevin. Water Kevin. Take out the trash cans. Clean the kitchen. Feed the dogs again. Clean the kitchen… Why am I so angry?

Oh right. I forgot to feed me. But if I do that, I will have to clean the kitchen again.

I now fully understand the desire to eat food off cocktail napkins with toothpicks.

Caregiving layered on top of a regular job is exhausting. There is no rhythm. No flow. Just a constant parade of nonsense that refuses to line up neatly.

This kind of work destroys focus — not because it’s hard, but because you have to change into a different mental uniform for each task. Changing takes time. And there is no “I’ll just finish this one thing.” For someone whose job requires long, uninterrupted stretches of concentration, that was humbling.

And I haven’t even mentioned dog food.

We make our own about once a month. When the surgery happened, we had four days of dog food left. Kevin even offered to make more the day before and I told him not to bother. We had plenty of time for him to get better and make it again… is what stupid people thought.

Making dog food requires its own grocery store trip, an arena where everyone is actively trying to kill you with shopping carts, followed by the realization you forgot something and going back at least once. Twice if you’re an amateur.

Now for years I’d been watching Kevin make dog food, observing his inefficiencies, making suggestions on ways he could improve, and watching him politely ignore me. I relished the opportunity to show him how much easier the process could be made. It takes him three hours to finish. This time I made the dog food my way.

I started at three in the afternoon. By midnight, it was done.

And then I had to clean the kitchen.

Again.

This is, ultimately, a love letter to Kevin.

Our anniversary is in a few days, and while I’ve always appreciated him, a solid week in his role awarded a mental shift. This kind of work is invisible until you are inside it. It does not come with milestones or applause. It does not get a neat day off.

Caregivers and household managers do not need one special day a year. They need ongoing respect, for the fact that what they do never actually ends.

I don’t have kids. Just dogs. I can’t even imagine how much harder this gets with children in the mix.

This morning, I made hummus and tabouli, enough to last a few meals. (Kevin said it was the best I’d ever made, but I suspect it earned extra points because he didn’t have to make it.) He started to help clean up, paused, decided he was tired and it hurt too much, and went to watch cartoons instead.

I was one hundred percent okay with this.

Because I was busy cleaning the kitchen.

Again.