February 21, 2004

• Dirty Dishes

  
  

  I do say in the header that this is where I spill my guts.  I have not done it much.  It has been a long time since I felt any need to vent anything stronger than a fit of pique.  Today, however, things came crashing in on me from several directions, and I do have some shit to spill.

  
  

  I was never much of a housekeeper in my own house.  On several occasions I was employed to keep house for others and I did it in typical Virgoan fashion:  to perfectionistic extreme.  One family I worked for said they were afraid to walk on the hardwood floors after I polished them, for fear of leaving tracks.  The two Air Force NCOs who let me have a room in exchange for housework soon told me I had to stop emptying the ashtrays as soon as they put out a cigarette.  It was making them nuts looking for the dirty ashtray to use when all the ashtrays were clean all the time.

  
  

  At home, it’s always been a different story.  As a teenaged wife of a crazy, drunken, abusive young man, I incurred his wrath often for neglecting little things such as refilling an ice cube tray promptly.  He’d beat me up over such lapses and my passive aggressive response was to neglect more and more of the housework.  I’ve transcended that passive aggression, but I still tend to neglect housework simply because it is not very important to me.  I guess the most accurate way to state my philosophy of housework is that I’ll willingly do what I feel needs to be done, if I don’t forget to do it or have other things that I consider more important to do at the time.  Usually, through the last half century or so, it has been either work or play that took precedence over housekeeping for me.  That “work” to which I refer is both the paying sort and the creative kind that often doesn’t return any monetary rewards.  I class study in that category, too.

  
  

  Play is something I learned to do when very young, to not only pass time during the bedridden periods of severe illness, but to occupy my mind when my body wasn’t cooperating.  When I’m ill, and my choice is to force myself to stand at the sink and wash dishes in pain, frequently dropping them, spilling water and generally making more mess than I get cleaned up, or to let the dishes go until I feel better, I don’t do dishes.  I have, over the past twenty-some years, acquired great stacks of dishes so I’ll be prepared for long exacerbations of the chronic fatigue syndrome.  If the relapses were so prolonged that I ran out of clean dishes, as a last resort I have gone to using paper plates, but that was before Doug was old enough to wash dishes.  Now, dishwashing is primarily his job and I only do them when I feel well and he is either not well or otherwise occupied.

  
  

  Throughout his childhood, there were more times when all the dishes were dirty than when they were all clean.  Neither of us really enjoys living with stacks of dirty dishes, but it’s a fact of life we both accept as occasionally being better than the available alternatives.  The idea I’m working here to convey is that dirty dishes are really no big deal, especially when there are enough clean ones in the cupboards.  Food safety is an issue, and it is one we are both aware of and careful about.  I have so many dishes that it’s quite possible to start with them all clean and then go weeks and possibly months without washing a plate or a bowl.  Cookware, cups, glasses and flatware is in less plentiful supply and so must be washed more often.  …and it does get washed, as needed.  Doug is very good about doing what needs to be done–what he perceives as needing to be done, not what he is simply told he needs to do.

  
  

  I have deliberately reared him not to take orders, not to show deference to others for reasons of their age or social status, and that is what is causing the current conflict in our household.  Greyfox, with his narcissistic personality disorder, acts as if he believes that Doug should wash dishes just because stacks of dirty dishes in the kitchen inconvenience him.  It seems to make no difference to him if the stacks are kept away from food prep areas, or that Doug and I frequently pick up the dirty dishes he leaves scattered around or in precarious piles and stack them neatly with the others.  He does not seem to care that the two of us who are responsible for washing dishes (his attempts to do the job result in a waste of water and dishes that have to be rewashed–creative incompetence) feel that it is sufficient if there are enough clean ones for our cooking and eating needs.  He wants Doug to be in there washing dishes instead of writing or playing, as long as there are dirty dishes to be washed.

  
  

  He will not get his way in this matter.  I think all three of us understand that.  However, the tactics he uses to get even when he does not get his way are disrupting the household and causing distress for all of us, Greyfox included.  He snipes sarcastically at Doug.  He subjects my son to the same sort of verbal and emotional abuse to which his parents subjected him.  For as long as I have known Greyfox I have been working to minimize and undo the psychological damage he has been inflicting on my son.  Doug is holding up reasonably well, but we both are feeling the strain.  Now that we have a name for Greyfox’s insanity:  NPD, it helps us having this vocabulary in which to discuss it.  It does not, however, make it any easier to bear than it was before we made the diagnosis.

  
  

  Things have gotten really nasty around here.  Twice in the past week or so, Greyfox has gotten up in the wee small  hours after (according to him) lying awake worrying and stewing sleeplessly for hours, and under the pretext of “sharing his feelings” has done his usual job of trying to shoot down Doug’s self-esteem while maintaining his own plausible deniability.  In the process, he has awakened me, which is not a simple matter.  This damned disease I’m living with causes sleep disturbances.  Even if no one awakens me, sometimes I awake for no apparent reason and cannot get back to sleep.  Lying in bed is painful, so when I’m awakened I usually just give up on sleep and get up.  Consequently, when Greyfox is in one of his NPD snits, I usually run short on sleep.

  
  

  Several days ago, after one of those incidents of his sniping at Doug, which passed without my being awakened, Doug left a note for Greyfox and me in which he expressed his feelings about the way Greyfox treats him.  Reading it, I was proud of the mature and composed way he had dealt with his hostility, rather than acting it out.  When Greyfox got up that day I showed it to him.  His response was a note of his own, which was as immature and pathological in its expression as Doug’s had been healthy and mature.  I intercepted it and confronted Greyfox about it on our trip to town that day.  He resisted defensively most of the way into town before those “seven healthy brain cells” he says he has, decided to get involved.  Then he expressed gratitude that I’d intercepted the destructive note, and he vowed to rewrite it.

  
  

  This was only a few days ago, and this morning he was at it again.  He woke me this time.  I heard his smarmy voice–the “NPD guy” as we call that false persona, both looks and sounds different from the sane, rational Greyfox we know and love–he was telling Doug that he just couldn’t sleep for worrying about the dirty dishes.  When I spoke and called him over to discuss it with me and leave Doug alone, there ensued a lengthy confrontation during which he acknowledged that his concerns were trivial, his manipulations pathological… HELL!  He’s got a full understanding of the nature of his disorder, and all it seems to have done for him most of the time is to have given him another mask to wear.

  
  

  I don’t think anything is going to change my opinion on the intrinsic IMPORTANCE of dirty dishes.  I’ve already said I prefer having my dishes clean and stored in the cupboard, over having them dirty and stacked on the floor.  That’s stipulated.  But dammit that is a preference.  It is not a requirement, not a demand, not an addiction.  Other things are much more important to me.  Doug has an ear infection.  He has been sleeping about fourteen hours at a stretch and dragging around when he is awake.  If he wants to put off doing dishes, that’s fine with me.  He splits and brings in firewood every day.  The last day we spent in town, he napped on the couch instead of sleeping in his bed so that he could keep the fire going.  He cleared snow off the roof when that needed to be done.  He takes warm water across to the feral cats whenever Greyfox doesn’t get it done while he’s on his way somewhere or other.

  
  

  Greyfox used to pretend that his bitching and sniping at Doug to do the work I’d told the kid to do was a gallant attempt to help and support me.  At least by this time he has realized that that crap doesn’t fly.  He freely acknowledges now that he is out of line, that his control issues and manipulation are pathological, that… SHIT!  He, we, and now many people outside our family, understand that the problem here is NPD.   It’s a behavioral thing and nobody but Greyfox can change it. 

  
  

  Meanwhile, the interrupted sleep, my concerns over my son’s physical and mental health, and the strains of trying to confront Greyfox’s disorder wherever it pops up, had left me feeling strung out and depressed today.  That’s where I was, before I called him on his cell phone just before I started writing this.  I vented my feelings to him before I began writing this down.  I wept and I sobbed.  I told him to lay off Doug, that the dirty dishes are my fault and if he wants to pick on someone, pick on me.  He says he will, but he has said that before.  The fact is that he picks on Doug because he is afraid of me.  That’s stupid, because my impulse control is better than Doug’s and he has pushed us both to the wall. 

  
  

   I don’t really feel any better for venting to him, and I am not kidding myself that writing this has helped or can ever help.  I just felt it needed to be done.  And now it is.

  
  

  

  • 8:10 pm
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