I was once small enough that my mother bathed me in the kitchen sink.
And when I outgrew even the toddler tub?
—I bathed myself.
I washed my hands, scrubbed between my fingers and under my nails.
The first Persian fable I ever read translates to Be Clean, Be Loved.
I was a beautiful girl.
The women of my family owned their first dishwasher in Tehran in 1980, although they still washed by hand after its arrival.
When my mother emigrated to the States, a year prior to the dishwasher’s arrival in Iran, her American apartments did not have dishwashers. She owned—and used—her first domestic dishwasher after she became my mother.
My childhood smelled of hair spray and lemon cleaner.
I grew up with access to a dishwasher.
I learned to wash, by hand, dinner’s remnants off of pots, pans, teapots, plastic Tupperware lids.
Only then did I sprinkle detergent powder into the dishwasher dispenser for good measure, arrange spotless forks with spotless forks and spotless spoons with spotless spoons.
Feminists hoped increased access to electronic cleaning equipment (dishwashers, washers and dryers, vacuums, etc.) would afford women greater access to fulfilling activities by merit of affording them time.
Instead, as access to electronic cleaning equipment increased, standards of cleanliness and general housekeeping increased too.
What comes to mind is Betty Draper buffing the (spotless) floor in a dress and heels.
What comes to mind: my mother cleaning our (spotless) home before the guests arrive.
What comes to mind? Megan Draper—stripping down to a sorry black bra. Trash can in hand.
Every time someone enters my (spotless) apartment, I am apologetic and embarrassed. Sorry for the mess.
Recently, I asked my mother what she would purchase with the prize money if she won the lottery: new dishwasher, she said, or facelift. When she reminds me they do not make them the way they used to, it is unclear whether she means the dishwasher or our bodies.
My mother comes from a line of unhappy homemakers. After childbirth—to which she showed up with a full face of makeup and from which she left with a full face of makeup—she cared for us children, a thankless task, she reminded us at unequal intervals. When she confessed to her lawfully wedded husband that motherhood left her without time to weight train—my mother was once a bodybuilder—he suggested she clean instead.
My grandmother, watching my mother clean with obsession, fussed—What are you killing yourself for?—and my mother considered her advice before waiting up past midnight to clean the kitchen in secret.
In an early memory, I wear a pink tutu with frills light as soap bubbles. I play house. I pull a stool to the sink.
My grandmother scolds: do you want to end up looking like me?
She lifts me from my station and seats me across the counter where I watch her fill the sink with suds instead.
To me, age four, my grandmother’s beauty is paradoxical: undeniable, magnetic, arbitrary aside. Her hands are all function: the feel of her cool hands kneading my itchy scalp with cream.
Even as a child, I found the implication of my grandmother’s question—do you want to end up looking like me?—disturbing. There was a right answer.
And I answered wrong. My grandmother would correct me in fragments: Me? Not pretty. A purse of the lips, a shake of the head. You: pretty.
In my first semester of college, I read The Second Shift. I took notes at women’s art galleries. All that.
When I returned home, the women still cooked while the men lounged, the women still washed dishes while the men lounged—and my placemat remained at the kids’ table. On Thanksgiving, I sat with the small children while my younger male cousin sat with the men (and their wives). —At least I finally had the language with which to articulate and make sense of my frustration?
Five years later I shamelessly and successfully convinced a friend to sign a lease with me, using a dishwasher as the bargaining chip. I promised to cook. She handled the landlord, put up shelves. For two years, we joked that I was the wife of us.
The dishwasher had buttons whose labels we never read. The lights flickered. We learned by error that I needed to press start three times for the noises to start up. I ran our dishwasher no more than twice a week because the spring inside had loosened, and I had to apply pressure to the door for it to run.
I leaned against the dishwasher and, while I listened to its hum, applied foundation, highlighter, blush, bronzer, eye shadow, eye pencil, mascara, brow liner, brow mascara, and lipstick—in that order and as I had seen my mother do it.
The roommate stepped over me to access the stove or fridge or honey jar.
I begin this essay in my teacher’s living room where she holds weekly workshops. Tonight’s prompt is tell me about your mother’s hands. To do so, I begin with a fallacy: I examine my own—not unlike a baby noticing her own miraculous body for the first time.
As I write, I hear my teacher’s teen daughter run the tap in the kitchen as she fixes herself a snack.
Later when my teacher reads a draft, she remarks that intersectional feminists do not give up on their mothers. They do not dismiss them as unable to evolve their politics because they are set in their ways. The revolution is open invitation.
She credits me with too much. The implication is that the ability to observe, articulate, and question their ways has unset me from their ways—that their ways are no longer my ways.
The implication—and premise—is that I am an (r)evolution.
The next weekend I run into my teacher and her teen daughter while browsing the workout section of a consignment shop.
Fallacy, prophecy.
Even before the dishwasher starts its hum, I wash for hours. I sort what’s in the sink. I nest pots and bowls like Matryoshka dolls in the left side of the basin. On the counter, I cluster like utensils. Plates, according to size. I pre-wash dishes: I scrub grime, sop with soap.
The differentiation between pre-washing and washing-washing lies in the rigor the washer applies to the dish. When the outcome proves unclear, I tuck the dish into the dishwasher, just to be safe.
Labor and cleanliness and beauty as an itch, a compulsion, a basic (female) need. If there are dishes in the sink I cannot sleep right. A dirty sink is (my) responsibility shirked.
Each time the dishes turn sterile, burn-you hot, I imagine myself a good homemaker, not unlike my mother.
I use dish detergent that allegedly smoothens hands.
I watch bubbles rise.
Suds pop against my hairline.
I put up photographs on dating sites, choose ones from at least a year ago, joke I used to be beautiful with a dramatic sigh.
My (female) friends laugh each time. Oh stop it, they reassure me. You are still beautiful.
And my mother? Any man should want you, she tells me after each dud date. I allow her to view the photographs from my dating profile, the ones from the year before. Look at you: You are beautiful.
I am as valuable as I am physically desirable. I am as desirable as I was. Because you too are my audience, let me include a dramatic sigh. I play nice.
—But I think I mean it.
Women acutely understand that a joke told as a joke is not a joke.
In my most poignant childhood memories, my grandmother calls herself ugly. This feeling or title is a curse my mother, frowning in the mirror, loathing a wrinkle, inherits.
Women are so eager to hate their bodies.
My own skin blotches with ingrown hairs, painful whiteheads, eczema. Cream burns me. Between my fingers, behind my ears, at the edges of my hairline, the skin is dry and scaly. I go to a medical spa every five weeks to whimper under the laser that burns off my man-beard.
True: I am a feminist. I understand that beauty ideals are social constructs. I adhere to an ideology that explains internalized misogyny and swats back at the patriarchy’s invisible hand.
True: in practice, I do not understand how to write an essay on beauty without disparaging myself.
If I have not fixed my face, I avoid mirrors.
To admit all of this is not a good look.
After my grandmother’s death, I woke up to hives: their itch and burn. They resembled buds, the progeny of dark spots my grandmother suffered through on her own skin. When I mentioned the growing accumulation to my mother over the phone, she said, my mother was so beautiful when she was young.
The implication is that I will never be as beautiful as I was yesterday.
The implication is that I am in my decline.
I consider the ex- to whom I was only ever beautiful when naked—and then not at all.
What a shame.
I should have worn dish gloves like I was taught.
What might my mother’s life have been without me?
Throughout my childhood, my mother repeated I did not regret staying home as though one of us might forget. The other truth—she only said it once—an eighteenth birthday—maybe she did not mean it—I regret having children—or maybe she did.
It is possible to carry paradoxes in the mind and, I imagine, to find exhaustion in the labor of mothering and housekeeping, to desperately want someone to love, and to fear the probability that we will fail.
I imagine my own life: childless, without a daughter to acknowledge that I was once beautiful, past tense. I imagine it is possible to (r)evolve a life around—or wash oneself of?—a sink.
