Your dishwasher is your glass ceiling

The canary in your domestic mine

Jun 04, 2025

Growing up in 1970’s and 80’s Belfast, my family didn’t have a dishwasher. Back then, they were a luxury item that not everyone had, so I grew up in a home whereby my brother and I washed and dried the dishes while mum cleared things away.

Then my mum fell down an opened manhole and we got a dishwasher. Not immediately, obviously. She didn’t find one packed up waiting for her down a dark crevice. No, one minute she was chatting to her work colleague as they made their way back from lunch and the next she was down a drain with blood pouring out of her leg. Eventually she was persuaded to make a claim - my mum hated “making a fuss” of any kind and so had to be persuaded and pressured but eventually she did, and got enough money to buy a dishwasher.

And it broke her heart.

Well, we did.

I remember the day it arrived. My dad was grumpy because of course there was no room for the thing so he’d had to pull out a cupboard. “Waste of bloody money” he’d muttered on repeat. Muttered the man whose job it was to not do the dishes. Of all the things for herself she could have spent that money on, she desperately wanted the dishwasher because she thought it would save her time to live more for herself.

Once installed, we all gathered round for a moment, but then since it couldn’t play Wham or make a cuppa we all eventually wondered off to play Wham or make a cuppa while my mum studiously poured over the instructions.

That evening as we cleared the table, she stood beside the dishwasher taking our plates and carefully stacking them “properly” inside. And it was this “properly” that would be the start of her heartbreak. You see, no-one else cared what way the dishes were stacked, and certainly didn’t have time to stack them “properly.”

Over the following years, my mum spent all of the free time her dishwasher was meant to give her, desperately shouting at us to stack it properly while taking out our improperly stacked dishes and putting them in again. I, of course, thought she was mad. With my Back to the Future posters on my wall and a teenage dream of living “BIG” when I left home, her preoccupation with something as domestic and dull as the fucking dishwasher was beyond me.

Until I became an adult with teen children who break my heart by not stacking the dishwasher properly. Somehow, I have become the only person in the house who is mentally and physically responsible for something as domestic and dull as the dishes. One of my teens actually once put her half eaten dinner plate on top of the top dishwasher shelf, with the fork still in it. Not cleaned off. Not even slotted perpendicular in the slots. No…. horizontally on the shelf, full of food with her fork neatly resting on top.

For fuck’s sake.

And so any time that the dishwasher was supposed to give me, is spent shouting at them or screaming in annoyance or worse - cleaning out the gunk in the filters because I have no idea how to add salt to it although apparently I’m meant to add salt to it. But that would require me to spend another 10/15 minutes googling what to do and how to do it, and then doing it.

And this is the kind of low-level, high-impact domestic-fuckery that breaks so many of us.

My client last week spent 10 minutes of our session telling me about her partner who actually started to empty the dishwasher. This was progress. But then as she watched him with delight, he got bored half-way through and just walked away. BECAUSE HE COULD!

Because ultimately, it is her ‘responsibility’ to ‘manage’ the cleanliness of the crockery.

There was a sense he was ‘helping’ her by emptying it, but then - because surprise surprise, most domestic drudgery IS bloody boring - he reckoned he’d got better things to do. As do my teens. As do many partners and kids who ‘help’ but don’t take responsibility for.

AS DO I! And yet, the responsibility ultimately lies at my feet.

And it can be so frustrating.

Here’s another client story about dishwashers. (Honestly, I can’t tell you how often they come up!)

Let’s call her Izzy. She was at the end of her tether trying to manage the home. Her husband is a farmer and so there is an urgency and constancy to his work that has meant somehow she has taken ALL the domestic workload on, despite also working and having four children. She’d been working on establishing better boundaries with everyone in the home, empowering her teens to step up, relinquishing her control on certain things and trying to dedicated more time and energy on her first, before many of the domestic responsibilities. Because amid the drudgery and the responsibility she also had ambitions for herself. Who knew.

Then one day, after 18 years - you read that right - her husband got up from the breakfast table and took his own plate and cup to the dishwasher for the first time. (By the way this isn’t about him being a bad man per se. He grew up on a farm where his father did all the farm work and his mother managed the home. All the work it took to manage the family and home was done without fanfare or recognition so he had no clue what it actually takes.)

He set them on the counter and then - wait for it - opened the dishwasher! He pulled out the tray but then stopped. She told me she was watching from the door, holding her breath. He looked quizzically at the inside of the dishwasher and then…… started taking all the dirty dishes out of it and placing them on the counter. She watched as he then restocked everything again in a more ordered fashion muttering how if it was stacked this way the dishes will be better cleaned.

I am listening to her, delighted with her for getting him this far. I was thrilled all the work we’d done was starting to pay off in the minutiae of her life so she could focus more on the things that really mattered - her own ambitions and quality of life.

But then she raged at me down the screen.

“I was so fucking furious at him!!”

Wait, what?? Surely this was a win? Why on earth was she annoyed?

“For 18 bloody years when I’ve asked him to help me more, his response has always been “I don’t have time.” as he marched out to the farm yard.”

Izzy was now screaming at her husband that she has continually asked him for help and he’s told her he’s had no time, yet now he can spend ten minutes restocking the dishwasher when all she asked him to do was put his dish and cup away!

I know why she was upset, but I also know this is where women shoot ourselves in the foot.

We do it to our children, our partners and anyone else who is asked to do a job, or does a job voluntarily. We tell them they’re not doing it right.

If you don’t want the responsibility of a task, stop assuming you are the only one who can do it properly.

I asked Izzy what would happen now that he had been screamed at him for finally doing the task she’d relentlessly asked him to do?

Is he more likely to do it again? Is he more likely to tell the kids to do theirs too? Will my teenage daughter pull out the hoover voluntarily if I’ve criticised her for not getting into the corners last time?

No.

So I said to Izzy, what would have happened if she had watched him stack the dishwasher “properly” and then run over and given him a medal for doing it so well. (Yes, sometimes we have to play that game). If she had announced to him and the kids that the dishwasher had never been stacked so well and isn’t that amazing, and isn’t he the King of the Dishwasher and maybe he could show the kids and maybe actually, since he is so brilliant at it, he should be the Dishwasher Person?

She started to laugh. Of course that is far more likely to make him do it again. I totally understood her frustration. The unfairness is fucking real. We all feel it. The unfairness is real.

But when you take responsibility for the dishwasher - and any family chore - being done “properly” then you are the one who has it’s proper responsibility.

That doesn’t take away the frustration when it isn’t actually done properly. When they leave caked on food that doesn’t come off (probably because I haven’t done the salt thing yet - if anyone knows what I’m supposed to do, can you let me know please!).

But we have to understand that this over-responsibility is real and it is hurting us. It’s not because being responsible for and enjoying domestic drudgery comes embedded in our DNA. Just because we have vaginas does not mean we know to wipe down a counter after making toast.

It’s basic home/-house / family skills that everyone should learn and have, but we were then extra trained to believe we were the Domestic Dementors… believing our value lay in how clean our home is, believing our value lay in taking total responsibility for everything and everyone else first, believe our value lay in doing all the unpaid work for free and smiling sweetly about it. Let’s break the domestic glass ceiling by not wasting your time getting others to do thing properly. Leave their dishes on the table. Don’t pick up their clothes and wash them if they know there is a washing basket. Don’t criticise anyone for not doing anything properly. T

However you stack your dishwasher, however everyone in your house stacks it, make sure it represents the dynamic of fairness in your home. Take the time it gives you to play. To create. To think. To exercise. To chat. To connect. To be.

If you feel you want some help with worrying less about the dishwasher and more about your own life, one powerful hour to just explore where you’re at and how can you make it all feel a little easier might do the trick. Details of my Breakthrough Empower Hour are here. (10% discount for my paid subscribers).

And as always, this is available for everyone to read, so for my paid subscribers (thank you so much - your support keeps this newsletter going, because it takes time and energy each week) I will send you a little exercise to help you listen less to the asshole in your head.

Just email me at alana@alanakirk.com and when you’ve done it, you can send it back and I’ll give you some feedback (feel free to ask questions or ask for specific support in an area) to try to move you forward. I’ll do this each week for paid subscribers.

Your dishwasher is your glass ceiling

The canary in your domestic mine

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