My dad moved in with me after my mom passed away, and while it's mostly been good, we have had a few moments. Like what happened the other day.
I'm trying to do six million things after working at my day job and before going to bed. My dad is cooking dinner. He tells me we don't have any coconut aminos. But we do have coconut aminos, the bottle is in the refrigerator. I tell him this. He tells me he looked. I tell him the label is an orangy-yellow. He goes back to look again.
Minutes pass and then I hear him say, no, we don't have this ingredient. I looked everywhere.
This means I have to drop what I'm doing and head to the kitchen. I open the fridge, and in less than 30 seconds what do you think I found? Yes, the coconut aminos with the orangy-yellow (AKA hard to miss) label.
Where did you find it? he asks, sounding amazed.
The fridge is a finite space to begin with, and because this is a taller bottle, it limits the space it could be even farther. I found it one of the two shelves that could accommodate it.
This isn't the first time this has happened where something is absolutely not there and I find it in seconds. After talking to some women at work, it seems like this might be a guy thing because their husbands do this to them, too.
I read this article back in January about millennial burnout and one of the things I saw mentioned in that article that resonated for me is the part about how women carry the mental load for their households and that it's exhausting. This has definitely been true for me. It also mentioned that women are often the project managers for the house and that men wait to be told what to do rather than seeing what needs to be done and doing it. I have some of this, but my dad is actually pretty good on this score. Sort of.
One thing that drives me crazy is laundry. I always wash clothes on Saturday and yet every single week, I have to tell him to bring his clothes over. Sometimes I give him a couple of hours notice. Like when I went to get my haircut, I told him I was going to wash when I got home and he should have his clothes there for me.
Guess who came home and saw zero clothes in the laundry room? Yep, that would be me.
