Why Do Salt Flakes on the Kitchen Counter Drive Me Crazy?
The beauty of a relationship peeve and what it taught me.
Dear Beautiful Friends,
BY SPECIAL REQUEST: My friend Liz asked me to re-pub this piece on ANNOYING MARITAL PEEVES I wrote a couple years ago on Medium. I brushed it up a bit, and here you go. It pairs really well with this poem by
The Hum of the Living. It’s an exquisite reminder of the beauty of these everyday signs of life.🧂🧂🧂
My husband leaves me a souvenir of his mid-day meal preparations: flakes of salt on the kitchen counter. For years, the sight of random salt bits scattered across the butcher block surface made me as angry as a bear. ROAR! I’d stand on my hind legs, mouth open, bellowing my disapproval.
Why the hell couldn’t he wipe his shit down afterward! All the time, I could hear this faraway voice asking: Why the hell do you care? It’s just salt.
I don’t know. But for whatever reason, I really, really cared.
It was a conundrum. So I studied it. The flakes continued to annoy me, I continued to snap and wipe down the counter with loud sighs and grunts so Steve could hear my annoyance and put-out-ness as he watched the evening news from his recliner. All the while I continued asking:
What is up with this? What is the lesson of these salt flakes?
Why did I, upon returning home from work to a husband who greeted me with a huge smile and a prompt kiss, choose to give the goddamn kitchen counter more of my focus than my gorgeous love-partner?
Days, weeks, months, and years passed. Still, salt flecks on the kitchen counter. Still, me getting irked to an unnecessary degree.
I knew my kitchen counter reaction was optional, but I remained full-on in it.
I bitched to my friend Laurie on a walk through Pioneer Park. Laurie is the kind of friend with whom you can share all the external/internal goings-on in life, put them under a light, and see them from all angles until you are cracking up at the ridiculousness of the entire situation.
I admitted to her that I returned home from work more affected by the surface of my kitchen counter than my husband’s affection. She gave me a nod of recognition. “Oh yeah, me too.” How I loved her in that moment. She saw me, she got me!
We did some swapping of our favorite marital peeves — set to the theme of “I do all the work around here!” — and then started to laugh. Through our conversations and confessions, we were able to call bullshit on ourselves. I certainly didn’t do all the work around my house — probably not even half of it, good grief!
This I’m-doing-it-all feeling crept in, again, one early evening at my usual pre-dinner spot: the beloved kitchen peninsula, chopping vegetables and doing meal prep (after wiping down said counter from salt droppings of course!).
From where I stood I had a direct line of vision to my husband stretched out in his recliner, watching the news. Some nights I can be at my post, purring away, happy to be in my regular spot, focused on slicing an onion as thinly as possible; other times, I glare at my husband leaning back in his chair without a care in the world. WTF? Why am I doing all the work around here? 😩🥺🤣
The victim-y binge, like the bag of potato chips is hard to stop after you start.
After my tell-all with Laurie. the next time my husband was in his news-watching chair, it felt different.
I now experienced this scene from a new perspective, as if Laurie and I were standing back and watching it together, like detectives on the other side of a one-sided glass. I reached for my phone in an attempt to take a photo and text it to my friend with the words “See?” written beneath.
But there was no way I could do this without getting my husband’s attention. How would I explain myself? “Oh, Laurie and I were talking about . . . something . . . and now I want to take this photo so we can laugh together — at you.”
Men, private ones like my husband, can’t understand the sacred ritual of women sharing stories about their married life (nor can they appreciate how much it helps the relationship, too).
After my therapeutic conversation with Laurie, and the giggles that followed, I started to relax into the whole salted kitchen counter ordeal. I not only saw it as my thing and my problem but it felt less important; I knew that my husband was going to keep salting that counter because he was A-Ok with it, so why resist? Eventually, my husband and I started joking about it.
“Don’t you dare clean up after you make your sandwich,” I’d say to Steve during lunch. “I’m going to clean up my beautiful peninsula as only I can!”
Another time, when my husband caught me glaring at the surface he said:
“Oh my god are those SALT FLAKES?”
The more I made fun of my need to have a salt-free kitchen counter with Steve, the more relaxed I became (and we became) over the once-hot topic. What makes moments hard in my marriage is when I can’t accept the fact that my love mate doesn’t care about the same things that I do (food bits on the g-damn kitchen counter). And it’s always a pedestrian irritant over which we blow out tops: socks on the floor, toilet seat up, crackers and chips bags left open and stale, a sink piled with dishes, ignored laundry, [put yours here]. Who hasn’t gone ballistic over one of these?
After a while, I found myself wiping down the kitchen counter with fresh inner dialogue: “It’s no big deal: salt, mess, counter, me loving a pristine counter. I got this.” (Note: I am not a neat freak; there are areas of the house I leave clothing and items all over the place. Does my husband complain? N-E-V-E-R.)
Then one day recently, I came home from a swim. The sun was out, my endorphins were blasting, cherry blossoms were rocking the neighborhood, everything smelled sweet. I walked into the kitchen. And you already know it. Kitchen counter, flecks, salt, husband nowhere in sight.
I saw it, I grabbed a cloth, I wiped it up. No angry bear. No peeve. Just dealing with it. Humming a tune, even.
In other words, I stared this ridiculous peeve down until I laughed, until one day it was (practically) gone.
»What peeve or annoyance can you get so close to, it starts to lose it’s hold?«
If you have a peeve you’d like to talk through, reach out.