I made a quick dinner for my kids and me tonight: spaghetti. Afterwards, while the kids watched TV in the living room, I cleaned the dishes in the kitchen. It is something that I did hundreds of times during my marriage.

When our daughter turned one, my wife invited most of the children living in our apartment building for a party. There was food and cake, and in the end there were a lot of dirty dishes. Our kitchen was small. We were living in the Balkans at the time, and over there is it common for each faucet to have its own small water heater. The one in our kitchen ran out of hot water in about five minutes, so I took the dishes to the bathroom, which had a much larger water heater, and washed them in the bathtub. My wife’s paternal aunt told me that there was no need for me to help, but I kept helping anyway. Why not? Being a man is no excuse for not helping around the house.

I have done a lot of dishes. Once when my mom was visiting, she said that I’d cleaned more dishes in a week than my dad had during their entire marriage.

While the divorce was in progress and I still had to live with Ljubica (my wife—not her real name), I kept doing the dishes. Once I was in the kitchen cleaning up and Ljubica came in and started talking at me. She said that I had “always” done the dishes, but that I only did them as a way of pardoning myself. During the day, according to her, I would carry on affairs with different women while I was away at work but at night I would absolve myself of my sin by washing plates. It wouldn’t work, she said. No amount of dishwashing could remove my sin.

This is the conservation that I remembered tonight while I was washing dishes.