dishes

Every marriage has a problem with doing dishes, am I right? Or perhaps NOT doing dishes is more apt.
It's trite and it's petty, but it's everyday life and it all adds up.
I am the dishwasher in my family. My husband works and I stay home, so fair is fair, he says. I make the dinner, serve it, clean it up; there is no expectation that he lends a hand in any of this affair. We have clearly defined roles: he is the breadwinner, and brings in the dough. I do everything else. Our names should be June and Ward Cleaver. It still shocks me that this is my life, but there you go.
I do have a house cleaner once a week, so scrubbing toilets and floors is not part of my game. We hired her because I was too busy caring and running three children around to do a very good job at cleaning. It is not my forte, I happily admit. So when he complained about the dirt on the floor or the mess in the bath tub, I told him to either clean it himself or hire a cleaner. The next day we had a cleaner.
That worked out so well that when he next complained to me about our garden, guess what? He hired a gardener. We now have a small army of people who help us run our household, which he is not at all happy about, but he realizes that, since we can afford this help, things actually operate at a much smoother level. And the garden is weeded and the house is clean, which is very important to him.
But it ticks him off to no end that I don't scrub the floors or spend my time planting flowers and growing vegetables, so it is of utmost importance to him that I do everything else. (He did admit this in marriage counselling, saying he would be happier at work if he knew I was home scrubbing the floors. Can you feel the love?) He refuses to take out the garbage, for instance, insisting that is my territory. I have stopped asking.
It's generally fine and we have both accepted our roles, but he so adamantly enforces the letter of the law it is depressing.
So on the odd occasions where I go out at night, and they are still eating their dinner, I invariably come home to a kitchen frozen in time: every dish, pot, plate and utensil is exactly where it was when I left.
When the children were little and more hands on, I ignored this; it was hard for him to put them to bed. But now our children are at the age where you say, "go to bed," and they go to bed. There is no heavy lifting or difficulty involved in this task. It is probably harder for him, a known neat freak, to purposely leave the kitchen a mess while he navigates around, then it would be to fire a few dishes into the dishwasher and scrub a pot; but this is what he does.
Out of spite, he leaves the mess for me to clean up. Fair is fair, he shrugs.
And since there is nothing I love more than cleaning up a kitchen at midnight after I have come home from a concert, I mindlessly scrape the cheese from the pot and wonder what it would be like to come home to someone you actually liked?