The rancid smell invades their home, a pungent reminder of broken promises and daily disregard. She asks, pleads even, for him to change, but the weight of forgetting and excuses crushes her patience. Dishes pile up, a silent battlefield of love and resentment, as she carries the burden of cleaning what should be shared, her kindness slowly suffocating under the stench of neglect.
I meal prep my husbands breakfasts and lunches in those little black plastic, compartmented containers.
An ongoing argument is that he leaves the sealed containers at work (he’s a mechanic in a shop) for several days, bringing home a stack of 10 hot, sealed, dirty containers that he piles on the counter or in the sink.
I have asked him to bring them home every day, he forgets. I ask him to rinse them out at work. He forgets/cant/wont. I ask him to please take the lids off so the reek doesnt just keep getting worse.
He cracks the lids open kinda on a few. Theres juice or bits of food baking in the heat from everything like eggs and sausage to ground beef to mashed potatoes.
It’s “gag a maggot” level when you open them, to the point theres pressure building in the containers so you get whooooshed in the face with hot garbage air.
I told him to wash his own. That’s how i wound up with 50+ containers taking up every inch of my kitchen because “i dont have time to do dishes every day. If i have to wash dishes you just have to wait until saturday.”
So i told him, “Fine. I cook 100% of the meals in those containers. I make the list to buy the food and i deal with the shopping. Im the only one washing them. So if you cant use any of the options i gave you to keep them from rotting in a hot shop, im throwing them in the trash every time i find a sealed one.”
He evidently didnt believe me because last night when he took out the trash, most of the bag was full of containers, some with utensils still in them. He freaked out and said we cant afford to replace all of it and i told him to remember thats what we tell our three year old about not scratching his movies because he wont have movies if he ruins them.
And the three year old learned.
So hes pissed that i threw away the containers and hes eating steak and mashed potatoes with one of the toddlers mini forks out of a ziplock bag today.
AITA?
Conclusion
The Original Poster (OP) reached a breaking point due to the husband’s repeated failure to manage the dirty meal prep containers, leading to unsanitary conditions and frustration. The central conflict lies between the OP’s established system of providing meals and the husband’s refusal to adhere to simple maintenance requirements for those containers, resulting in the OP enforcing a hard boundary by discarding the soiled items.
Is the OP justified in throwing away valuable property to enforce a boundary regarding shared household maintenance and hygiene, or did this action escalate the conflict unnecessarily by disregarding the financial impact on the couple?
Here’s how people reacted:
I have similar boundaries. Because of the way we set up our lives, I’m responsible for most of the housework but not the cooking. It’s a fair division of labor when I have an at home business. Because I do the housework it’s up to me to decide how, when, and to what degree. I’ll do the dishes, laundry, etc but I will not be treated like the maid. My family likes to eat off clean dishes? Get them in the sink or I’m not doing them. Want clean clothes? Put them in a hamper.
I do dishes once a day, in the evening. Vacuum and dust most mornings. Laundry once a week. Bathrooms once a week. Everyone in my house has all day to all week to get their stuff in the right spots so I can do the chore. That means that if I have to ask any one of them to pick up their shit so I can do my chore, they will do it RIGHT THEN because they’ve had all day to week to do it. They will NOT infringe on my time that way or treat me like a convenience. They can be personally responsible for their own mess.
….and yeah, I’ve thrown away things that have gotten in the way of me doing my chores.
You could try making the food and just keeping it all in a large container at home and allot him ONE container to use for work. Then he has to bring it home and wash it at the end of every day or it’s sad bag lunch for him.
I would switch to glass though. Larger up front investment but they last forever and you can put them in the dishwasher over and over.
>So hes pissed that i threw away the containers and he is eating steak and mashed potatoes with one of the toddlers mini forks out of a ziplock bag today.
I still laughed, though.
Your husband is being a jerk and a disrespectful one, at that. If he can’t be bothered to at least rinse a container, then screw it. He can eat out of a disposable bag with a plastic fork.
He does not respect your work so he can just do it himself.
His ONLY comment to you EVER should be ‘Thank you, sweet amazing spouse, for the the food every day.’ The 3 yr old/movie analogy is spot on – suck it up, buttercup!
Its really irritating when people fail to do the simplest of jobs and we have to forsake the good thing to hear about us being a asshole when the fault is theirs.