sisyphus & dishpan hands

I love my children dearly. Really, I do. But there are times when the menial tasks that I do being a stay at home Mom take a herculean effort and I feel like I get nowhere and just want to throw a tantrum, like Owen is prone to when he's overtired, inarticulate and frustrated that I can't meet his needs. As the weather gets colder my skin gets drier and we don't have a dishwasher so I wind up doing the dishes at least four times a day and the skin on my hands, particularly the left hand or 'soaker' of the two, looks like someone took a lemon zester to my knuckles. Every knuckle is cracked and bleeding and the skin between my fingers is sloughing off like skin from a bad sunburn. I slather my hands in heavy lotion AND vaseline every night but damn if it's mending my dishpan hands. I do have rubber gloves that I could use, but it's hard for me to get a proper grip on the dishes then, everything is so slippery. My being the none too nimble one, I have broken more than one glass just moving it from the sink to the drying rack. Toby graciously helped with the dishes last night and I was very thankful but what do I do during the week, start using paper plates and plastic forks and make every meal an indoor picnic? I'd feel too much guilt over the landfill that would be accumulating my waste due to laziness and cracked hands. Unlike Sisyphus I don't have a rock to push for eternity but, until my children enter college, I have all the household mom related labor. My labor isn't in vain like Sisyphus but, at times, it can chip away at any notion of self-worth. On those bad days when you're feeling a lot less than supermom, flipping through the pages of some celebrity rag envying the artifice of the perfect starmom, until your knuckle starts bleeding again!