Today is Labor Day in the US. This first Monday in September is the day that our country dedicated to honoring the working classes after the powers that be decided that May Day, the original Labor Day, was too closely tied to the actual labor movement. A parade of organized laborers was held in New York on September 5, 1882; but the September holiday was not widely adopted until after the Haymarket International Worker’s Strike debacle in Chicago in May 1886. The year after Haymarket, Oregon, oddly enough, was the first state to make Labor Day a public holiday. In 1894 Congress made it a national holiday for federal workers; but as late as the 1930s, unions were still encouraging most other workers to strike in order to get the day off. And it hasn’t gotten much better.
Today, the holiday weekend serves as the end of summer for Americans. It is a holiday for most of the professional-managerial class. However, it is not a holiday for most actual workers, though manufacturing and other “heavy labor” Labor Day hours do come with holiday bonus pay. But apart from education, most care-workers, including retail workers, do not have a day off. On the contrary, if you work in retail, then this weekend is likely spent managing end of summer blow-out sales — extra work so that those with a paid holiday can spend more money while they are not working. Most care-workers do not get that “heavy labor” holiday pay premium either… because most care-work positions don’t come with such benefits.
Nominally, I am off work. That is, I am released from wage work for the day, but I don’t get the day off. If anything, I have more work to do today. In fact, I hardly get any time real off at all. I am constantly stressed because I never have down time. I always have some task that Needs To Be Done Now, and most of those should have been done last week. I wake up at 2am and feel guilty about going back to sleep because this is time that could be used to finish up that thing that never got done last night or start that thing that never got started. Sleeping feels like laziness, a waste of my time. I normally try to go back to sleep, but it doesn’t often work. I will gnaw on that undone list until I finally get out of bed and address it. In fact, I got up yesterday at 3:30am after an hour of futilely trying to suppress my worry at the mounting pile of things that were slamming up against hard limits — like corn that needed to be frozen before it rotted, apples and peaches still moldering on the trees, and basil in full flower, so far out of a reasonable harvest schedule am I. Plus it is September. It could frost as soon as next week. In fact, tonight it’s supposed to be 42°F (5.6°C). Basil isn’t reliably hardy under 52°F, though we’ve dipped below that a few times and it is still bright and bushy.
Not me at 3:30am, but I got up nonetheless… Because I really do have that much to do… But also because it does feel faintly indolent to spend time doing things like sleeping — or eating sit-down meals, or exercising, or getting showered and dressed on the weekend, none of which happened on Saturday. And I still didn’t get done with what needed to be addressed immediately if it was going to be addressed at all. So I got up at 3:30am on Sunday. By noon I was exhausted. By sundown I was in tears… and still not caught up. For the record, I am writing this at 9pm… because I’m so fretful that I can’t fall asleep… I hope that happens sometime before the fretting wakes me up again… Either way, I’m sure that as you read this I am once again slogging away at the arduous task-list for this day “off work”.
Labor Day Weekend is a time of craft fairs and music festivals. There were a couple plays that I wanted to see. I would have liked to attend the Stowe Harvest Festival. And I really would like to sit in that lounge chair in my back garden at least once before I have to put it away again for the winter. But I am not of the socio-economic caste that gets to do such things. (And no, that is not a typo… we don’t have classes in this culture. That implies mobility between groups. This is a caste-system. Though lots of people do manage to slip lower in rank.) Unfortunately, I am close enough to that leisure caste that I can see what I’m missing. It might be better if I wasn’t privileged enough to take the newspaper or to work with people who get actual time off. I am very tired of over-hearing detailed disquisitions on the weekend’s golfing (while I’m working, no less!) when I can’t even manage to get a full night’s sleep. And the weekend arts section in the paper is just taunting me…
I was reading Katherine May’s Enchantment while making this week’s yogurt on Saturday morning. In the essay “Take Off Your Shoes”, she talks about the way time is stacked against working bodies. When the pandemic hit and there ought to have been much more time, at least those many hours a day normally spent in commuting and so on, plus a whole other adult at home who could theoretically take up some of the workload, she instead felt time dissolving. In the time leading into lockdown, she had been feeling guilty about not taking the time to meditate, of not being dedicated enough to cultivate a spiritual practice that might not only define life a bit better but promised to build a healthier version of her body if only she would put in the work. But, with a young son and a career and myriad other tasks wedged into every day, she rarely carved out time to work only to the benefit of herself. Of spiritual practices, she says, “It was a long time before it occurred to me that the whole system might just have been designed for men…” Then when the pandemic upended what order she had created — and her partner did not deign to help, but was instead working longer hours… at her desk! — whole days would go by in which she was, in a very real sense, non-existent. “I willingly surrendered my meditation time because I thought it would be a vanity to demand it. … I let those moments become overrun by work and care, and I was surprised to find that, without them, there was nothing left of me.”
May could have been narrating any woman’s life. Or at least all but those of the highest privilege. Some of us have children. Some of us have careers. All of us have jobs. Some of us have aging parents or an ailing spouse or a basement full of mold every July. Some of us have apple trees demanding harvest. Some of us have to find ways to buy apples, not only the money to pay for them, but the time to go shopping and the time to turn those apples into food. All of us have laundry and cooking and dirty bathrooms and floors in need of mopping and the weekly Broken Thing That Must Be Addressed. (In addition to the mold in the basement…) Some of us live alone and have to manage all that without help. But then many of us have partners who only add to the task list. Most of us do not sleep well. Few of us ever have waking time dedicated solely to caring for our own bodies.
Which is so very disorienting in this self-obsessed, me-time culture. We are bombarded with self-care obligations. We should exercise. We should sleep eight hours a night. We should eat fresh food prepared by our own hands (to avoid the poisons laced throughout all that we don’t control from field to table). We should meditate and practice mindfulness and daily gratefulness. We should devise work-life balance. We should develop hobbies and craft our lives. We should go forest bathing and spend hours soaking in herbal baths. We should attend spiritual retreats and go on vision quests. We should take continued education classes just to expand our horizons. We should travel. We should read a book from cover to cover now and again. We should at least find the attention span to finish reading that damn essay that we really want to read and that has been sitting in the desktop to-be-read folder for the last, oh, six months…
Does anyone get to do these things? Does any woman get to do these things…
(Any real woman, that is… not the plastic models they use for advertising…)
Yes, I am a bit bitter… Because it’s not only that do we not get to do these things, most of which I don’t actually want to do, but it’s because we are shamed because we are not doing these things. We are made to feel undisciplined and disordered, stupid even, because we are not doing these things that are so good for us. They say, “You would stop being such a sickly, dour burden on this world if you’d just get off your ass and do…” whatever it is they are trying to sell. And the insidious thing about this messaging is that they are right. Taking the time for self-care would make us healthier and happier… if it were at all possible to do any of it.
In my more cynical moments, I think that they know that it is impossible and that the shame is actually the point. We are meant to feel like losers, ill-equipped to do anything but mindlessly carry on with the daily list of menial obligations. Because consider what would happen if we stopped carrying on! The laundry would not get done. The kids would not be fed. The dog would not get walked. The spouse might actually have to turn off the computer do something real. And that, I think, is what all this shaming is meant to prevent. We have to feel that our time is less important, less worthy, so that we will keep spending it on the endless mountains of care work, without the assistance of those who have loftier visions of life and oh-so-much-more valuable time.
I am fortunate. At least, I live alone and could actually just decide to ignore the dirty laundry and the unmopped floors. (Until I run out of underwear, anyway…) I could stop trying so hard to decarbonize my life which significantly increases my workload relative to other solitary women. I could maybe even afford the occasional yoga class. (Travel and mindfulness retreats and so on are still right out…) But even so, I can’t imagine getting back more than a few hours a week. For one thing, if I could choose to toss some of the to-do list in favor of self-care, the first order of business would not be forest bathing and meditating. I would probably sleep.
But the bigger obstacle to living a healthy life and getting done with all that needs to be done is that there are 45-50 hours in my week that are filled with doing absolutely nothing good for anyone… Minimum. If I counted the time I spend getting ready for work, traveling to and from work, and trying to decompress after work, it’s more like 65-70 hours dedicated to my wage job. That’s 13-14 hours a day, every weekday. If I were to get eight hours of sleep, I would have to shove everything else — from cooking and cleaning and eating dinner to gardening and writing this blog — into two or three hours each weekday. However, because I don’t get eight hours of sleep, because I need more than three hours a day to do all the things that need doing, especially in the growing season, I often crash on Saturdays. Which also counts as time given over to my wage job. Un-waged time, but nonetheless obligatory.
Do you know I’ve never had a vacation as an adult? When the kids were young, we went on a couple trips. But the kids were young, so I was mom on those trips and the trips were focused on the kids. I’ve never been anywhere just for myself, to do nothing but relax. I’ve never even had a week at home without either a fever or a break-neck to-do list. No relaxing… Truthfully, I don’t know if I could. I don’t know that I’m built for relaxation… though it might be nice to try. But then I look at the other women in my life… few of them ever get true down-time either. Even an hour a week to go to a book club or a knitting group is a luxurious use of time that few of us can afford. (Therapy, however…)
Do you know that something substantially south of 20% of the world’s population could actually afford one of those “conventional” vacations to a relaxing and remote destination? More precisely, they couldn’t afford just the plane ticket, never mind the vacation. Actually, less than 5% of the world travels on a plane in any given year, and I suspect most of those are not vacationing. Astonishing to think that the annual budget of the entire travel industry is supported by less than 5% of humanity — though it takes millions of wage hours in labor from all those who never get a vacation. Wouldn’t it be nice to change that… more vacations, less travel…
Well, that’s all pipe dreams. Maybe in some future culture in which the burden of wage work has been lifted off our backs, women will be able to live healthy, fulfilling, serenely meaningful lives. For now, I’d just like the time to be able to get done with the necessary work. I need more than three hours a weekday. I need to have full weekends, not whatever I can manage around recovering from sheer exhaustion. I also need to have a week or two in the autumn to undertake the intensive labor of preserving the harvest — regardless of whether or not I was off work for two weeks earlier in the year with COVID — because there is no point to gardening if you do not then store what you have produced. And these many tasks all take many hours of uninterrupted time. You can’t put the apple butter on hold in the middle of making it. (I can assure you that you would come out of that experience with a completely new definition of “ungodly mess”.) Nor can you put off making it for too long when your trees are heavy with ripe apples. You either make apple butter, or you find some way to compost an enormous pile of stinking, wasted work… I mean, apples.
This is a minimum. This is what I need to do the work that needs to be done to tend to my needs. This is what I need to be alive and mostly well. But really, this is what everyone needs. We all need more than three hours a weekday to tend to our lives. We all need more than two days a week in which to shove all the built-up tasks that can’t be accomplished in a few weeknight hours. We all need to have time to garden or to do whatever we find necessary to pulling our lives back within planetary limits — most of which probably relates to producing food. And we need seasonal cycles, with more time freed from wage work when the demands of life are more intense.
Wage work is the lowest of priorities in the autumn. If I didn’t go into work, absolutely nothing would be adversely affected except my paycheck. (And therefore my ability to pay for this house and this garden, I suppose…) Nothing would die. Nothing would rot. Nothing would be wasted. To the contrary, each day that I don’t do wage work is a day in which there is less waste and rot and death visited on the planet.
But if I don’t get those apples picked and turned into apple butter, then the last four years of growing these trees is all for naught. Not only that, but I will not have apple butter, among other foods in my pantry. Which, for me, means that I will be eating a less nutritious and certainly less flavorful and filling diet in this winter to come. And a few years deeper into biophysical collapse, that’s what it will mean for all of us.
We don’t need a labor day… we don’t need a labor movement. We need a respite from all this useless labor so that we can get the real work done. And still have time to sleep… I mean, live…
In other news…
I was coming home from work last Thursday, fairly knackered and depressed, and I saw this little beauty resting on the roses. It’s not a monarch; it’s a viceroy. But it’s the only one of either kind that I’ve seen in years and one of the very few butterflies I’ve seen this summer that weren’t cabbage whites.
This one tiny creature swept my dour mood clean away. So here it is to brighten your day as well!
©Elizabeth Anker 2024
By My Solitary Hearth 
It is great seeing both the butterfly and your roses 🙂
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