working girl

I come from women who carry the load and pretend that the weight doesn’t bear. They came from women who stayed the course while denying the cost. Theirs came from women, too. Mine then is an inheritance borne of labors picked up and passed on. Mine will always be the work of putting the too much back down. My spirit lives for moments like these, when the calm after a storm carries memories of a different kind of being. Sometimes, the work is remembering the lessons we keep living until we learn them all the way to the bone.

Systems and supremacies – stories, too – are wrapped up in assumptions we make about people, productivity, and profit. It is my truth that there are things more valuable than labor. It is also my truth that some things are not worth the work. How then do we measure the cost of price and profit, of meaning and metric, of labors of love? It is sobering when the seeming ease of a solo turn erases not just our own labor, but the work through which which we grow one another into the kind of people who notice the weight of any lift. On the other side of a long push, I wake up and wonder: When will I outgrow this place, where the giving and the taking are so far apart? It was once my truth that to hold so much and so many so fully would be a gift that multiplies and returns. These days, I look for myself elsewhere. A working girl, perhaps, but so much more. May the gift of less than always be more than just enough.

March 19, 2021