I have been counting it.
Not obsessively, not as score-keeping, but as witness, as the plain accounting of a woman who is finally old enough and rested enough and far enough from the middle of it to look back at the full shape of what she did and call it what it was. Labour. All of it. The visible kind and the invisible kind and the kind that was invisible precisely because it was performed so well that no one knew it was being performed, that it looked like simply the way things were rather than the daily result of someone’s effort and attention and expenditure of herself.
The school lunches for twelve years.
I have done this calculation. Not to present to anyone. Just to know. Twelve years, roughly two hundred and twenty school days a year, two children, not always elaborate, not always what they wanted, but made, thought about, put in the bag, the thinking-about being its own form of labour, the invisible management of preferences and nutrition and what was available and what would actually be eaten rather than traded or left at the bottom of the bag, that specific calibration that no one sees but that requires a running database of two small people’s needs and tastes that is updated daily without ceremony.
The emotional accounting of a family.
The tracking of who is okay and who is not and who needs what kind of attention and who is approaching a threshold and who needs to be left alone to manage and who needs to be gently asked about the thing they have not mentioned but that is in the room, which I could feel because I was always tracking, always with some portion of my attention on the temperature of the people I love, never fully off duty from the work of knowing how everyone was.
I am putting that work down now. Some of it. The portions that were never mine to carry.
I am keeping the love. I am releasing the surveillance. The children are adults and adults get to have their own interior lives without their mother monitoring the temperature. I am learning the difference between paying attention because I love them and paying attention because I am afraid of missing something, and I am trying to do more of the first and let go of the second.
The labour was real. I am naming it. I am not waiting for anyone else to name it. I name it myself and I put it in the record and that is enough. The naming is enough.
