I have been thinking about the line of us.
My mother and her mother and the woman before her whose name I do not know because the names did not always make it forward, because the women who carried the line often did not carry their own names into the official record, because the record was not for them, the record was for other things, and the women were part of the background of the record, the unseen labour in the footnotes.
None of them rested. That is the thing I keep coming back to.
Not as accusation. Not as grief exactly, though it is grief, it is grief in the slow and diffuse way that structural truths become grief when you finally let yourself look at them directly. None of them had thirty days. None of them had even ten. They had the minutes they carved out in the margins of the work, the coffee going cold at the window, the garden before anyone else was awake, the brief and unremarkable pauses between the labour that no one was tracking because no one was supposed to know the labour was that much.
I rest for them too. I need to say that.
I know it is not a transaction. I know that my rest does not retroactively give them theirs, that the logic of inheritance does not work that way, that I cannot pay a debt forward or backward through time with an act that they cannot receive. I know all of that. I am saying it anyway. When I sit at the edge of the sea and I am still and I am not producing anything and no one needs anything from my body for these thirty minutes, I am doing it with an awareness that this was not available to the women who made me.
And maybe what I am passing forward is different.
Maybe what I am passing to my daughter and her daughter if she has one is this: a woman who rested. A woman who said out loud that she needed it and took it without waiting for permission and did not apologize. A woman in the line who modelled that a body is not a tool and a life is not a ledger and rest is not something you earn by suffering enough first.
The line continues. I am in it. I am trying to bend it, slightly, in the direction of dignity.
I think that is enough to try for. I think that is the whole thing.
