I find myself wanting to refer to Nicole as my niece. She's my cousin Christina's daughter, and they lived with me and my oldest (when he was an infant) when Nicole was little. Does our Standard American English's inability to adequately name our relationships reflect something lacking in what is handed down to us from on high in our society? "My cousin's daughter" utterly fails as a description for these familial relationships, as do so many of our words attached to "friend." "Good friend" or "best friend" or "close friend" - how can these speak for the nature of particular friendships that cannot be contained in these categorizations?
Nicole called this morning. I wrote about her in this recent post. http://labor2beardown.blogspot.com/2013/07/cruelties-of-positive-thinking.html
In July, she'd gotten a job in the bakery department of a major corporate grocery store in California. I saw her profile photo sometimes change to one of cupcakes with flowers she'd made. Other photos of her newly learned skills put into action were posted. The job paid $10 per hour.
She calls this morning and asks how I am. "Good! How about you?" I answer, still feeling great from yesterday's long conversation with the professor who helps the adjuncts where I will be teaching (a generous, helpful, and thoroughly delightful conversation). "Okay...." she says - on a down slope. "I lost my job yesterday."
The boss told her she wasn't a "team player" and that she's lazy. Nicole is necessarily in defense mode. She says she asked a coworker if that was how she saw her, and the coworker said not at all, that she's just in the same boat as all of them, trying to deal with a lot of stuff at one time. Nicole says she missed a shift last week because she didn't read the schedule right (they change the working hours from week to week), and that she told them, "I am SO SORRY. I'm really, really sorry. I promise you this will never happen again." She says that the main baker doesn't wash his board, that it gets to be "pretty disgusting" with eggs having been on it, staying unwashed for batch after batch of different mixes. She says she went in one day and scoured everything. Another couple of days, she cleaned and organized the department's freezer, which was also "disgusting" and "just a mess." At other times, the baker told her and other assistant bakers to wash his utensils and boards, and she told him that he needs to wash his own stuff, just like they have to wash their own stuff. These are the pieces of the picture she can convey in a 50 minute phone call. They are inevitably not enough for me to fully understand the situation.
Here's how I will NOT respond. I will not in any way imply that maybe she did something wrong, that maybe she just needs to learn to follow orders better, to suck it up, to kiss ass with a peppy smile at all times, to never question the authority of the layers of people who get to tell other people what to do. This may be seen by some as just doing what you have to do - a necessary survival strategy in a highly unequal society - but there's enough of that advice going around already. I don't need to add my voice to everyone else who, in their dubious wisdom, get to lecture her and talk to others with such confidence, about "the problem with Nicole." The dominant logic of the system is, if you're getting screwed over - if your life is not a shining "success' - then it's your own fault. This "kick 'em when they're down" mentality makes me sick.
At the same time, I'm painfully aware of my inability to provide sufficient comfort. I say something along these lines: "You know, if you and I and some other people were cooking together, and I tried to order you to clean my stuff, you could respond the way you did, and I would have no power over you in that way. I could argue the point with you, and if we had a bakery we owned together, maybe we'd all have to sit down and hash out issues in a circle, but we'd be doing that as equals. But these situations in these jobs are power relations. What they mean by 'team player' isn't at all someone who can work as an equal with others. It's someone who is always subservient and does everything they're told without daring to question anything."
We talk longer about that, and then she changes her tone and says, "It's fine, anyway. I have a talent, and I'm just wasting it there. I told them thanks for the training and I'm glad I got a chance to know you guys, and now I'm gonna find a way to really use my talent, because I LOVE baking. It's a passion of mine." My eyes water, and I say, "What if you go talk to some independent bakeries and see if anyone would hire you?" She says, "You mean as an apprentice? Yeah, I'm gonna try to do that today." I imagine her venturing out, and the simple metaphor of her monumentally uphill struggle makes me see her walking up literal hills, as if this were San Francisco, in and out of shops, to try to sell bakeries on how awesome it would be to hire her.
Later, she talks about trying to get on Trader Joe's because she's heard they're really nice to work for. "Yeah, maybe that would be good," I respond with a smiling voice. What is there to say? My answers are anemic.
I tell her that after I talked with her recently, I was thinking about how her grandmother and her mom both left physically abusive spouses and raised kids on their own for some years, and how the main thing that enabled them to do so was that their jobs paid enough. I say it's terrible how lousy these jobs pay, that it's impossible to try to live on $10 an hour now, especially in the more expensive parts of the country (which all still rely on the masses of poorly paid workers to serve the more affluent). She agrees.
This, of course, doesn't solve the problem at hand. If she can't get and keep a job that pays enough to live on and rent a basic apartment, she can't get her kids back. The system particularly tortures those who continue to love the people they love - kids, parents, siblings, friends, nephews, nieces... Just don't feel anything for anyone in particular - just make yourself into a spiked shell - and you'll fare a little better under capitalism's terms. But who can do it? And what kind of victory or even survival is it? As I am always saying, there are no good surrender terms here - but there aren't very good terms for battling on, either, especially as the isolated individuals we too often are forced to be.
Then Nicole tells me she had an awesome birthday week, before this happened, and that she even got to meet her sister. She has a 26 year old sister with a 9 year old daughter, both of whom she'd never met. This is her dad's daughter. She also has a 26 year old sister who she grew up with who is also her dad's (and mom's) daughter. Her dad had an affair with a woman he worked with, but he broke it off before the baby was born and never had anything to do with this daughter. Nicole says that she and her newly-found sister were happy to meet.
Nicole told her dad that she met her sister. She says that's when he went off on her. "He said it figures I'd go and do something like this, that I've always been like that, always having to create drama. He told me I'm a brat, and fuck you, and he doesn't want anything to do with me again."
As always my response is inadequate, or maybe any response is, because what I want to do in that moment is go beat the shit out of him, the way he beat the shit out of Nicole and her mom and sister and his later partners and other kids (the ones he chose to know). I think of his oozingly sweet manner which always held in it the iron insistence that he was right about everything, all the time, and held darker stuff bound to his smug self-centeredness. I remember some of my old disagreements with him.
I tell her that I don't understand how any parent can say such shitty things to their kid. She says she told him, "You're gonna end up alone. You've already lost one daughter, and now you're gonna lose another." She says he's always blamed everyone else for everything. I say that people like that are their own worst enemy. She says that she can't help it, that it still hurts, that he's still her dad. I say, yeah, I can imagine. She says she has so many things that happened in her head, and she doesn't know how to get rid of them. She says she remembers one time going with her sister to visit him (after he'd remarried), and that the two girls were playing around at the table, and he said, "You see those crystal candle holders on the table? I'm gonna knock you upside the head with one of them if you don't stop." It was never safe to take his threats as idle.
She says that she and her sister (the one she grew up with) have talked about how they see parts of their dad in themselves - how they have tempers - and how they hate this in themselves. Again, I feel the devastation in this and want so badly to make everything right somehow, and there is no way to do it. I can only be on her side.
She says she called her aunt - her father's sister - and told her what her dad said, and what her stepmom said about it (her dad's ex, who Nicole is still close to). Her aunt says, "You see, Nicole, that's your typical pattern. Your dad says something, and you have to tell others about it. You can't just keep it to yourself." I say, "Why is it all about him? And why should you have to keep it to yourself - so that he doesn't look bad? Why shouldn't you have the right to talk to some people about it if you're hurting?" I detest the impulse some people have to keep other people's truly vicious behavior secret. Shout if from the rooftops, I say - shame these assholes. I'm on the side of the people they continually hurt.
Nicole cries a little during the call, not much, just a little. She says, "God must think I can really handle a lot. I mean, I feel so overwhelmed. I wish I could just catch a break for a while. Just for a year. That'd be good."
Why can't I manage to come up with an answer of some kind? I do answer, but these words never amount to real answers.
Then, I hear the smile in her voice when she says she went out last night, that she decided she needed to have some fun. A guy she knows was having a birthday party for his wife, who is a cancer survivor, and she went by herself. She danced a lot - and some of it was swing dancing. She says she had a wonderful dance partner who was "a lovely older gentleman" for a lot of the dances, a man in his 80s, she says. I smile, laugh, and say, "That's awesome." She says she tells the birthday lady, "I"m happy you're here with us!" and that her aunt and her mom are breast cancer survivors.
We say some other things, and she asks more about how I'm doing. She tells me, again, how inspired she is by me going back to school and doing what I've done.
We wind down and tell each other that we hope the other one has a good week.
***
Looking back at this post's title, I want to make it alternate ad infinitum.... "It's Economic - and So Much More - and It's Economic - and So Much More - and It's....
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