The End: Labor to Be

by Lucy S.

Implied in the title of this blog is the act of giving birth. I was thinking about this in literal and metaphorical terms when I started this back in January.

I was trying to find ways to articulate the many conflicted feelings I have about the work of bearing children – pregnancy, birth, caring for them year after year – with that work both devalued in terms of the person doing it deserving material compensation from her society (U.S. and many others), and hyper-sanctified as being above such concerns.

We’re bombarded with a multitude of stereotypes about ‘good’ mothers and ‘bad’ mothers.  (And there are mothers who hurt their children badly. But as umpteen feminists have pointed out so many times, there is not this kind of intense focus on fathers.) What is a ‘good’ mother, anyway? What is a ‘good’ parent – whatever their gender or sexuality?  What is a ‘good’ caregiver in other scenarios – a ‘good’ teacher, infant caregiver, or caregiver for someone differently-abled who needs extra assistance (for various reasons)? 

What is a ‘good’ person?

That last question brings me to the more metaphorical implication of the blog’s title, alluding rather obviously to the act of giving birth to ourselves as individuals and as groups (small, large, and massive).  As clichéd as the metaphor is, so many of us are seduced by the idea over and over throughout our lives.  I remember when I last lived in California embarking on a 500 day journey – one I constructed in my journal, which would find me somehow transformed by the end into someone better. I had specific changes in mind, and some of them worked out, while many did not.  But I don’t think health and love (of our self, of each other, of the myriad creatures and elements that surround and make up our particular lived existence on this planet) come from these end-oriented constructed interpretations of our existence. 

We’re all on our way to becoming older, and then dead – but then we get into the whole question of our final ‘end’ and whether that is some kind of eternal life – as reward or punishment or reunification into nirvana – or whether it is ceasing to exist as any kind of sentient being.  I don’t want to wade into that debate. I just know that there is never going to be another July 27, 2013 morning, in which the kids, our own or those of others, and everyone we know, are precisely these ages, and this exact blend of us and others and events exist in these exact relationships with one another.

Someone sent me an email today saying that she bet it feels good to be done with school.  I know she means well. But being ‘done’ doesn’t feel good, other than the relief that I didn’t fail to finish, which is itself embedded in the construction of learning as various ends to check off rather than as fluid and intrinsically meaningful. The statement from my master’s adviser that I was most profoundly thankful for was when he said I’m always welcome to sit in as a member of a class he’s teaching if I’m still in this area. I will take him up on that, I think. I didn’t go to school in order to get to something else. Yes, I LOVE that I will actually be able to finally teach college classes, but what I want is to be a teacher and learner all my life. And to be a writer, a painter (me and my palette knife and oil paints, just for the love of it), a food grower and maker and eater, and a multitude of other actions made into nouns.  I’m in no rush to be done with processes that are to me life itself.

To think that other way would destroy my ability to so utterly be in these days and the later days of this year, when I will teach a college class. Should I be glad for that fall semester to hurry and be over as well? Why would I want any of these experiences and efforts to be over? So that I could hurry and get to – what?

Yet I’ve struggled with so many anxieties since I went back to school in 2009 and even more in graduate school.  And I struggled with them again while writing the syllabus to try for the teaching job, and while preparing to guest-teach at a friend’s class (which went well – I LOVED it), and even in connection to the extended union organizers’ training I went to recently. This morning, I was thinking that maybe the problem is trying to not feel the anxiety, wanting it to be over, struggling against it, instead of just living it. Why is it wrong if I have a million doubts about myself and others, and worry that people won’t like me, and question what some people are insisting on and question myself for questioning them (out loud or in my head)? I yearn for steadiness, it’s true, but maybe the steadiness is in being all I am at any given moment.

I don’t labor to finally bring myself into existence, and no one labors to later bring their kids into existence in all the years after that literal birth. (Even in giving birth, fighting the inevitable pain tends to cause more and prolonged pain.) We are existing right now. And laboring to bring some better society into existence some other time keeps us from enacting it now.

I think we labor as life itself, and it is the blockage of that labor-as-living which robs us and others of part of our full human experience. I'm thinking that this is what one of my friend has meant when he’s told me so many times that writing is a process, that I don’t have to view everything I write as a perfect end-point (which it never is, while imagining it that way has contributed to my more debilitating anxiety too many times). I am also thinking that this is the meaning of the story of the man who weaves his song into his baskets and refuses to mass produce them, the story my friend Amir wrote about. (http://labor2beardown.blogspot.com/2013/02/assembly-line-logic-amir-hussain.html  So much in this society pushes us to be alienated from our own labor, and when so many are economically blackmailed into working in jobs we’d never work in otherwise, how can we not be alienated from that labor?  But the labors that spring from our own desire to create and to take care of ourselves and each other are the ones that are bound to our essence.