Work

If there are certain “bad” words in any given family

quit

dumb

weird

no

 there are as many “good” ones—words intentionally or unintentionally imbued with something sure to soothe, or at least to impress, the entire group who share a name or a history. For my family those words were

food

football, and

WORK.

There were general encouragements in my house about always trying your best just like you might hear in most any home, but with the Fishers there was something deeper than that, something truer than pious poster platitudes. Hard work seemed to be the honest rhythm of the bodies around me. If anyone in my family groaned about going to their jobs when I was growing up, I can honestly say I have no memory of it. My mother was a licensed vocational nurse for every old-age facility in town at one point or another (and often all of them at once). There were years when she worked days at Camlu Care Center, evenings at Crestview Nursing Center, and then pick up weekend shifts at Park Place Manor as our family had need. When I was nine or ten, she got hired at a local rehabilitation hospital and in those years she was able to do less driving all around town but still described her weeks according to the number of double shifts she would be performing—a schedule something like this:

Sunday: Double (7am-11pm)

Monday: Off *

Tuesday: Double (7am-11pm)

Wednesday: Single (7am-3pm)

Thursday: Single (7am-3pm)

Friday: Double (3pm-7am)

Saturday: Single (3pm-11pm)

And lest you think hers was a type of nursing primarily characterized by taking vitals and handing over medications, it was not. It was a far more visceral vocation, primarily with older adults that involved vein-finding, vomit-cleaning, transporting bare bodies out of diapers and into showers. In short it was the manifestation of my own deepest ring of hell’s most consuming fires. I respected my mother’s empathy for some of the world’s oft-abandoned people, though, and even more, I respected her ability to, a la, rihanna,

work, work, work, work, work.

My middle brother and sister carried on the medical tradition from my mom’s side of the family. My sister is a respiratory therapist—literally in charge of keeping people breathing. My brother is a surgical tech, a role in which he has been the actual physical holder of human hearts. He is the only one in the family who knows what cancer looks like inside an otherwise unremarkable body. My oldest brother and my father work mostly in construction—they are the kind of laborers who want to move their bodies. While I sit stationarily at my desk for hours at a time, they are lifting and crushing and spraying things, feeling the exertion in each limb as they make roads and ways for all of us to get to where we are each going.

None of us Fishers do the exact same job, but when we get together on Sundays, I’ve noticed, it’s like we are in a little fraternity—the hard workers club. We tell tales, eyes-wide, about curious colleagues—the corner cutting, the calling in sick, the interpersonal foibles that leave us scratching our sweaty, if self-satisfied brows. We are gesticulating and stomping, holding our stomachs like cartoon characters so wild are our laughs at the thought of sloth. We’d like to be more humble, we really would, but we all come with such long receipts of our own professional prowesses. We calm down after a while when the game comes on—just to get riled up all over again when the first ball makes its way down the field.

I consciously uncoupled with football a few years back. My friend Will did it at the same time. We hated ourselves for staying tied to a system that has created and perpetuated so much and so many varieties of violence. We also understood that finding ourselves battling rage hangovers on Monday mornings because “our team” had lost the day before was honestly starting to feel a bit unbecoming as we approached mid-life. We dragged our feet for several years, always threatening to bow out the next season, only to find ourselves reanimated each August by the memories of middle-school victories, now giving birth to fresh hope for one more trip, trophy, and ring. And, to this day, when I am back at home with my family and the game comes on, even if it isn’t our team and even if I’m only kind of catching it out of the corner of my eye, I feel my blood, bubbling, buzzing, boiling in no time at all.

I remember when I first became a social worker, several colleagues quivered to think that I engaged with such an easily condemnable sport. How can you do it, they asked. What could you possibly like about it?  I told them the truth. I told them that to me, football was a ritual and a metaphor not unlike church—not unlike communion. It was a weekly acknowledgment that there are forces working against me—us—my team (whoever that may be in any given year). Some weeks we try everything we have at our disposal and still come up empty. There are, in fact, entire seasons when we are too weak, too undisciplined, too unskilled to put up much, if any, fight. Occasionally, we get wins that weren’t really earned or that were too easy to feel satisfying, but even more infrequently, on some rare but glorious weeks, all of our analysis, and practice, and wearing the same lucky jerseys pay off, and we are triumphant over our enemies, real and perceived.

I think some people don’t like football because it is violent or because they are more musically inclined. Some people don’t like it because their dad tried to make them or because they are from a country where soccer is the real futbol. I get it. Not everyone is a Fisher. But I also think some people don’t like football for the same reason they don’t like religion—because they have never really needed a metaphor in this life. For them, life has mostly been a chain of unmitigated wins and they have been led to believe it was all their own doing. They don’t really connect to the notion that an entire system of enemies has been plotting ways to keep them down because it hasn’t. And I know this might seem to be a weird take because there are plenty of exceedingly privileged people who love the game, but I just know that there has to be some reason my Black grandmother, and mother, and aunties connect to the sport so deeply, and this is my suspicion.

If I had been born a boy, I imagine I would have played football whether I really wanted to or not, but I am a girl, so instead, I got to be a reader, a writer, and a worker instead. I love to work-- to feel my brain and my body get heavier with each passing hour, to know that I am fighting against the forces that would have me reach for anxiety, ambivalence, or anger about the state of the world and my life, and instead in an act of counterintuitive faith to choose right action. With my work I have asserted my will in the world, and to me, that feels good and right and beautiful.

It would be wrong to write about work without writing about privilege though. I love my work because I was created, whether by God or biology, or circumstance, to stand in front of rooms telling people what I have learned and to encourage them to resist evil in the forms of ignorance, ineptitude, and worse, apathy. That said too much work, unexamined work, unpaid work can be a system of violence as cruel and life-threatening as any other that requires our divestment. 

It seems unbelievable to me that I was once so easily and comprehensively duped by racist and capitalist mandates to objectify my own body for others' profit, to consider it more like a hammer than a home.

But I was,

and I did,

and, at times, I still do.

I used to time the drive between one work campus and another and clock the minutes lost as a debt owed and in need of repayment. If a colleague dropped by office or I took ten minutes to set up a dental appointment, I took note so that I could avoid cheating the system. This is what happens when you get your worth from the number of hours you can prove you were on the clock. In the second half of life, the undoing half, I am trying to elevate work in my life that I once thought trite (unmeasurable, unpaid, and thus unimportant), housework, body-work, therapy—things like that.

I realized a few years back that I am the kind of woman who only accomplishes what I give myself credit for having accomplished, so I began adding plant watering and walking, and lunch with friends to my daily to-do checklists. This practice reminds me that I value being a human more than I value being a machine. It sounds simple, but for me, it is quite challenging. It might just mean that I never make it to the career Superbowl or the social work hall of fame. It might mean that I never publish a book or get invited to discuss it with Seth Meyers on Late Night, and that bums me out because I still work very hard and very passionately to put up a fight against the forces of evil at work in the world around me.

I am beginning to understand, though, that the real reward for real work is the simple and profound joy of having made a little something in and of this life, whether progress, process, or product, and knowing that even with all that didn’t go as planned, nothing is ever wasted. We will come back and make something from the scraps together next week, those of us brave and uncool enough to keep at it.

And then again, the week after that.