A Brief Note on a Restless Working Sunday
It has been an incredibly hard few months, but in a week my organization will be past its annual conference, and I’ll be able to breathe out again—so today, even though I have a ton of data entry waving cheekily at me from that slice of my life, I’m going to try writing prose more than once every four months.
(And who knows? Maybe in a week or so, it will stick again!)
I received quite a few comments on my last piece, after all: many shocked by how complicated the scenario with my teen ward is, and how much extra pressure that whole mess places on a life in which I am already juggling multiple roles at work.
In my last essay, though, I alluded to one of the factors that softens my approach to “mess” in other lives: the knowledge that I too was a terribly messy person.
(Was? Still am?)
Someone who used to be dear to me, my closest friend for years until they didn’t approve of a choice I’d made and went radio silent, had a habit of responding to my latest lament with the same phrase:
“If you didn’t have bad luck, you’d have no luck at all.”
Which was fair at the time. From their perspective, I was constantly coming to them with tales of woe. I was a venter, and I would talk out all my frustrations in tedious spiels at every opportunity, because I felt trapped in one stressful situation after another. I didn’t like being a venter, but I couldn’t see any other form of agency over my situations. All I could do was articulate how unhappy I was within them.
These days, I still vent, but with hard limits to some of my topics. I can’t vent too much about work because I have responsibilities that venting would make harder; and I can’t vent much about the kid because she’s her own person, a minor under the law. She deserves the opportunity to craft a sense of her own tale.
But when the venting does rear up in a big way, as it has these last few months, it reminds me of a way of being I despised inhabiting, and it gives me a lot more room for grace with others who haven’t found their way out of the mess of their own lives.
In that spirit, then, I’m going to share a wee follow-up from my last post about the messy situation with the kid and her previous family / living arrangement. There’s a bit of a moral lesson in it—but not one I expect everyone to adopt.
Everyone has to find their own way through the chaos of life, you know?
Burying the hatchet
As I noted in my last essay, the kid desperately wanted me to heal the rift between myself and the other family, because it was causing her great pain to feel caught between two worlds while she lives with me and works among them. And after she told me the extent to which she was lying to cover up said rift, I knew that for her moral development I had to mend fences, so she would not be driven to dishonesty.
For this reason, I invited the family over for lunch last Sunday. Now, I was still very busy that day, trying to get data entry wrapped up even while the meal was in the oven, but I did try my best to put together a nice Sunday spread and make the home inviting for guests. I had also invited over a couple of my friends, mostly for a bit of strength and sanity while breaking bread with people I felt had abused my kindness just a few months prior—so I was almost feeling “human” again, despite the work.
Everything seemed to be going swimmingly with prep, too, until the kid realized that I had two of my own friends coming over. In that moment, she shut down completely, morose in her room. And I was surprised, because I’d mentioned my guests a few times, but language barriers and a child’s convictions can be hard to overcome; for her, this was the first she’d heard of their impending presence, and she was crushed.
When I sat down to talk to her about this change in attitude, she admitted that she had been hoping it would be “just family”, at which point I realized the true extent to which she was longing for a situation in which everyone she considered family could just be happy in a room together. She had built up this lunch far more than I had imagined, as an opportunity to feel safe and loved in the company of only loved ones.
And my heart broke at having missed the obvious myself. This kid pretends to be an adult so often that sometimes, when her deeply wounded child-self shows up instead, it throws me for a loop. Thankfully, my friends are dear and responsible people, so when they arrived well ahead of the kid’s very late other family, they understood her reaction and insisted on leaving, slipping out with their portions of lunch packed up.
The kid then returned to her good cheer, singing as she prepped for the visit of that other family. She also noticed that I was still upset—because I had been trying to put together this stressful-for-me lunch around so much pressure at my job, and yet it felt like nothing I did was good enough; I still kept getting everything wrong.
When she asked me about my clear shift in mood, though, we were able to have a calm conversation about how I was feeling, and later that evening I would reiterate to her that the two biggest wins of the day, for me, were a) her feeling comfortable telling me when something was upsetting her, and b) her feeling comfortable asking me if I was upset. These were signs of terrific progress for her emotional intelligence, even if they had been hard-won in the middle of a stressful lead-up to our lunch.
As for the meeting itself:
When the family finally arrived, two hours after they’d said they would, I still had difficulty talking to the older adults at first, but there was a baby celebrating her sixth-month anniversary with us that day, and she made easy for us to redirect the conversation for most of the event. I have always been excellent with kippers, and this was no exception—though even here, watching the grandma’s interactions with the baby only deepened my private share of frustration with this mother-figure in the kid’s life. (One does not yell at or swat a six-month-old for involuntary actions! Ugh.)
The baby’s parents are 19 and 24, though, and as lunch continued, I became acutely aware of the precarity in which they were living. They were trying to save for a trip back to Venezuela, so the baby could meet more of its family and so they could gather more necessities for future thriving, but they lived in a room without so much as a hot plate—meaning all their food came from costly buys on the street. I was visibly stunned to be hearing about this for the first time, and explained to the others that my incredulity over the kid not telling me sooner came down to a lesson I’ve been trying to drive home for months: the power of prevention. The toll of poverty often cascades on the back of small hurdles like this missing hot plate, and I’ve been trying to get the kid to understand the importance of nipping big problems in the bud.
The turn: work vs. neighbourly assistance
So, I gave them money for a hot plate.
And… that’s when the kid got a bit too excited and went an extra step, by telling the baby’s father about all the tasks that needed doing around the apartment. These were tasks I had been hoping to get a professional to do, since I don’t have time right now for the store trips necessary for minor items for repair—a new door handle, runners for the shower, some paint jobs, and some related wall and trim work.
But the kid insisted that the baby’s father could do them instead, and he did seem very keen. I told him I’d make a to-do list and we’d set a price for five days of labour on top of the required purchases. At first he deflected on payment, insisting that we could work out that part later, but later agreed to having the project plotted out in full first.
The kid also grandly insisted, after the family had left, that this young man would only accept payment after the whole job was done—to which I shook my head and said that I would pay him daily on completion of his labour, so that there were no lingering debts between us. She and I then talked about market rates and I privately decided to pay him closer to the highest end no matter what, because babies are expensive, and I knew I was ultimately doing this as a favour more than anything else.
This arrangement worked for the first two days. On the first, he went around town gathering the materials we needed. On the second, he got to work on initial paint jobs and the door handle replacement. This young fellow, like many around these parts, had not finished high school because of the family’s needs to help with subsistence-level work on the street, and so he told me with great pride on Day 2 about how he’d learned in the course of the work how to fix his very first handle.
I saw in that attitude a young person whose opportunities in life had been diminished, but not his intelligence or curiosity. If he hadn’t been displaced by economic hardship in Venezuela, and if he hadn’t been on the street supporting his parents, what might he have accomplished through a regular school program or apprenticeship?
What might he still, down the line, after the chaos of young fatherhood?
I asked him how the hot plate was faring, and he told me “Great!”… they were putting plates on it to warm up leftover street food. I did a double-take: Did they have no pots or pans? No, apparently they did not. That was next on the list of items to save up for, once everyday expenses were addressed. So, I sent him home with the day’s earnings plus money for a pot—which the baby’s mother confirmed the next day had been acquired. Finally they could start cooking from cheaper staples at home, which would have the longterm impact of reducing everyday costs of living.
The trouble started on Day 3, though, when the young man came to work unannounced after taking a day off due to illness, and left after just a few coats of paint to help his parents with other labours on the street. I’d made no change to my daily payment plan, though, for a reason that will become clear in a moment.
Yesterday, he said he was on his way for Day 4, but I told him that as per our original plan I couldn’t receive him on the weekend; our original plan would have him working again on Monday.
He told me that was fine, but he desperately needed to cover some costs for the baby, and could I lend him the money from that future day’s labour?
And that’s when I knew I would have to do what I had suspected from the start, when the kid so eagerly offered him up to do chores around the house last Sunday.
The lesson from Matthew, humanist-style
When the kid came home from school yesterday, I had lunch waiting for her and also my text exchange with the young man. In it, she could see how he’d asked for an advance against next week’s work, even though I’d already paid him much more than many would for his labour every day he showed up this week. Around it, I told her about the extra money I’d also given him for a pot to go with his hot plate.
In that chat, she could also see that I had sent him money for the next two days of labour, full stop, in response to his request for a partial advance—at which point, she looked at me in confusion. He hadn’t done the work yet. Why was I giving him money?
I explained that I was sending this along to wrap up our interaction as smoothly and as simply as possible; he didn’t need to come by now, except to finish items she wanted done for her room and bathroom. My professional business with him was concluded, without him “losing out”, because I had realized this week that he wasn’t able to be a professional right now—even if I do think he might have the aptitude for it some day.
Right now, he was coming to me as a young dad desperately trying to make pre-trip money for his family ASAP. For him, this was all just part of a frantic scramble to get by, and I don’t have the time/spoons to help him gain the kind of discipline that tends to emerge from job training under better—calmer—life circumstances.
Conversely, as I explained to the kid, if I had chosen a professional from the start, I would have been able to set a proper hourly rate, and he would have been able to do his work responsibly within those parameters. But I didn’t blame the young dad for not being able to snap into the role of a professional overnight; as I said to this kid, this is why we generally avoid mixing contracted labour with help for our community.
Then I brought out Matthew 20:1-16, to explain all of this in a language that I figured would be easier for her. She hasn’t actually spent much time with the Bible itself—hers is more of a “street” Catholicism with blended Yoruban-Coastal pantheon culture—so at first I had her read the Parable of the Vineyard Workers on her own.
I then asked what she thought the lesson of that story was, and she shuddered.
“I don’t agree with it,” she said. “They did less work, so why should they get paid the same as the people who worked all day?”
“That’s a very common reaction in our world,” I said. Then I asked if she knew what a parable was, or an allegory. She said she only had a loose idea, so I explained: Sometimes we tell stories that are about something more abstract than what we see on the page, or about topics too painful for us to talk about directly. Instead of trying to say plainly what we mean, we use other contexts to make sense of what is difficult.
I then walked her through three different readings of this parable.
First, I told her about the core evangelical meaning: the idea that just because someone comes to faith later in life doesn’t make them less worthy of salvation. We then agreed to put that meaning aside, because she knows I’m an atheist, so that’s not my reading, and it’s definitely not a relevant reading for this conversation.
I then told her about the imperialist/capitalist reading of this story: the idea that lowly workers should shut up and accept what they are given without judging fellow workers for being given equal pay for less work—because the money isn’t theirs in the first place, and since they aren’t the landowners, they don’t get to make the rules. They should be grateful they’re given anything at all, really—and if they have a problem with that, they should just go start their own vineyards instead.
And we had a good rueful chuckle over this interpretation, which is unfortunately the preferred reading of many a conservative Christian these days. That killer line, Matthew 20:15, “Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money?”, is the canonical bane of many a cruel form of religious practice.
I then hazarded my reading of this story—the most humanist way of reading this tale, to my mind:
Imagine that the owner of the vineyard knows that he is living in an unjust world, and that he is surrounded by more people than he can ever hope to employ himself, to defray the weight of so much systemic inequality. Even with that lousy language in Mattthew 20:15, you get a sense of this mentality from how often he goes back to the market, checking again and again on all the others still waiting there for work.
This owner also fully understands that the fate of every family behind the men lining up will ultimately be decided not by merit, but mere flukes of employment opportunity.
And so he gives work where he can give work, but he also tries to help the people to whom he can’t give the same share of work, because there just isn’t enough work to go around. Is this a perfect solution? No, it isn’t—because he can’t fix the whole system all on his own. But he is making an effort, imperfect though it might be, where he can.
The problem is that this same unjust system pits workers against one another, causing them to see fellow workers as the problem because they’ve all been trained to believe that one must “earn” the right to feed their family; and that if there isn’t enough work to go around, well, too bad for anyone not chosen to do what little work exists.
And to my great delight, as I talked about Matthew 20 in this way, my choices with the young man started to make a lot more sense to the kid. There was a moment when I could see it in her eyes—the relevance “clicked”. I then explained that, from the outset of her offer of this young man for household chores, I had set a budget not around the essential completion of tasks, but around what I could spare to help his family.
“Like you did in February?”
“Like I did in February.”
Because back in February there was a formula shortage at the hospital helping the mum (who cannot breastfeed), and this family was thrown into a frenzy of looking for formula daily so their baby could live. But how can one ever hope to advance when driven to that kind of desperate subsistence labour all the time?
So I paid for a month of baby formula—enough to last until the hospital program renewed its supplies—and that little nudge gave these kids a chance to focus on making money for other needs instead.
Back then, I had driven home for the kid that I was helping this other family out of a sense of “prevention”—the same as when I helped her past parental figures with a stove and washing machine last fall, to cut down on their own burdensome costs.
This time, though, the lesson was a little different, because the whole situation had started when the kid eagerly put this young man forward to do housework for coin—mixing labour and community care in a way I know all too well can become messy.
This time, then, I also got to share an important lesson about how we provide help for those in need—because sometimes what people need is work… but not always.
By the end of our conversation, the kid thus understood a) why I had initially tried the professional path with this young man, but also b) why I had wrapped up my professional dealings with him as quickly as I had. She further understood why I would be hiring a professional to help with the bigger tasks that need doing next—but, hilariously, she also folded her arms over her chest at the end and declared:
“Well, I’m still getting him to finish painting my room and bathroom, because he’s already got the money for it, so I’m not just letting him do nothing!”
—which is perfectly fine. She can work out that part with him at her leisure, and outside of any further paid relationship.
The important part, for me, is that she understood I wasn’t upset with this young man for not being able to become a professional overnight. He has been living for too long rushing haphazardly from crisis to crisis—and yet, that doesn’t mean that he and his “messy” family are any less worthy of the means to survive.
It just means that how we show up for one another will always differ case by case.
The takeaway
These last few months, I’ve been burning myself out in a big way, while trying to cover for huge gaps in our organization and hopefully put us in a better position for the long term. And yes, my work situation will change soon, when I have more agency to set our workflow from the jump—but for now, whenever I encounter people who are also scrambling in their own frenzied way from disaster to disaster, I find myself reflecting more on the toxic mentality behind it all.
Long before I was paid for the work I’m doing now, I was still throwing myself headlong into my organization, in part because I too grew up with the mindset that one needs to perform busy-ness and “worthiness” to earn a chance at a better life. Just work a little harder, study a little longer, perform how desperate you are for a chance to “do right”, and then surely the universe will see your efforts and reward you for them.
And because I am still living in deep precarity—more so now, perhaps, since I have a teen ward under my protection these days—my habit of throwing myself into overwork remains, along with that nasty venting impulse I’ve carried since my youth.
So I can’t claim to be much less messy now than I was for most of my life.
Indeed, I often feel tremendously sad when I think about all the people my chaos has touched over the years, and all the people who went out of their way to try to help this drowning person during eras in which I simply wasn’t ready to be “saved”.
Am I doing enough to reward their care for me? Am I atoning sufficiently for all the problems I brought to the thresholds of so many other lives for so long?
(The toxic mentality of needing to prove deservedness lingers, as you can tell.)
But if I’ve learned anything useful from my staggering number of character flaws, it’s certainly how to show more empathy for others embroiled in their own.
Can I ever really help others grow out of their own misconceptions of essential human “worthiness” when I still struggle with them myself?
I don’t know—I really don’t, and maybe the answer is “I cannot”.
But imperfect as my path is, I’ll keep going back to market, and I’ll try.
Be well, be kind, and seek justice where you are.
ML
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