The Work You Do: The Person You Are
This article first appeared in the Minden Times on January 4, 2023.
Toni Morrison, that world-shaking author who died in 2019 at age 88, wrote a short article in the New Yorker in 2017 that described her first job as a teenager cleaning house for a rich white lady. It was a crap job, but she valued it because she gave half her wages to her mother who used it for essential household expenses. ‘The pleasure of being necessary to my parents’, she says, ‘was profound.’ It was ‘confirmation that I was adultlike, not childlike. In those days, the forties, children were not just loved or liked; they were needed.’
We have been on a rather steep pathway of rendering children an economic liability, rather than the sense of being needed that fed Morrison’s soul. I’m a dozen years younger than Morrison; I was raised on a farm where I was part of the economic team from early on – with roles in the garden, with the chickens, the cattle, the grain and hay crops that grew with me. I imposed an unfashionable expectation on my children that they pull their weight with work both inside and outside the house. We also, equally unfashionably, expected them to fund their post-secondary education; they squeaked into that stage of life just before tuition sky-rocketed.
The generation now parenting couldn’t get away with that. Over my lifetime, I have seen mothers working outside the home go from being a selfish dereliction of maternal duty to being an economic necessity for middle-classdom to being a recipe for physical and emotional burn-out. The path is marked by the increasing commodification of childhood – attaching monetary value to every aspect of being a child. Starting in utero – I was gob-smacked by what was on offer at a baby registry that accompanied a baby shower invitation, not just the florid imagination about what was considered useful, but also the eye-watering prices. Child care costs as much as university tuition. Extra-curricular activities are expansive, expensive and require chauffeuring. Unsupervised recreation is verboten.
Children are so busy being consumers they don’t have time to be contributors. Employers say teenagers aren’t available for summer work, not because they’re lazy, but because they have no time after honoring their obligations to competitive sports, summer school to improve their grades, additional studies to expand their portfolio, all in order to get into ‘good’ post-secondary institutions.
The cost of post-secondary education challenges not only the economic well-being of parents --who must balance a felt duty to pay for at least one post-secondary certification per child with saving for their own retirement -- but also of the young adults themselves. Gillian Turnbull, in a long article in the Winter 2022 edition of Maisonneuve, describes how she managed, with great difficulty, to pay off $80,000 of student debt by age 42. She was caught in the modern vortex of needing education to get a job but then not being able to get the job the education purportedly prepared her for, and returning to school to get the ‘right’ qualifications (and, incidentally, pause compounding interest on student loans). She concludes, ‘I had internalized messaging from a society and governments that believe post-secondary education is a privilege, not a necessity, and that those who attend should pay the cost.’
One of the impacts of the cost of post-secondary education is that educated women are not moving forward with procreating. Women generally are reconsidering whether having children is something they will do. Why? Many reasons, but one is that children are unaffordable. To re-phrase Gillian Turnbull’s conclusion about education, ‘Having children is a privilege, not a necessity, and …those who [choose it] should pay the cost.’
We seem to be overlooking the fact that reproduction is essential to the continuance of the species. We seem to have bought without question that humans are but cogs in the economy, that we are the work we do, and that some work has value and some (like raising children) does not.
Toni Morrison lived in an era when work needed people; we are again in an era when work needs people. A lot of essential work is crap jobs – why is grist for another exploration. Morrison, with her worm’s-eye view of a racialized life, may have pegged the work vs workers conundrum. She concludes: ‘You are not the work you do, you are the person you are.’
Being the person you are may well mean doing the work that needs to be done to make this world we share the place we want to be.
