Let No One Shirk

As a child, I grew up with the Mormon hymn “Put Your Shoulder to the Wheel” ringing in my head. One of the lines that has since been taken out (of the book, not out of my head) reads:

“The world has no need for a drone.”

The song was written in oldy pioneer times, and has lots of old language about shirking your duty and being happy doing your duty, and doesn’t seem to distinguish much between men’s work and women’s work, though the song only talks about men. It used to be a staple of Mormon church meetings, but in my last years in the church, I heard it a lot less. I suppose that if you’re going to survive a harsh environment like the Utah desert, it makes sense to encourage people to work really hard so that the community survives. People who don’t work hard aren’t useful to the community and you want to make sure that anyone who lives off the labor of others at least feels guilty about it.

What my child and teen and early adult woman brain made of this song and its message was that I had to be busy at all times. My father and mother definitely helped drill this in for me, since on weekends we spent from sunup to midnight on Saturdays doing chores my father supervised. I eventually learned I preferred the chores my mother supervised indoors, because they tended to go only to seven or eight at night, but still. It was a lot of work. When I was a child in elementary school, a teacher once asked us to write about our summer vacation. I wrote about the real story of my father stating on day one of the vacation that he expected us to do eight hours of work each day and that he would be requiring us to show proof of that every night. I might have been the only child to take this seriously, but I did A LOT of work that summer. The teacher didn’t believe me and insisted that I write a “real essay” about my summer. This was one of my first chances to lie with imaginary intent. I wrote an essay about a trip to Disneyland that we never went on and the teacher gave me an “A.”

My parents had eleven children who have all been very good at work. In my teen years, one month my father decided to create a family “crest” and assigned one of my artistic sisters to create this crest. She designed one with a shovel and hoe with the words “We have not yet begun to work” on it. It was meant to be a joke, but my father took it one hundred percent seriously. He loved the idea that we would always be working. He got his wish. The story about the family crest was told at my father’s funeral and both of the siblings who spoke about my father in as kind a way as possible mentioned that they valued that he had taught us all to work hard.

The problem (or one could argue this isn’t a problem, at least for a culture that wants to exact as much labor as possible out of as many people who are willing to offer it) is that I and most of my siblings don’t know much about resting, relaxing, taking a break, or enjoying a vacation. In my thirty years of marriage, I never once took a vacation with my husband and the kids. This was in part because he and I had different ideas of what a “vacation” was. I will say mea culpa here because I wanted a vacation to be enriching in some way. My idea of a vacation was to visit museums and to see exciting places in some kind of checklist way that my father had modeled as we drove past the Eiffel Tower on a memorable quick sightseeing trip to Paris. Yup, saw it. It was there. Done that.

As a result of this, the only sort-of vacations that we went on were “race vacations,” which were, as you might guess by the name, not a vacation at all because they involved checking into the race venue, preparing everything for race day, consciously not exercising because it wasn’t in the plan, and making our kids volunteer (or voluntold, if you ask them) to run aid stations during the race event itself. I thought of these as “fun” because I got a nice hit of endorphins from the race itself, but also the aftereffect was kind of nasty because I was in pain for several days afterward.

I keep trying to figure out how to vacation better. It’s tricky with a neurodiverse brain because I don’t focus well on “resting” and I can drive myself crazy if I don’t have something to do with my hands. As a result, I often bring yarn projects with me on airplanes. But also, I remember that my mother once told me that any sewing or yarn work I did on Sundays, I would have to undo with my nose in the afterlife because it was “work,” which I wasn’t supposed to do. There is a serious irony in the reality that my parents insisted that on Sunday we had to “rest,” something that they never showed or taught us how to do.

It turns out that other people have an idea of vacation and find it rather easy to rest and relax without planning out in advance or practicing how to “rest” and not run around doing even more stuff on rest days than they do on other days. This has been something I’ve been working on in the background for the last several years. One experiment gone awry was for me to spend my Thursday off (I work 4x10’s) doing “fun” stuff all day, only to end up so exhausted that I vowed NEVER to do that again.

I do still have to use some Thursdays for appointments of various kinds (doctor, car repair, paperwork errands, lawn care, massages, etc) but I’m also leaning into trying to figure out what “doing nothing” might look like for me. I know other people are trying to stop using their phones so much and to enjoy life. I am trying for now to let myself fiddle around on my phone as an antidote to working too hard. I am trying to congratulate myself for NOT finishing everything on my to-do list (or let’s be real, at least not adding anything to it at 5 p.m. when I already got everything done). I am trying to just not plan stuff and watch Netflix or sit around after a long workout and not make myself write or do something constructive.

In essence, I’m trying to evict the monitor installed by my parents and by Mormonism in my childhood that observes my body at all times and thinks—not working hard enough. This person might be a drone if she sits down in front of the “boob tube” (as my father used to call it) for more than two hours at a time without multi-tasking. It could be that this impulse to checklist my life and to never let myself sit still is part of the problem I’m having with happiness. Or maybe that’s just a coincidence.