Bump on the Line
“Why does first trimester feel dying?” Google helpfully suggested to me as a related question when I was looking up something or other. It’s not just the nausea, though that’s omnipresent, giving me motion sickness when I turn my head too fast. It’s not just the dizziness, causing me to clutch the counter so I don’t fall over after leaning down to reach into the low-boy. It’s all that plus the overwhelming fatigue, which makes even a dinner with friends wipe me out, and a 9-hour shift on my feet complete torture. Every day of work is like army-crawling up a mountain. I collapse at home, hollowed out and occasionally sobbing (I sob for all kinds of reasons lately), and lie vacantly on the couch for most of my time off.
Working at a restaurant is incompatible with pregnancy. I’m lucky to be in a progressive, women-led environment, but the nature of a restaurant is that it’s a tiny, tight ship sailing through a storm. All hands are needed on deck at all times to prevent capsizing. The internet suggests employer pregnancy accommodations like more frequent breaks or offering a stool to sit on, but when orders are coming in fast you can’t just walk away because you need a “break.” A stool would be nice if there were anywhere to put it or any time to sit on it. Drinking water is encouraged, but it means taking off your gloves, pulling down your mask, and trying to remember all the new orders that get shouted while you gulp it down, finally letting out a breathless, “Heard 104 and 203!” as soon as your throat is clear.
You’re either on or you’re off during service and if you’re off you might as well not be there at all. You’re part of the team or you’re a drag on the line. Chef likes to use the metaphor of dominoes, because when one part of the chain slips, it causes everything else to topple over. If orders don’t get fired fast enough or if one station is too slow, the tickets pile up, harmony is disrupted, everyone is frenzied, mistakes get made, everything is fucked. I can’t help thinking about this all the time now. I’m that unstable domino.
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I keep Googling things like “pregnant line cook,” “nausea at restaurants” —fruitless, futile searches, since what I’m really trying to ask is, “How does anyone do this? How do I do this?” The Internet cannot tell me that. Instead I come across depressing stories of women trying to work through their circumstances worse than mine.
- The heat is intense, over 100 degrees at any given moment, the ground is hard, the plates are up high, the oil is hot, the 22 quart containers get really heavy, the pace is neck-break and dizzying, essentially spinning in place for hours, sweating profusely, soaking my new nursing bras. It’s exhausting, to say the least.
- I’m on my 27 weeks already and starting to feel tired all the time and I hate the heat from the fryer, oven and salamander. My boss is getting me pissed all the time too coz it seems that he doesn’t care.
- I was literally throwing up in the kitchen,I had horrible morning sickness that lasted almost my entire pregnancy. It wasn’t the food so much that bothered me, it was the smell of coffee that had me running for my bucket. LOL…I did end up having to quit, I was hospitalized and almost lost my baby. That was the last time I worked in a kitchen. I felt horrible about having to quit.
- I would put off telling your employers as long as possible. It’s a good way to get terminated, and usually there is no legal recourse.
- Ended up having a C-section (it was a Wednesday night), was laid up over the weekend, and was back to work (light work, and just for a few hours, but still made it there!) the fifth day after my son was born.
- I’ll be working until 37 weeks and I’m so freaking exhausted already but us women in the kitchen, we’re tough. If I can do it, so can you!
I read this stuff and it makes me feel like my own discomfort is nothing.
***
I finally told my boss. It was months earlier than I’d imagined. I thought I’d be able to work with a bump growing unnoticed under my apron until I was so big that the conversation would come as no surprise. Clearly I had no idea how bad I’d feel at just seven weeks. Pregnancy is unfair like that, swooping in to wreck you from the inside before anyone can even tell that you might need help. My restaurant’s been great — completely supportive of what I said I needed. I’ve been switched to the cold station and have more days off in the next few weeks. I’m relieved to be further away from the vomit-inducing deep fryer and that I can spend more time recharging at home, but I feel guilty about abandoning my coworkers and frustrated with my weakness.
The rewarding aspects of working in a restaurant mostly have to do with competency and camaraderie. Knowing I can hold down a station on a busy night, knowing that my team can count on me. The drive is always to be faster and faster and make fewer mistakes so that the night goes smoothly for everyone else. All of this doesn’t have a whole lot to do with what I originally loved about cooking. There isn’t time for care and attention to food and certainly no opportunities for creativity. I’ve been okay with that so far because there are other things that make the work fun, but a compromised physical state can suck all the joy out of it. My sense of pride and self-worth diminish at the first sign of weakness. Instead of trying to prove myself, I spend every night trying to survive until close. I feel like I’m thrashing in white water, raftless and directionless, my body too heavy to steer.
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All of this makes me question the nature of restaurants altogether. How does something so precarious and so contingent on healthy, fit bodies willing to work for low pay make up 10% of the job market? There are restaurants out there that are trying, basically, to be good, but the whole system is too cutthroat and too bottom-line to really allow flexibility in working conditions. Almost everywhere, workers are pushed just as far they can handle, and some a little further, with the assumption that there will be someone to take their place when they quit. The story often goes that those people just aren’t good enough to make it at a demanding place, but maybe sometimes it’s that they aren’t willing to give all of themselves, or that for invisible reasons, they don’t have all of themselves to give.
We had employee reviews lately, and one of my coworkers had a weird experience. The chefs gave him two separate reviews, for when he’s “Good” and “Bad” because they decided he’s inconsistent. On his “good” days he’s reliable and fast, and on his “bad” days he’s distracted and slow. He got the average of the two sets of scores. We all thought it was a strange way to approach the issue, but I’m also troubled by the expectation that you’re not supposed to have bad days at work. I know the guy is going through relationship problems and has stuff going on in his life, like we all do. How can an established, successful restaurant be so affected by an employee’s bad day? How many other jobs out there demand prime physical and emotional health from employees every day to keep up with the grind?
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I’ve always comforted myself by dreaming of other ways the world could be. I try to imagine a system optimized for the health of its workers rather than the bottom line. It might look a little more like Europe, with no tipping and food that sometimes takes quite a long time to show up, restaurants closed on holidays or vacations. It might not look like anything like what we have, but more like cafes and pop-ups on the lower end, where you’re paying just for food and you fit yourself into someone else’s schedule for making it, and catered experiences on the higher end, where you’re paying directly for the labor of serving you. Perhaps restaurants, which bundle so much together for such a low cost, shouldn’t exist at all.
Lately, I’m dreaming of other systems for the person inside me as well. It helps, when I’m feeling at my worst, to remember how much I love the world and how optimistic I am about finding ways that make sense through it. I whisper those dreams to myself and to someone new to all of it. I focus on the lovely parts, like my coworkers who have showered me with affection since I told them the news, and rise up at every opportunity to try to help me. We talk about all this stuff during our breaks, about co-ops and worker-owned restaurants and the underground supper clubs we want to start together. These are the people who are making the world right now, and I have enormous faith in us.