Holding
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Sometimes the work is just holding. The baby is clean and fed so there’s no reason he should be crying, unless loneliness or existential fear are good enough reasons. Holding doesn’t seem like much work. It doesn’t require any heavy lifting. Usually I can read or write, though sometimes he’s close enough to tears that I need to pay attention so I can rock him away from the edge in time.
To hold is to be still. Like all care work, there’s no progress or accomplishment, so it doesn’t fit easily into our economy and our value system. It’s hard to talk to people about what I’m doing with my time. The things I get done - feeding changing washing trimming - will only have to be done again soon. Time passing is my enemy because it undoes all my work and my goal because what other can there be for maintenance?
“I felt like two people in the same body. The free artist and the mother maintenance worker,” said Mierle Laderman Ukeles, NYC Department of Sanitation’s artist-in-residence for almost 40 years. In her 1969 manifesto, she contrasts development — “pure individual creation; the new; change; progress” — with maintenance — “preserve the new; sustain the change…Maintenance is a drag; it takes all the fucking time. The mind boggles and chafes at the boredom. The culture confers lousy status on maintenance jobs=minimum wage, housewives=no pay.” The manifesto was part of her proposal for an exhibit called CARE, in which she would move into a museum with her husband and child and do her work of cooking, cleaning, and mothering as a performance art piece. Her proposal was never accepted.
Mothers are the ultimate creators, but only at the moment of their creation. At childbirth, they are the apotheosis of beginnings and growth, but afterwards they have nothing new to give. We, as a culture, stop paying attention to their boring and obsessive domestic concerns. We, as mothers, after the jubilation and pride of showing off the new baby has died down, suddenly don’t know what it is we’re doing. Maintenance takes all our fucking time.
“Some passersby ask me why I bother. Others thank me, insinuating a “Finally! You’re doing something!” with their tone. Maybe they don’t know there’s a future demolition date…It's just too much feral living, I guess. Gotta reign it in for…. control? Aesthetics? Propriety? I don’t know. Regardless here I am, doing my job, weeding.” My friend Candace is the caretaker of Stuy Cove Park, doing work that she calls “park hospice” since she took the job knowing the park was going to be demolished to create a sea wall along the east side of Manhattan; the demolition is finally coming up this month. She’s done plenty of valuable work during her time there —educating volunteers and visitors about native plants and even growing food that we’ve eaten — but I’ve always seen her tenure as something of a performance art piece as well. The careful work of weeding in a park’s final days is both literally and symbolically the work of living through ecological collapse.
The final part of Ukeles’ unperformed exhibition is called “Earth Maintenance” and it would involve containers of polluted air and Hudson River water being delivered and then “purified, depoluted, rehabilitated…by myself or scientists.” In 1969, we weren’t facing anything like the climate crisis that we are today, but it was already clear that the trajectory of modern progress was bent toward destruction, not maintenance. The leap that Ukeles makes here, from the small world of domestic maintenance to maintenance of the whole planet, is striking to me. It suggests that the work is the same, it’s just the scale that’s different. And maybe that the shift to a maintenance-mindset is the revolution we need to keep the world going.
Though I’m frustrated by our culture’s lack of appreciation for the work of domestic maintenance, I don’t think I resent finding myself here as much as Ukeles or other writers I’ve read. I don’t feel divided as a person the way they do. Since leaving the corporate tech world for the much more domestic art of cooking, I’ve felt my life to be more coherent. I like to nurture, to nourish, as if it were a vocation (it is). When I’m not obsessing over whether my work is respected by the greater outside world, I find a lot of joy in the small tasks of a small world.
At my Zen monastery, part of the daily schedule is “work-practice” — which is just work, like weeding or vacuuming or cleaning bathrooms, but happens right after a period of meditation and is considered an extension of it. You’re meant to sink into the immediacy of the mindless tasks and let them teach you how to pay attention. The building holds a hushed, focused atmosphere and somehow it does feel possible to find something sacred in cleaning a toilet. To the Zen mind — which is more deontological than utilitarian — there is nothing more significant than cleaning a toilet, if cleaning a toilet is what you’re doing at the current moment. Current moments make up time; most of them are boring, but if you’re constantly trying to get out of them, then you’re wasting an awful lot of time.
It doesn’t escape me that Zen practice wears the respectable patina of masculinity; the sharp serious monastics with bald heads seem to be in every way the opposite of the sneakered women laden with toys and snacks in the park. If Ukeles had managed to get her exhibition produced, her domestic work would have become Art because it was in a museum. I know it’s all the same work though, whether it’s performed for an audience of attentive adults or a single wild-eyed infant. We’re doing what needs to be done. Maintenance is the quiet engine of the world, making all the time.
What I’m cooking
I love carrot halwa — a rich Indian dessert made with carrots simmered in milk, spiced with cardamom, and mixed with ghee-fried raisins and cashews. I decided to combine it with a carrot cake recipe, for a cake that’s not far off from the original, but a little more complex. There’s also sweetened condensed milk in the cream cheese icing.
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