SHIRKERS...

When my son rings in sick to his job, after having a little “too much” fun last night (our local football team had a very successful night), I feel the old (long-ago conditioned) worry immediately bubble up.

“Oh Nathan” I sigh down the phone, my disappointment falling squarely on his shoulders.

And then, of course, I realise it’s my problem not his. Despite the fact that he has probably already internalised my disappointment in him, without even knowing that he’s done it (nominating myself for the mother of the year award again).

I was brought up to believe that you never missed work/school/any commitment unless you were on death’s door. And that hangovers didn’t count. You showed up no matter how ill you were because otherwise, you were a work-shy shirker. And so this is a battle I wage with myself on a near daily basis.

See, nowadays I am well and truly work-shy. And so the disapproval I felt for him is the same internalised disapproval I often feel for myself. If I’m honest, even writing this now, I am aware that there is a part of me forcing the issue so that I can at least tell myself that I’ve done something productive today rather than just lie around in my jarmies reading tweets and waiting for inspiration to strike (in fairness though, I am back in my jarmies, despite it being after noon; although I did have a bath and wash my hair)

My life now is so vastly different to the life I was living 10 or so years ago, when I was working upwards of seventy hours a week, while raising two kids and completing my undergraduate degree as a mature student.

And never taking a day off other than properly authorised annual leave.

In fact, sending my kids to school dosed up on Calpol when they were under the weather, unconsciously hammering home the story that stopping and resting was not allowed (I know), while making sure that I didn’t have to stop either.

And showing up to work, relentlessly, even when I was exhausted with (usually minor but nonetheless debilitating) illnesses and sometimes just the sheer fatigue of impending burnout.

And now I question, “Why?”

Why is it so important that we never show weakness? That we never stop? That we never be human?

My sense is that this story, handed down by the “ruling” classes to working class folk, like me, over many generations, was propagandised to keep us in line. To keep us in fear for our livelihoods and of the public ostracism of being singled out as shirkers.

For, just as surely as the police officers, who killed Tyre Nichols a few weeks ago, are both guilty of horrific brutality and murder, and are victims of a system that has conditioned them to suspect and vilify and turn on their own (to align with those in power), so the working classes of the UK (and no doubt many other places) have been conditioned to do the same (wow, I didn’t see that connection coming).

See, we have been trained to work ourselves to death. And to turn on the folks who (we suspect) don’t. To stay on the right side of (what we’ve been conditioned to believe is) right.

And thus, as a working class woman running a business I love that takes very little effort, I am trained to turn on myself for not working hard enough. And to turn on my son for calling in sick.

This is not a case of disempowerment. It’s a case of training (that dates all the way back to my earliest childhood) kicking in faster than my own truth.

This, my friends, is the work.