First Person is a daily personal piece submitted by readers. Have a story to tell? See our guidelines at tgam.ca/essayguide.
This week, First Person celebrates the joys of Christmastime.
Illustration by Rachel Wada
Years ago a friend who teaches anthropology introduced me to the term “kin work.” We were in my basement with our kids – six boys between us, three each – and she was talking about some mundane detail of a life lived in relation to others: sending school photos to aunts and uncles, or helping her sons write thank you cards. I knew what kin meant, and as the mother of three young sons, I sure knew about work. But kin work? It’s the labour that goes into preserving the bonds of family, she told me. In most cultures, she said, kin work is the purview of women. Essentially, it’s the activities that keep us kith and kin.
I remember a sensation of something snapping into place, like two pieces of the Lego that littered the floor around us. Those two simple words, when joined, illuminated a set of tasks that occupied my time but that I had never had the language to name. I’ve since taught the term to friends and family, and it now fuels a running competition between my husband and me. “Just doing some kin work,” I’ll say nonchalantly, pushing send on an e-mail to my siblings about the Christmas gift exchange. “Guess I’m winning at kin work today,” he’ll say, organizing our digital photos.
What my children have taught me about Hanukkah
The past few Christmases my husband took kin work to a whole new level. Last year, like he had done the year before, he went to his mother’s retirement home, where she is in the memory-care unit, with a stack of envelopes. Each envelope contained a Christmas card with a painting of a red barn on a snowy field. Each card opened onto a crisp new $50 bill that he had withdrawn from her bank account. As the only son living nearby, he pulled up a chair next to his 94-year-old mother’s recliner and showed her the cards and the money, which they would send to her sons and their wives, her grandchildren and her great-grandchildren scattered from coast to coast. He handed her a pen and held each card as she wrote “Grandma” at the bottom, in a cursive made jagged and slow by tremors. By the time he dropped them into the mailbox, she had forgotten this work entirely.
In her prime, though, my mother-in-law was the consummate kin worker. She was the hostess who plied you with snacks 30 minutes after you’d finished dinner, the one who, after running into someone at the grocery store, could tell you exactly where they were located in the ecosystem of church, neighbourhood and ancestry back three generations. And she folded new people into her definition of kin, taking in a single mother and her daughter to live with her and inviting a somewhat forlorn man to every Thanksgiving I can remember. If kin work were a career with salary and benefits, she’d have been an executive.
But as she reached her upper 80s, her skill set began to wane. Evidence included the closet we discovered a few years ago, its shelves bulging with gifts she’d bought for family members. Apparently she’d forget that she had already ordered this cat magnet for her daughter-in-law or that sports bloopers DVD for her grandsons. So when the new mail-order catalogue arrived, she’d order it again. And again. And again. Opening the closet one evening, we discovered five mugs with cardinals for the two birdwatchers, three cupcake cookbooks for one granddaughter and seven windshield ice scrapers with built-in gloves for four sons.
Her instinct for kin work was still strong – blazing, in fact – even as her capacity for its details was faltering. There are certainly worse loops to land in toward the end of one’s life, lesser jobs at which to fail.
Kin work will look different for us this year, kept apart as we are by a pandemic still raging. Even the plexiglass-protected visits we had with my mother-in-law in the summer are out of the question for now. Last year my husband did not love buying Christmas cards with red barns in the snow or going to the post office for stamps with poinsettias. But now, some nine months since he last hugged his mother, he’d pay a lot to be able to pull up a chair next to her and help her sign some cards.
This holiday season, those of us for whom kin work does not come naturally likely feel a mix of relief and grief. We may even miss the mind-numbing chores of kin work, recognizing anew how they sustain fibres of connection in families and communities.
And we’ll have to learn distance kin work, involving porch drops and letters and phone calls. Tonight I hear my husband on the phone with his mother, telling her about the pies he plans to bake for the coming holiday – the same recipe she used all those years, the one with coconut. Tomorrow we will drive over to the parking lot of her nursing home and call her on a cellphone. We will take along her grandsons so that she can see how much they’ve grown, and we will wave up at her third-floor window while we talk.
My husband still plans to send his mother’s Christmas cards for her this year, and he is hoping next year’s batch will have her signature instead of his. Watching my husband’s care for his mother, and remembering her care for us and so many others, has me recommitting myself to kin work as essential labour in the world, even in this strange year. I hope that my sons are watching their father care for his mother by helping her care for them. I hope that they are learning what it means to be kin, and what it means to do work and what happens when you put those two lovely words together.
Valerie Weaver-Zercher lives in Mechanicsburg, Penn.