Rebecca Gayle Howell's "Every Job Has a First Day"

Thoughts on the work of care.

Every Job Has a First Day

Slade was pulling minnows out of the dry river
the day we met. Puddles, more or less, was what
was left. But what could live wanted to and tried,
treading narrow circles, a glide of brittle fins.
He wore those rubber boots, though the sun was
an anvil, and very little wet; he smiled, I remember
that, his nickel smile right at me, his fingers
letting fall the small fish muscles into a bag filled
with yellow tap. I didn’t ask his name, or what
it was he thought he was doing, but we talked,
I listened as he taught me to relax the hand just enough.
They can smell, he said, the oils our pores release
when we tense to catch. You have to believe it,
he said. You don’t mean any harm.


first published in Poetry (2015)

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Over the past few months, I have been thinking so much — it seems — about mothers, which I know, on a day such as today, feels apt. I came across today’s poem after being reminded of Rebecca Gayle Howell’s 2013 book, Render, and then after wondering if she had published anything since, and then, as a result of the searching that followed such wondering, I found myself reading not just this poem today, but also an anthology (one I immediately borrowed from the library after reading about it) she co-edited — What Things Cost — which I loved.

Anyways, I know that I have been thinking lately of mothers because, when I read both the title of this poem — “Every Job Has a First Day” — and the poem’s final two lines, I thought first of what parenting must feel like, how it must feel like a first day so, so often, and how that beautiful, so deeply human sentiment — you don’t mean any harm — must become a mantra that repeats itself in a parent’s head over and over again. I don’t know this for certain, but it feels like it must be true.

I thought too, while reading this poem, of a profile of Silvia Federici — one of the founders of the Wages for Housework movement — that I remembered reading during the pandemic. I thought of the ways that, over time, people have rightly called our attention to the ways that so much of the care-work of parenting, or caretaking, or working alongside and with and for someone in a way that has more to do with sustaining a life than selling a product has been unappreciated as a form of labor. In that profile, Jordan Kisner writes, of the term “reproductive labor”:

She uses this term not simply to refer to having children and raising them; it indicates all the work we do that is sustaining — keeping ourselves and others around us well, fed, safe, clean, cared for, thriving. It’s weeding your garden or making breakfast or helping your elderly grandmother bathe — work that you have to do over and over again, work that seems to erase itself. It is essential work that our economy tends not to acknowledge or compensate.

Maybe today’s poem doesn’t seem to directly relate to this idea, and yet, I can’t seem to get these final lines out of my head:

You have to believe it,
he said. You don’t mean any harm.

At the heart of these lines is something, I think, that sits at the heart of all sustaining work — work that is, quite paradoxically, often quite unsustainable. The work of care is a work where harm is not meant, even as such work is done within a world where so much harm is done. Harm is done, nearly always, when humans are involved. And yet there is a kind of work that seeks to offer care even in the midst of such harm. That same work is the work that is described here, in the poem’s opening lines:

Slade was pulling minnows out of the dry river
the day we met. Puddles, more or less, was what
was left. But what could live wanted to and tried,
treading narrow circles, a glide of brittle fins

What could live wanted to and tried. Such a short phrase describes so much, sadly, of this life and this world. A world that doesn’t always create the conditions of depth and care for a life that doesn’t need to feel forced, a life that doesn’t need to feel like it is searching for space in just a puddle. And so, in this world: the unsustainable work of trying to sustain who and what still lives, despite the conditions. This work of not-meaning-any-harm, this work of trying to provide care within systems that often perpetuate harm — that work, that deeply sustaining work, well, it’s hard, beyond hard, and it feels so related to work of parents and mothers and so many others.

And so yes, on a day like today, and on every other day — I am thinking of mothers. But I am trying not to think of mothers in the overly-simplified and highly-commodified way that our culture often forces us to think on a day like today, which is to say a holiday, which is to say a day that is often reduced to facile appreciation and consumption as a form of such appreciation. No, I am trying to think of motherhood as one place where the care-filled and sustaining work that allows for a life to be just that, a life, is modeled and enacted for us. And I am trying to think of how to appreciate and celebrate that fact in a world that seems to take it for granted, that seems, so often, to sideline the importance of such work — the importance of caring while living within the limits this world creates for us while we make time out of no time to imagine a different world.

One consequence of our society’s neglect of such care work is illustrated in another poem by Rebecca Gayle Howell, “My Mother Told Us Not to Have Children,” from that aforementioned anthology, What Things Cost. In it, she writes:

Is gentleness a resource of the privileged?

She then continues:

In this respect, my people were poor.
We fought to eat and fought each other because

we were tired from fighting. We had no time
to share. Instead our estate was honesty,

which is not tenderness. In that it is
a kind of drowning. But also a kind of air.

Here, on the margins of society — in that place of economic insecurity while practicing monetarily unappreciated forms of labor — care is still offered under immense amounts of stress, stress that makes something like gentleness feel, perhaps, like a privilege, stress that makes something like tenderness feel like even harder work.

One reason that I think I am thinking of all of this is because, over the course of the past few months, as a part of the digital newspaper and magazine the students in my high school journalism class create, I have asked, each month, for student volunteers to take part in an oral history project — to interview and profile a person that they care about in their lives. Every piece that has been written — whether this one, this one, this one, or this one — has been about a student’s mother or grandmother. I didn’t really realize this until I had taken a moment to consider it. But even now, looking back on those early conversations, I remember the quick, knowing certainty on the part of my students. As in: are you kidding me — of course I am going to write about my mom.

They have all been wildly beautiful pieces — generous, tender, compassionate, and full of a love beyond measure. Editing and working with my students on them has felt like such a wild privilege, as if I have been allowed to be a tiny spectator to the immense love at the heart of two people’s lives. To be a privileged witness — maybe that is one of the great joys of being alive.

Each of these essays details multiple forms of difficulty — the difficulty and trauma of illness, or journeying, or insecurity, or, to put it broadly, trying to make things work in a world that makes it hard to make things work. In the midst of such difficulty, though, is real love. And so what each of these essays also details is the way in which people have learned, through relationships of care that persist in a world of harm, how to love. And I think — no, I know — what makes me quite emotional about reading these words is that I know, with real saddened certainty, that part of growing up into this world means fighting, nearly every day, to hold onto the act of love (and tenderness, and joy, and grace, and life-sustaining care) as a defining aspect of how you approach the world, because the world so often makes it seem as if you have to abandon such love in pursuit of power. This is another way of saying that the world, each day, tries to make us abandon one another so that we can become lonely.

It has been impossible, while working with students on these essays, not to think of my own mother. And it’s funny, because the other day my wife was reading my journalism class’s most recent issue, and we were talking about whether either of us would have — as high schoolers — agreed to interview one of our parents, to do so with such rigorous complexity, and then to write and publish their story. I don’t know if I would have. I think it takes a remarkable courage, a real vulnerability, and a special relationship. And, at the time — still processing a parent’s divorce, still thinking about addiction and all else — I don’t know if I would have wanted to try to get to the heart of either of my parents’ stories.

And yet now, looking back, I see, in both my mother and my father, something so captured in today’s poem. I see, in the description of teaching — I listened as he taught me to relax the hand just enough — the voice of my father, the person who raised me and the person who taught me, when I started learning how to run, which I didn’t know at the time was also about learning how to be myself, about the importance of trying to relax even in the midst of pain. There’s a metaphor there, I know, of single parenting, a metaphor that feels relevant, as my father was raising me and my brother on his own. I don’t think I recognized that metaphor at the time, but I felt my arms drop low on my runs, and I felt my cheeks grow slack and calm, and even now, when I coach my high school’s track team, any onlooker will tell you that the word they probably hear me yelling the most, as my runners move in circles around me, is relax. Relax, I yell, drop your arms. That’s my dad talking. That’s my dad talking through me.

And yes, looking back, I see in my mother’s love the same attempt at harmlessness offered at the end of today’s poem. An old poem I published long ago began with the line: before my mother left, she gave me books of great beauty. Now, I know that first clause matters less. I know the leaving matters less, because I know that distance can return, so often, to intimacy. It just takes a little time. And it takes a little grace. Just the other day, I woke to find that my mother had texted me an entire poem. I would revise that earlier poem now. I would revise so many of the poems I wrote so long ago, which were searching for something that I didn’t know then was actually called grace. Every day, I would say now, my mother makes of this life a book of great beauty.

In one of his many essays on the spiritual and the everyday, Brian Doyle writes:

The whole point for us is grace under duress.

I don’t know if there is a better way of describing what it must mean to be a mother. I don’t know if there is a better way of describing what it must mean to try to center a life of harmlessness in a world that so often creates conditions that make it easier to cause harm. I don’t know if there is a better way of describing what it must mean to fight for love in a world that makes it easier, so often, to settle for loneliness.

I think of the minnows in today’s poem. I think that we, too, can tense up so easily, because we know, intuitively, that there is so much that can cause us harm. We do this to defend ourselves, to protect ourselves — out of what has become, I’m sure, a kind of instinct. I understand, too, that this can become mitigated or exacerbated based on aspects of one’s identity — one’s gender or one’s race or both and more. And so, in this world, even love, then, becomes a kind of belief. Even tenderness. Even grace. I guess that’s the magic of it. There’s a gap — a gap that is wider than I could ever wish — between each of us. It is the kind of gap that makes you scared to even try to bridge. But there are people who teach us how to bridge it. My mother has taught me. My father. My wife, each day. My students, too. Sometimes they make it look easy. But it’s not. It is hard in this world. And so, when I think of that teaching that happens each day: I am grateful for it. The learning has changed my life.

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Some notes:

1. I continue to follow this page (and this one, of the NYC chapter of the Palestinian Youth Movement) to see the ongoing developments of the Columbia University protests in solidarity with those in Gaza.

2. As I will continue to mention, Writers Against the War on Gaza has been a powerful resource that has, in these days, reminded me of all the various potentials for solidarity in this moment. You can follow them on Instagram here.

3. If you’ve read any of the recent newsletters, you’ve perhaps noticed that I am offering a subscription option. This is functioning as a kind of “tip jar.” If you would like to offer your monetary support as a form of generosity, please consider becoming a paid subscriber below. There is no difference in what you receive as a free or paid subscriber; to choose the latter is simply an option to exercise your generosity if you feel willing. I am grateful for you either way. Thanks for your readership.