The Rest Wars
Credit to my friend and colleague the Rev. Jordan Haynie Ware for the title of this piece.
While it is not new, in the era of Coronatide, the ever present hierarchy of exhaustion and glorification of busy has exploded again. Particularly, the wrestling between parents, and those without kids of our own. No doubt you all have heard the same things I have: “those of you without kids don’t realize how lucky you have it,” or “no one talks about how hard this is on parents of small children.”
I want to say a few things here. First, if you haven’t read Deb Perelman’s great piece in the Times about parenting, and working during COVID-19, do. Spoiler alert: one can have a job, or a kid in this era, but it is nearly impossible to do both. That labor, and those sacrifices largely impact women and femmes in a society that consistently devalues feminized labor. Second, parents do indeed have a particularly hard set of challenges in the era of COVID-19 (particularly if their kiddos are small). I have yet to see anyone deny that. Y’all parents are warriors. Finally, it would behoove us all to remember that many folks caring for and raising kids in this era are not parents, but aunties, uncles, grandparents, cousins, caregivers of all kinds, and more. Those folks are a piece of this conversation too.
Now, we’ve acknowledged those pieces, I want to say clearly that it’s time to stop the Rest Wars. It’s time to put an end to the olympic sport of “who has it harder” or “who is more exhausted.” It is time to dismantle the hierarchy of exhaustion. That was true before a pandemic, and it is even more true now. This is NOT how we should be spending our energy.
The framework that keeps us constantly competing with one another for who is more tired, or more worthy of rest is a tool of the same capitalist system that has wrought this moment upon our collective society. It is a tool designed to keep us fighting with one another instead of uniting together to fight the systems of power and oppression that are literally killing us. Imagine the force we could be if we took the energy of “I am more tired than you” and united that to demand affordable childcare, a sustainable model of work and rest, and collective care that puts first the needs of the the last, the lost, the least and the left behind. It is a tool of capitalism to encourage us to see one another (particularly well-rested and well organized folks) as a threat instead of seeing a system that simply uses and disposes of our lives as one instead.
It does not have to be this way, friends. Read that again.
Some of us are childfree by choice, and some of us are not. Everyone is holding care taking responsibilities regardless of those facts. Parents make extraordinary sacrifices for their children, and childfree folks are expected to sacrifice in many ways to support parents. There is a pandemic of illness in our country, and also pandemics of racism and loneliness both including and apart from parenthood.
I am not interested in remaining part of a dialogue that simply makes us more exhausted, and turns us against one another. I am interested instead in dismantling the systems that see us as little more that cogs in a machine to continue production, that will keep trying to kill us without regard for anyone’s parenting status, and that are counting on us to keep fighting with one another. As always, Black women are showing us the way in this moment of organizing and activism. Let’s stop the rest wars friends. Let’s build a society of collective liberation that values ALL of our labor, especially that which society has historically disregarded. Let’s be all in for each other. Revolution is within our grasp and people in power won’t know what’s coming if we claim it.
