Working, a meditation

The protestant work ethic killed my father.

At least, that's what I spent a long time thinking. It might still be true but I'll admit that my perspective has changed a bit.

I originally got my work ethic from him. He owned his own business -- three at once for a time, actually, worked his butt off building homes and running both a sporting goods store and a trophy store in separate locations. When he decided to sell the construction business and combine sporting goods and trophies into one, he took me for a long walk with him so that I could help him work out the best decision. I think I was seven or eight, but Dad talked to me like another adult, laying out the pros and cons, asking my opinion. I'd like to think I made some good points, but if all I did was act as a sounding board, I'm content.

He wouldn't let me start working for him until I was ten. Let, I note: I'd been begging him for years before then. I worked on my tenth birthday, for two hours, pricing socks. I was so proud of the four dollars I made that day, and of all the things I got done for my father.

He'd work rain or shine, drive through snow bad enough to worry my mom, healthy or sick; when his back got bad he took up stretching and went through a couple of experimental treatments but still worked his eight, ten, twelve hour days. Now that I'm older and my back has gone the way his did, I know how much this must have hurt, but it's a man's job to work, so he did.

In my second year of college I knew that he was having some trouble with his health, but it still came as a complete surprise the night that my mother showed up to tell me he'd died. A massive heart attack, didn't even make it to the hospital, there one moment and gone the next. A sort of shock-related amnesia set in -- I still don't remember the last time I saw him, the last words we exchanged. It was years before I could remember his face.

I immediately decided that he'd worked himself to death. How else could such a strong man have succumbed? My work ethic dissolved into vague fears and, eventually, as I went from job to job and found that they all became the job I hated, into a conviction that I simply couldn't work, wasn't suited to anything involving earning money.

I kept trying. One can't simply sit around the house all day doing nothing. I worked for my mother, I worked a variety of temp jobs, I worked at another trophy store for a while. I tried a career at writing and found that I couldn't stick with that, either. Clearly I was destined never to have a job.

I left the ex knowing I'd have to work to support myself. It wasn't so bad -- but the first job I got dissolved, the second took its toll on my health until I was forced to quit, the third didn't pay enough to live on, the fourth stopped before I'd even caught up on my bills...

I was conflicted about that second job -- should I work until I physically couldn't, like my father had? Should I stop at the first sign of pain, to spare my health? Thoughts of the second led to overwhelming guilt; the path I chose led to further deterioration until I could barely walk.

I still can't judge when I'm 'sick enough' that I should go home. Guilt or pain? Money or health? Even my mother's one hard and fast rule, if you puke you stay home from school, isn't enough: my manager at work had a horribly upset stomach for a week and only missed half a day for it. If she'd stayed home, I'm sure, she'd have felt much better.

If my father had been more willing to take a day or two off of work, he'd still be alive.

Because after all, if work is just something you hate anyway, why should it lead to anything but pain?

--

I'm trying not to talk about my new business too much here (saving that for the other blog) but since I started it -- has it been a month already? -- I have begun to really understand my father. I work on it on my days off -- eight, ten, twelve hours. I work on it before I go to work and after I get home. I think about it in the shower, in the middle of the night, everywhere.

I knew I was hungry today, hadn't had lunch, but I just had to do one more thing -- adjust the camera a little, try another backdrop for that one necklace, touch up the wording of a description just that little bit more. I had lunch at four, because my stomach was so grumpy I was about to fall over; and right now, working on this post while making dinner, I have another window open to a blog post about what I've done today.

In fact, having reminded myself, I just spent another twenty minutes working on that...

It's absorbing me. It's consuming me. I can't stop. Is this how my father felt? Is this why he went in, day after day, in sickness and in health?

Did it kill him? Is it killing me?

Would I stop if it were...?