Invisible Labor

Some labor only becomes visible once someone else picks it up.

Dad, his sister, and their Grandparents

Before GPS, my mom and her sister from New Jersey would plan meetups the hard way.

One summer, they planned a week for me to spend in New Jersey. They decided on a halfway point to meet. Two hours from each of them, where I would get dropped off. But things didn’t go as planned. They ended up at slightly different locations, and that’s when the phone tag started. Calling home from a payphone or a borrowed phone from a restaurant, trying to figure out where the other one actually was, and how to get there to the same location.

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In a time without cell phones and the ability to drop a location pin. Just a printed MapQuest sheet, an agreed-upon exit number, and a restaurant chosen in advance as the meet-up point. Everyone just waited, hoping the other car eventually showed up roughly at the agreed-upon time.

I didn’t think about any of this at the time. I just remember the week itself. Hanging out with my cousin Ken, playing baseball and basketball, going to the movies, not once wondering how I’d gotten there. They were the closest relatives I had.

It wasn’t until recently, hearing my aunt tell the story as an adult, that I understood what it actually took. The coordination. The guessing. The hope that two people driving in different directions, with no way to check in except a landline call, would find each other at an exit off a highway neither of them lived near. And that was just one trip.

Doctor’s appointments, orthodontist visits, AAU practices in gyms across various towns, all while working full time and raising two kids with no family nearby to help. Some of it was routine, driving to the same place over and over again. But the unfamiliar locations, back before you could just type an address in Google or Apple Maps, this took real effort I never thanked her for.

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My aunt and uncle are in from LA, staying with my parents for the next three weeks. The day after they arrived, I took my dad to pick up his Tesla, which I was very excited about. When we got home, my aunt had already cleaned every bathroom in the house and the kitchen, knowing that in a few days, a cleaner was coming for a deep clean. She showed my dad how to change the filter on the robot vacuum. Then she asked him, whether he’d ever changed the dishwasher settings to sanitize.

“There’s a setting for that?” he said.

He genuinely didn’t know. He’d never had to know, because for most of his life, someone else handled it

My Aunt is a little OCD about cleaning. I remember staying with her in Shanghai years ago, watching her clean an apartment that was already spotless. She told me it was her exercise. Said she doesn’t sleep well if the place is dirty. Watching her clean my parents’ house this week and help my dad, this is how she takes care of people, whether they’ve asked her to or not.

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My dad didn’t push back on any of it. Growing up, she was the one who took care of him. Taking him to school and washing his clothes.

I spent months getting him to agree to hire a cleaner, someone we’d pay to come regularly. It took a long time to get there. He’s resistant to outside help that’s become a recurring theme of late: the Care.com aide he wouldn’t have a call with, Senior Helping Senior. And yet he’d just spent the morning very excited about handing over control of the steering wheel to a computer program.

Maybe it’s not help he resists. Maybe it’s who’s offering it. A car doesn’t ask anything of his pride. His sister helps, but she has been there supporting him his whole life. It’s just who she is, and he’s known her his whole life.

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That night, my mom, my aunt, and my uncle made dumplings for dinner. The wrapping of the dumplings is the most time-consuming. After that, we just boiled them, as it is the healthiest option. I made my dad a plate of noodles instead, since he’s vegetarian and won’t touch the meat filling. My mom, hands moving on instinct even now, folding dumplings the same way she probably has for fifty years. My aunt and uncle also helping. What would have taken my mom and I around an hour and a half was finished in 20 minutes.

It occurred to me, watching all of this, that the house runs differently right now than it does the majority of the year. Someone else is noticing the things my dad doesn’t have bandwidth for. Someone else is cooking. For a few weeks, the weight is spread out instead of being on him.

I think about my mom and her sister at that highway exit, decades ago, working through the confusion with nothing but a payphone and a printed map to get me where I needed to go. Nobody called that labor at the time. It was just what she did. When my aunt gets on a plane back to LA in three weeks, I wonder if anyone will still be checking the dishwasher settings, or if it’ll just quietly go back to being something nobody thinks to look for.