Better Than Good

 

An artist's rendering of me and Alan

The other day Dame Magazine published a farticle I wrote about my mom. Well, it was about my mom but it was also about work, and where our drive and work ethic comes from. Or more specifically where MINE comes from. It's been a near-constant topic of rumination since I decamped here eight months ago and has in one way or another been at the heart of many of these digital musings. I feel that more than any cheesemaking knowledge she has bequeathed (rather frustratingly little, at this point TBH but that's for another post), Laini has served as a a model of tirelessness, perseverance, grit, uncompromising vision, resilience, self-sufficience, perfectionism and dogged, unflinching hard motherfucking WORK, girl. 

For months and months I was just trying to keep up. I was trying to do Laini proud, not let her down and make her rue her decision to take a chance on hiring coddled cityslicker me. And I found that I was pushing myself harder than I really ever had, because I wanted so badly to do well by her. The culture of the farm (funny to call it a culture considering that approximately four people work there) is one in which no one takes sick days, ever, or is late EVER, or goes on vacation between the months of March and December. This is SO DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSED to the job I left, where people routinely showed up late and left early, took weeks-long vacations and generally fucked off because they could. 

I am realizing now that just because I'm working harder than I ever have doesn't mean it's enough. I've only just wrapped my mind around what it means to be a "good" worker. But perhaps because I've grown slightly restless, or slightly dejected, or simply hit a wall of exhaustion from keeping up appearances, I've lost a little of the will to go above and beyond what is asked of me. And I need to step up my motherfucking game. 

Case in point: last week, as I was leaving the cheese room, Laini asked me to give some of the pens their lunchtime hay. I normally don't do this, so she explained that they each get 1 pound of 2nd cut hay. "If you run out, just give them 3rd cut." 

I did not question this, even though it occurred to me to offer to get more 2nd cut down from the hay loft, which I have done plenty of times. I simply accepted that she probably didn't want to make things more complicated. And to be fair, I didn't either.

When I came in later in the evening for milking, Barry chastised me for feeding out third cut to the goats. Of course, I was hurt and offended and angry at being reprimanded for following exact orders. But Barry had a point. While I should not be expected to read minds and certainly don't feel confident enough in my knowledge of animal husbandry to fuck with anything as crucial as what the animals are eating, I DO know how to get hay from the loft and I SHOULD have offered that to Laini, who is pulled in a thousand directions and for whom I suspect casual interactions eat up significantly more energy than the average person. And while I resent being scolded like an incompetent child, I also think I'd have been MORE justified in that resentment if I had truly done my due diligence in that instance, and in all instances. 

For good or for bad, my drive is 100% fueled by a need for Laini's approval, which I've yet to acquire, and probably never will. If not for my singular desire to please her, to make her life easier and make her feel supported, I don't know that I could have maintained this level of laboriousness. But it's a tricky and unsustainable dynamic to be entangled in. My adulation and respect and care for her is almost certainly one-sided. And what happens if or when she gets knocked from the pedestal I've placed her on, as she certainly will be eventually, being that she's human? I need to find a way to harness this commitment and reliability and industriousness and fold it into me, so that it's not merely a conditional state of being. 

It's pretty goddamned obvious I need to find a balance. Much of the time I tell myself that it's ok, preferable even, to have work as my priority right now, being that the scales were previously tipped in the other direction to such an extent that I have a lot to make up for. But I don't think that life works that way, as much as it would be so much simpler to make things into black and white. I'm no longer a rip-roaring party girl but neither am I a Laini, whose intensity has forever canonized her as the patron saint of wackadoo cheese geniuses amongst pretty much everybody in the artisan cheese world. I've started to question whether I really have it in me to live that sort of a life, one where I'll always be too poor and/or busy to travel to Finland or Tahiti or Akron. 

Mainly my doubts and hesitations have almost entirely to with imagined trips to Akron. 

In other words: WHAT IS THIS ALL FOR? WHAT IF I DISCOVER I CAN'T DO IT? OR DON'T WANT TO?  I cannot return shamefaced to Nueva York and resume the life I used to lead. I will die first. Or at the very least be very sad and despondent.  

Life is happening all the time. The future is now. And space is so very very close. 

Help?