Happy Labor Day. Now Let's Talk About OUR Labor.

Happy Labor Day.

Except we need to be honest, because the labor they are celebrating today is not the labor we have been doing for the last 30 years.

They mean the 9-to-5, clock-in, hard-hat, paid-time-and-a-half kind of labor.

We mean the other kind. The invisible kind. The kind that never clocks out, never gets a paycheck, and never gets a long weekend.

The mental load. The remembering. The planning, the packing, the pre-thinking, the pre-feeling for everyone in the house before anyone else even realizes something needs to be done.

All day, everyday, therapist, mother, maid. Nurse, then a servant. Just an appendage that lives to serve. Sound familiar?

We remember the dentist appointments, the birthdays, the allergies, the size that kid wears now, where the other sock went, and what we have to defrost for dinner tomorrow. We are the family calendar, the IT department, the emotional support human, and the keeper of where the good scissors are.

And we do it while working our actual, paid jobs. We do it with hot flashes. We do it on no sleep. We do it while being told we are "so organized" like it is a compliment and not a trauma response.

This is labor. Unpaid, unseen, uninterrupted labor. And if we added up the hours, we would have retired by 2004.

So today, for Labor Day, I am not celebrating hustle. I am acknowledging our hustle. The kind that keeps entire households, families, and workplaces from falling apart because we remembered the thing that no one else remembered to remember.

If you are tired today, it is because you have been working two full-time jobs for decades and only one of them has ever shown up on a W-2.

Put the to-do list down. Let someone else figure out dinner. Let the laundry sit there and contemplate its own existence. You have labored enough.

Keep thriving.

Tracy 💗

💭 Reflection: What is one piece of invisible labor you are officially putting down for Labor Day weekend - and who can pick it up instead of you?