Pulling on our one thread

Is not-enough enough?

I recently stood on my porch, barefoot, an early-Spring wind tickling my cheeks and hair, talking to my friend Patricia. Besides owning my favorite local coffee shop, Patricia is a fellow homeschooler whose three children are friends with my children (she was standing in front of my porch, in fact, to pick up her daughter, who belongs to the weekly homeschool book club I host for eight 8-12 year old girls). She also happens to be someone who is continually, perpetually, impressively involved in mutual aid efforts; every time I talk to her she is making and distributing food at our local soup kitchen, hosting free English classes, collecting backpacks and school supplies for families who can’t afford them, or bringing coats and coffee to the migrants our city has indecorously decided to house in tents on an abandoned air field in the dead of winter. She’s also doing this while pursuing a graduate degree in theology.

Basically: she’s one of those people I’m in awe of, one of those people I aspire to be more like.

“I’m hosting an Iftar dinner tonight and I don’t really know what I’m doing,” she confided.

“Oh, that’s easy,” I said, “Lots of food and space to pray. Done.”

“Okay, that I can do,” she said.

“Patricia,” I said, “You’re always feeding someone. It’s really just so incredible.”

“Well, it’s a thing I can do,” she said, “you know? There’s so much that needs to be done, and for a while I wanted to do it all — I was trying to get involved in immigration reform, and learn as much as I could about law, but I don’t actually know how to do that the way I know how to feed people. And I’m starting to wonder if that’s just okay?”

I thought of her a few weeks earlier, when I had stopped into the coffee shop, and saw her disconsolately sitting at a table; it turned out she had been distributing food, coats, and cold medicines at Floyd Bennett field earlier that day and the cops had come and threatened to arrest her for “drug dealing.” And that wasn’t even the start of her troubles that morning. The group she had been organizing with, and who had more experience with distributions at this location, had been late; she’d started setting up alone, in the wrong place and eventually needed to move; the mood among the people searching through shoes and coats was chaotic and tense. She looked totally defeated. I knew that feeling well, that feeling of trying to do a little good in the world and instead having it just reveal how much more work there is to be done. I also knew, intimately, that feeling of people’s need being so much bigger and vital and urgent than what I can offer, knew the experience of filling community fridges and having people grab food out of hands faster than we could load it, my kids wide eyed, and offering cabbages to those who spoke to them in languages they didn’t understand. Patricia and I had talked, that day, of abolition; of feeling discouraged by how big the work was and how beyond reform all the systems and institutions of our lives are, how badly we wanted to build something new.

Now, I stood on my porch and widened my eyes at her. “It’s definitely okay. It’s your thread — the one you specifically can pull that destabilize the whole oppressive structure. And honestly, I’m starting to wonder if it’s the most important thread, tending to these immediate, real, tangible needs. Taking literal care of each other. I kind of wonder if it’s the only work to do because none of the structural stuff is actually going to change without a revolution, and leading one isn’t exactly my skill set, you know?”¹

She laughed then. “Well, your skill set is enough. You do so much, helping babies be born, and your activism, and your writing! Your writing. It does so much.”

“I don’t know about that,” I said, feeling my cheeks flush with the color of someone who feels they have convinced people of something that isn’t true², and quickly moving on to talk of scheduling logistics and birthdays.

There is so much to be said about that flush, and that change in topic. Because the truth is, while I so easily offered Patricia reassurances about the value of “small-scale, embodied” work, I am often lost in doubt about its value when it’s me who is doing it. Just that morning I had been texting with my sister Saadia, about how she and I have been mobilizing during the last six months of genocide; much of her efforts have been in local politics and organizing neighborhood events, and mine has been, in my words:

“swimming through various spaces recruiting for actions and putting people in touch with other people who can help them organize — I guess that [making connections] is just a skill I have, and I should feel good about it but I’m never in a meaningful organizing role myself. Which maybe is fine, but I always feel like I should be doing more.”

I continued, “I always bump into this feeling now, with midwifery — it’s so all encompassing and feels so deeply political and hard in an embodied way — so my time and energy for other work is limited…it also makes me money, so is it inherently corrupted by that? And then I wonder, too, ‘am I letting myself off the hook by using midwifery as an excuse for not doing more?”

“Are you feeling like it’s not ‘enough’ to be helping people bring their babies into the world in radically liberating ways?” Saadia responded. “Like, I want to be sure I’m understanding this 😅.”

The answer is yes. I do, quite perpetually, feel like it’s not enough.