The Unfiltered · Monday · No. 8
Sitting outside again tonight, second beer, and my head’s back on the same loop it’s been stuck on for weeks.
My mom.
Forty-some years of work. Every shit job that needed doing, she did it, no complaints, or complaints nobody heard. Every single year came with the same quiet promise that next year would ease up. Next year never eased up. She is getting close to the age where this is supposed to slow down, and it has not slowed down one inch. No cushion. No safety net. Nothing waiting for her on the other side of all this except more of the same — because nobody ever built her a way out.
Including me.
Not yet, anyway.
I keep seeing this one image, on repeat, like it’s stuck in the projector. Her, years back, coming home after a double, still in her work clothes, sitting down for exactly four minutes before getting up to start on dinner because that was just what happened next. Nobody clapped for that. Nobody was ever going to. It was just Tuesday, and then it was just Wednesday, and it kept being just some day of the week for forty years straight.
I don’t have some clean insight to hand you tonight. What I’ve got is rage. Ugly, undirected rage, the kind with no face on it, because there isn’t a person to actually blame here. Just decades. Just a system that ran her hard and never once stopped to ask if she’d had enough.
Epictetus has this whole idea — some things are up to us, some things aren’t. I know it. I’ve read it a hundred times, written about it on this exact site. Tonight I want to put my fist through that idea, because right now it just sounds like a polished way of saying sit still and accept it, and I am not fucking ready to accept it.
Marcus wrote himself a similar line once, something like — you could leave this life right now, so let that decide what you do and say. I used to read that as permission to let go. Tonight it reads like a deadline. Like a reason to move faster, not a reason to make peace with what hasn’t moved yet.
My mother’s exhaustion is not some cosmic fact I’m supposed to make peace with. It’s a problem. It has an actual solution. The solution is money and time, and I don’t have enough of either yet. I know the theory says to separate what’s up to me from what isn’t. Tonight the theory can wait outside. I’m not in the mood to be reasonable about my own mother.
That’s the whole of it. That’s the entire sentence.
Not enough. Yet.
I hate that sentence.
Here’s the part I’m not going to dress up, because I said I’d say it straight: I know there are a million people in her exact spot. Millions of mothers who gave everything to jobs that gave nothing back, who are standing right now in some kitchen at the end of another double, four minutes of sitting down before the next thing starts. I know that the way you know any statistic — correctly, distantly, uselessly. Some other night I might actually feel something about all of them.
Tonight I don’t give a single fuck about the million other people.
Tonight there’s one person, and she’s mine, and pretending otherwise just to sound like a bigger man than I am right now would be its own kind of lie. This isn’t an essay about labor and dignity and the working class in general. It’s about my mother, specifically, still tired, still not okay, while I sit outside with a beer and not enough yet to fix any of it for her.
She never once asked me to fix it. Not one time. That’s almost the worst part. If she’d asked, I could aim the anger at the asking. She just kept going, the way she always has, like the exhaustion was weather — something that just happens to a person, not something anyone was ever supposed to be responsible for.
I’m not interested tonight in the version of this where I’ve turned the anger into something useful, where I’m more disciplined now, where this becomes forward motion by the end of the page. Maybe that’s true on some other night. Tonight it’s just anger, sitting here with nowhere to go, aimed at a situation that doesn’t have a person attached to it — which might be the worst kind there is.
I don’t have the ending where I’ve solved it.
I have the beer, and the mother I can’t fix yet, and the fact — the only fact I actually trust tonight — that I’m not done trying.
Not yet.
The Unfiltered runs every Monday — no lessons, no answers. Just what’s true.
