Nobody Wants to do the Dishes
A meditation on maintenance work, guided by Mierle Laderman Ukeles
There is nothing more infuriating to me than a growling stomach in the middle of a productive hour of writing.
Before we get into it: I’m currently fundraising to help a family of 6 escape the war in Sudan! If you’ve gone out for coffee in the last week, if you have a very specific favorite pen that you loyally buy, if you’ve ever forgotten to cancel a gym membership for months after you stopped using it, I’m going to guess you could probably give Asjad $5 without it being a huge deal!! If not, could you send their link to someone you know?
Okay, I’ll be more honest. I’m annoyed no matter what point in my day my body decides to express its hunger. It’s unreasonable. The domineering insistence that I stop whatever I am doing to source food and occupy my hands with holding a fork and chew and chew and chew (god, the endless chewing) seems like a task assigned to me by a micro-managing CEO who doesn’t understand my true value. There are 500 more interesting and effective things I could be doing with my one wild and precious life. With my brilliant brain! With my creative spirit!
A friend once told me that they saw me as someone for whom “physically humaning is a second language”. I’d never felt more seen. It’s as if all I’m fluent in is ideating and soul searching. The little tasks involved in keeping a human body and a human life running (teeth brushing. car oil changing. doctor visiting) are a vocabulary I have to manually practice and remind myself I know.
In 1969, artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles wrote her Manifesto for Maintenance Art, a vision of an art exhibit where the care work that filled her days as a mother became the art people came to see.
She proposes that everyone wants to do the development work (“pure individual creation; the new; change; progress, advance, excitement, flight or fleeing”), but no one wants to do the maintenance work (“keep the dust off the pure individual creation; preserve the new; sustain the change; protect the progress; defend and prolong the advance; renew the excitement; repeat the flight”).
So instead of creating pieces for the exhibit, she would live there in the museum, and her “work would be the work”. Making food and mopping floors. Changing lightbulbs and taking out trash. Challenging us all to revere what so many of us resent.
Included would be a series of interviews with people of various occupations asking them, among other questions “what is the relationship between maintenance and freedom?” and “what is the relationship between maintenance and life’s dreams?”
I often think of maintenance as existing in conflict with life’s dreams. My sexy sparkly projects are held back from being fully pursued by the obligation of washing my body (over and over), using the toilet and then scrubbing the toilet because I used it, sanitizing the birdfeeders when it’s already been 2 weeks even though I feel like I last did it just yesterday. Even as someone who receives a lot of assistance with care tasks from an incredibly supportive partner, these are the constraints placed around my ability to grow, to create, to aspire.
And yet, the ache in my neck the day after it goes unstretched reminds me that I am only as free as I am well maintained. I am only as expansive as I am cared for.
I am only as free as I am well maintained. I am only as expansive as I am cared for.
Ukeles’ idea for her maintenance work exhibit went through many public iterations. In one performance in 1979 and 1980, she shook the hands of every New York City sanitation employee - all 8,500 of them - and said to them “thank you for keeping New York City alive”. The celebrities who made names in New York owe their fame to 8,500 artists who devote themselves to the craft of lifting trash off of sidewalks.
If we approach our maintenance work in this way - as partner to the art we are passionate about, maybe even as art in and of itself - I wonder if we would not only release some of the resentment we hold towards these tasks but also release some of the shame we feel for not doing them perfectly.
Our culture looks down on those whose work is keeping rooms clean and yet expects all of us to have a perfectly clean room. Degrading the skill needed for the job also makes it embarrassing to not be effortlessly good at it. If we started respecting the level of functioning and intention that it takes to be a well maintained human, we might be able to more cleanly offer support to those of us who require it. Those of us who require it might be more willing to ask for and receive that help.
And, if we saw care tasks as a morally neutral thing to be good or bad at (the same way we don’t call someone a delinquent for not having chosen to be a sculptor), and also as a part of life that - for each of us - will support our dreams and bring our aspirations within reach, we will start to see which pieces of maintenance feel genuinely important for us, even when freed from the expectation that all of it will be important because it’s what respectable people care about.
The purpose of maintenance work is to give us a daily experience of being cared for. Only we can know what truly gives us that experience. Only we can discover it, through our exploration of where we feel needs, and when we feel satiated. It is not as simple as following the societal checklist of six pack abs and sparkling countertops.
I might never have an organized closet. There may always be a pile of clothes on the floor next to my bed. When no one is looking at or commenting on my closets and piles, I do not experience them as burdens. If they are allowed to simply not be a priority, I may have brain space to notice that having a clutter-free office space is. And I might have the energy to pursue that with devotion and passion.
My resentment of my grumbling stomach doesn’t actually do anything to quell its needs. But it does keep me from being able to experience the grounding, the communion with my humanity, that it invites me into. When I release the sacred and the mundane from their forced opposition, I discover them mingling, I see them hand in hand.
As I was considering how to end this, Ian peeked their head into my office to tell me dinner was ready.
“I’ll be there later,” I said “If I send this out after 5pm on a Friday, nobody will read it.”
So you know. Easier said than done.
But I did notice the irony and go eat.
We are just two weeks out from the start of the Week of Delight, a weeklong virtual scavenger hunt for wonder and beauty, hosted by myself and
.We’ll begin on the Summer Solstice (June 20th) with a workshop titled Sunshine Hunters 101, where I’ll lead us through creating our own personal glossaries of delight - an exercise that allows us harness the power of neuroplasticity and retrain our brains to be more receptive towards felt experiences of joy.
Then, participants will receive 7 days of emailed prompts and scavenger hunt lists, to help them go out into their lives and discover where the beauty they’ve been craving has already been in existence, unnoticed, all around them.
And we’ll close with Poetry as a Time Capsule, a workshop led by Giselle. In this space, we will explore using a poetry as a way to practice the art of noticing and to hold a magnifying glass to our moments of beauty, so we can keep record of what can at times be fleeting feelings.
Replays will be available for both workshops for anyone who can’t attend live.
We would love to have you join us. More details at the link below!
This week I read Y/N by Esther Yi, a novel about a woman from Berlin who becomes obsessed with a member of a K-Pop band and moves to Seoul to try and find him. It was surreal, heady, and nothing like I expected, taking place in a universe where the boybands are philosophers as well as sex symbols. At times the pacing dragged, but I enjoyed the exploration of parasocial relationships and all the things that we use to try and give ourselves significance and identity (and what they cost).
Thanks to some recommendations I received after I voiced my pen woes on instagram, I recently started using Pentel Energels and I’m obsessed. I’ve never had a smoother writing experience. One cartridge lasts me about 4 days with my 5-10 page a day journaling habits, so the fact that they’re refillable further solidifies them as the pen of my dreams.
Not quite related to the post, but today I was weeding an area chock-full of invasives in my backyard, and I was trying to go relatively quickly because there’s so many of them, but I kept not getting all the roots, and the pace I was going at meant I wasn’t paying close enough attention to what were invasive roots and what weren’t (granted, sometimes they’re indistinguishable) so I ended up damaging some tree roots. I’d do this, feel bad & apologize to the tree, and then accidentally do the same thing a few minutes later.
I stopped for a sec and a) realized I had my hands in the ground but was completely in my head (like, the birds are always singing around my house and I couldn’t even remember paying attention in the last 20 minutes), and b) remembered you talking about listening to the earth & what she can teach us (I know this isn’t a new idea, you’re just whose words I remembered). I realized she was telling me to slow down, and that she needed me to be patient (which, as a chronically impatient person, was both ironic & needed).
Occasionally I’d speed back up, but then I’d remember that there was no point in trying to remove the invasives to prevent them from damaging the trees if I was just going to damage the trees myself (and then have the weeds grow back bc I didn’t get all the roots), and I’d ground myself again.
Earlier I thought “I feel like Frankie would like to know this”, and a few hours later I got the email that you’d posted, so here it is💗✨
"The purpose of maintenance work is to give us a daily experience of being cared for." Really resonated with me and (as always) your writing's arrival into my life feels very timely. (I am currently sitting on my couch contemplating a messy room and procrastinating on getting started on my evening routine because it feels like a lot of work.)