Honey, there ain’t no through.
I had an interesting conversation with one of our staff this morning.
She is a young, thirty-three-year-old woman who has been working with us for more than three years, growing steadily from apprentice to production manager. She grew up on a coffee farm in a remote Panamanian village, raised by her grandparents. She left home at sixteen, barely literate. Since then, she has lived and worked in Canada, California, Brazil, and Russia, and is now back in her homeland, fully bilingual (and even a bit of Russian!) and building a life that supports herself—and others.
Today, she is caring for those same grandparents as they decline in health—arranging in-home care, scheduling doctor’s appointments, organizing transportation, and contributing significant financial support.
She sighed.
“It’s really difficult doing all this adulting.”
Amen, little sister.
It is.
When I was a child—the oldest of five children born in eight years to a young mother—one of the stories she read to me was The Little Red Hen.
You probably know it.
The industrious little hen asks her friends to help plant the wheat, grind the flour, and bake the bread. No one wants to help.
“Then I’ll do it myself.”
She just keeps going.
But when the warm, yeasty loaves come out of the oven, suddenly everyone is eager to help eat them.
I don’t remember whether she shared the bread.
What I do remember is my mother, barely thirty years old, with children underfoot everywhere, saying at the end of the day, “I feel like the Little Red Hen.”
It took me until I was raising three children of my own while building a career to finally understand what she meant.
As I thought about that conversation this morning, I remembered something else.
One afternoon, when I was a teen complaining—in typical adolescent fashion—about always having to help with chores, I asked my grandmother,
“When will I be through?”
She looked at me, shook her head, and smiled.
“Honey, there ain’t no through.”
And ain’t that the truth?
There is always something else.
So, please excuse me now.
I have to buy milk, pick up the laundry, buy gas for the car, stop by the bank…and get to Tai Chi.
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