A few nights ago, my AI assistant told me to Stop.
We had made thirty decisions together. She warned I was about to hit exhaustion. What?! Not my AI assistant earning her keep by looking out for me! I could have kept going. Of course I could have kept going, that is the exact problem. And just because I can doesn't mean that I should...but I did.
Before her warning we had spent about two hours hammering out and refining a marketing strategy I'd previously had written by my brand strategist. Mind you, this strategy had already taken about 20 hours of my time. But perfectionism snuck in, like it always does, and I felt like it needed a liittttlllleee more tweaking. Just small tweaks. So I turned to her and then she turned to me and told me I needed to chill out. Okayyy girl I see you. SO, after about three more prompts, I stopped.
I was working late at night. My daughter was sleeping and my husband was out working. I had my thoughts and the time to myself, so I decided to take advantage.
Long before this productive meeting with my girl AI assistant, I had already made a million decisions about work, childcare, and managing the household. Did you know there is a limit to how many decisions a person can make in a day before something inside them breaks? I do. Want to know why? It is because I have hit that limit more times than I can count. I have kept going every time. I don't hold this truth up like a prized medal.
The reality is that I am the daughter of immigrants who modeled a lifetime of giving. My parents came to the United States, independent of each other, and built a life for themselves and their families long before my brothers and I were a part of the picture. They created a long chain of people for whom they sent money, provided resources, and eventually helped navigate to this country. They labored in factory jobs, long hours, and still provided everything they could and then some. They provided even when there was nothing to provide. To sum it up, they are gangster AF. And I have spent my life confusing that inheritance with a mandate to be the same kind of gangsta. A tired, sleepy gangsta.
Jasdomin Santana wrote that immigrant sacrifice has a sound. Coffee brewing before sunrise. Factory shifts while the city sleeps. That sound was the soundtrack of my childhood. My father's keys at 4 a.m. My mother's coffee before anyone else was awake. The sentence pero na', adelante carrying entire families forward, including mine.
My mother grew up as one of my grandfather's many children. He had four different households of kids. Twenty-six kids in total. And somehow he managed to provide for all of them, just enough to get by. My grandfather was a tobacco farmer. And yet, if a neighbor showed up around la comida del mediodía o la cena, they were never turned away. Quite the opposite. They were offered a plate and sent home full and happy. My grandfather and his homemaker wife, my dear Mamá, would not have had it any other way. They weren't well off, but they believed in the spirit of sharing with whoever needed it, even if giving took from them. And because of their generosity, I am certain some of those neighborly visits were strategic. I could never blame a hungry soul for doing what they have to do.
Mom always tells me that if they had one chocolate bar, they had to split it as many ways as there were children at the table. What?! Can you imagine the whole crew was over? We are going to split a candy bar twenty-six ways? ¿Pa qué? Mejor no me den na'. But I digress...
She grew up with a selflessness, a relentless giving of herself and her resources, that was instilled in her too deeply. It meant working until she was moving on hopes and dreams, never taking a moment to rest. Working to provide for anyone and everyone that needed, and voltiando la cara, turning her face away, when providing meant she was the one put out for doing so. ¿Qué se va a hacer? Just keep going. And keep dancing. For any and every occasion, keep dancing. Dancing on top of enduring.
I can make lists of what first-generation, oldest daughterhood looks like. I can tell you better what it feels like. Deep cultural pride entangled with running on fumes to satisfy everyone, get everything done. The beautiful thing and the costly thing are the same thing. The heaviness of a list of never-ending expectations weighing on my being, and the anxiety of telling someone, or even myself, that I couldn't get to it today.
Here's the joke: I love helping in every way I can, being present for those that I love, but I never learned to put the boundaries in place that protect my mind, body, and spirit. The aftermath: a deep malaise that cocoons my whole body for days following the overextension. I do this, over and over, and while I recognize the pattern, it is hard to shake.
Mommy embodied the work ethic but never, ever the rest.
I grew up with the duality of Dominican and Western culture. The latter doesn't put much importance on the sacrifices of a woman and honors hustle culture over balance. I'll sleep when I'm dead. You snooze, you lose. Or, put more eloquently by Nasir Jones, "I never sleep, 'cause sleep is the cousin of death." All three are rooted in the idealism of value only realizing itself through the work you do. And for what? To chase a dream, handed to you, to fit neatly into a box of what success is supposed to look like. And while Dominican culture prioritizes family ties and joint advancement, I know it is not any better when that advancement requires a harmful self-sacrifice. The kind I watched my parents and tías live out, and often, the kind I have exhibited myself.
There is a word for what I was raised inside, and I have spent most of my life avoiding it because it sounds dramatic. We weren't allowed to be dramatic growing up. Of course, we all are. Matter of fact, one of the family group chats is called "The Dramatics." The word is martyrdom. Not the saints-and-stained-glass kind. The quiet kind. The kind that looks like a grandmother feeding a stranger from a pot that was already not enough. The kind that looks like a mother splitting a chocolate bar between every child at the table and calling it love. The kind that looks like me, at midnight, on prompt thirty-three, certain I could keep going.
I have mistaken depletion for devotion my whole life.
I want to write it again so I have to look at it. I have mistaken depletion for devotion my whole life. This has shown up for me in the shadows of my own self-deprecation when I couldn't contribute in the ways I thought I wanted to, when I mistakenly thought my self-worth was implicitly tied to monetary and physical output. When I associated rest with failure. If they could do it so selflessly and make it look so easy, why does this feel so hard? I learned it from women I love. I learned it from women whose names I carry. And the cost of that lesson is not theoretical. It lived in my mother's body, it lives in mine, and if I do not name it, it will live in my daughter's.
My mother is the most generous person I know. She is also a woman who was taught, before she could consent to the teaching, that her worth was measured by what she could give away. Both of those things are true. I do not get to keep the first one and pretend the second one didn't happen. To honor her honestly means saying both. That her giving built me, and that her giving cost her something I am only now beginning to count. She handed me an inheritance of unbelievable love. She also handed me a blueprint for self-erasure dressed up as virtue. I am keeping the love. I am putting the blueprint down.
This is what I have decided, sitting here in the quiet my daughter left behind when she went to sleep: I am going to let her see me rest. On purpose. Not collapse. Rest. Not the malaise that cocoons me for three days after I've given everything to everyone. Rest. I want her to grow up watching a woman who stops before the fumes. Who closes the laptop at prompt thirty. Who knows that a chocolate bar split between every child at the table is a beautiful story and a story about scarcity, and that she does not have to live inside scarcity to prove she loves the people who did.
That rest is the most beautiful way to honor oneself.
My grandmother fed strangers from a pot that was not enough. My mother split chocolate bars and shifts and decades. I am writing this essay instead of answering three more emails. It is a smaller act than theirs. That is the point. The work I am trying to do is to make my acts of love smaller and my acts of self-keeping larger, until the math evens out and my daughter inherits a different equation.
A machine told me to stop. I listened. I am writing it down so my daughter learns this from the example set by her mother.
