Letter to Dad on Father's Day

Dear Dad,                                                                                                     Father's Day, 2020

Michael Amos Hall, my father, at work, where he often was, 1987ish .

You have been dead for just over 30 years now, since March 15, 1990. You died ten days before your 53rd birthday. Sometimes, I would hear Mom say "work killed Dad"; it seemed to be a trend in our family to blame outside forces for deaths: I heard Mom say that her mom was "killed by that modern monstrosity the neighbors built next door".

Besides a deep abiding love of puns and an affectionate nature, workaholism is one of the characteristic I inherited from you. I used to find comfort in a the false control overworking can bring me. Over the last fifteen years in particular, as I have practiced and taught Buddhism, alongside writing and photography, I have found the insidious grasp of overworking to help calm any doubts I've had about the worth of my work and myself. But I have also learned to push back and recover from overworking, as best I can, one day at a time.

You were a different generation, and you were male. You grew up in a house with two women; one of whom was able-bodied and single mothering you and her sister, the other woman, with crippling Rheumatoid Arthritis. So certainly, you got a lesson from Alberta, your mom, my grandma, about working hard - it was necessary for survival. Your father, Amos, whom you write about in the few journals of yours I have found, was intensely overbearing, a distant man, 100 miles away who worked (and lived, it seemed) as a judge. You had it modeled from both lines in your family.

My mom didn't work most of her adult life, and the few jobs she had early on in adulthood were adjacent to yours: scanning Fortran cards or filling out paperwork and/or correcting papers with you. By the time us three kids came along, you were living the home-owning, single income, three kids life promised to white middle class families. Except you seemed to believe you still had to prove yourself.


I have also believed I have had to prove myself. Capitalism, of which I learned about the evils in part from you in direct lessons, makes me question my worth, because I work for myself, because I don't make or contribute to widgets. Whiteness, which I bargain with, like all white woman, keeps me propped up in my trade; my type have become the model of the "wellness industry," which Dr. Angela Rose Black deeply addresses in her question: "Who gets to be well?" And Patriarchy, I have come to see, runs through my bones as an entrepreneur, as a female self-employed person (which makes me both employee and boss) and as the adult daughter of a workaholic father.

I know you loved your work, teaching computer skills to those who truly needed them at a local tech college. That can co-exist alongside your work exploiting you. Mom's blaming work for your death aside, they did exploit you; you never earned enough and had to constantly prove your worth to them in order to stay employed as you aged and the computer industry workers got younger. You loving your work also co-existed alongside your escaping into it, in order to hide from struggles: in your relationship to Mom, who battled mental health challenges; with three kids born within ten years; with your own personal demons, many of whom were never named, much less treated, because of you being born right after the Depression.

I also love my work, and that co-exists alongside my tendency towards workaholism. I tend to hide from personal struggles by overworking. I tend to cram in just-one-more-email in order to shore up my sense of worth by helping others. This has only been exasperated by the COVID-19 pandemic (oh, I can't explain that to you in this letter; let's just say 2020 has been a hard one!), and the need for me to offer all I can online, which messes with my vestibular system.

I remember early on in teaching dharma telling a more senior teacher that I could think during meditation if it was planning a dharma talk. They laughed at me, and I saw through the fallacy immediately - the way in which the drive to make, do, and serve crept even into the work that has played a large part in healing me from trauma, including losing you at age 12.

For years I have struggled to set boundaries between work and life, as I work at or from home, and my emails and social media - oh, wait, you don't know about that, but it would take a whole other letter to explain social media! You get the idea. I watched you bring home papers to grade, and grew up loving the scent of Elmer's Rubber Cement as you spread copies of receipts and articles across the dining room table, reassembling them for your students to read or for tax filing. Even today, when I walk into my office at home, which has a copier built into the printer (can you believe it?), I smell the books and papers and it takes me right back to you. I turn to my shrine, also in my work space, and smile at my protectors and lineage.

I have taken today off work, Dad, in honor of you.

I added your photo to my shrine.

I honor the hard work you did - what was necessary and also what was addictive - in your efforts to support our family. I also honor the way my own strong work ethic supports my small family, and also challenges me to make sure to continuously prioritize self-care, alongside both compulsory and compulsive work.

I promise to do the best I can to heal and heal our ancestral line of these legacies.

May you continue to rest in peace.