the church lady

Slowly emerging from a post weekend stupor. Feel like I worked solidly from Last Tuesday through till Sunday without pausing for breath or to put on a better pair of shoes. 

Dreamt just now that I was lecturing someone about the human capacity for work. “With each child,” I explained to someone whom I pretty sure I know but whose face has disappeared with the dream, “you will be able to work so much harder.” I think I was waving something around, like a rolling pin or some car keys. But this weekend wasn’t about having children and the Sisyphean work of mothering them so much as it was about being a good old fashioned, hard working Church Lady. One of those ladies who sweeps the floor and makes photocopies and bakes a cake and answers the church phone and listens to people in crisis and rummages around for a nice baptismal table. “Are you the First Lady here?” a charming young child asked me at the Harvest Dinner last Wednesday. “Oh! no no, I’m a Church Lady, not a First Lady” ‘and I know which is better,’ I whispered to myself as I brought that good child some more pie. I’m sure a First Lady is liable to work awfully hard and do a lot of interesting things. But Church Ladies put in solid hours of good labor. When you’re young you’ve had enough after a few minutes. But work brings endurance and endurance brings hope and hope is not a disappointment. You keep thinking you have reached the end, but then it turns out you can go just a little further before this happens.