Even Mules Rest

My grandmother never sat down.

Not really.

Even when she was sitting, she was folding something, fixing something, planning the next meal or the next worry. Her hands were always moving. She was one of thirteen kids from a village in Haiti where sitting meant lazy, and lazy meant you didn’t make it out.

She made it out.

Made it to Brooklyn, NY where sitting still meant you weren’t grateful enough for what you had.

I remember one summer when all eight of us grandkids ended up at her place. Ages three to eight, crammed into her one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn.

She’d wake up at dawn to start breakfast for all of us, and by the time we were eating, the neighbors would already be knocking, asking if she could watch their kids too.

She never said no.

The apartment smelled like café au lait, whatever she was cooking for lunch, and the Lysol she used to wipe down everything twice a day.

She’d hum while she braided hair and settled fights and made sure everyone ate, but I could see it in her shoulders... the way they stayed tense even when she was sitting.

My mother learned by watching.

When you’re a single mom and your hands are your livelihood, you don’t have time to question what you inherited.

You just inherit it.

She did hair during the day, then went to take care of old folks at night. Home health aide work, helping people bathe, eat, take their medicine. Her hands were always in service to someone else’s body, someone else’s needs.

Sometimes she’d stop and look at me doing my homework, and I could see something in her face I didn’t understand then. Like she was proud and worried at the same time.

"Bef ki bef pran souf," she’d say when she thought I wasn’t listening.

Even mules rest.

But we weren’t mules, and we didn’t rest.

I grew up thinking this was just how women lived. You worked until everything was done, and everything was never done, so you just worked. You took care of everyone else first, and if there was anything left... time, energy, patience... maybe you could have it.

I didn’t question it until I found myself doing the same thing. Working late, saying yes to everything, feeling guilty when I wasn’t busy. Treating my body like it was something I had to apologize for, like taking a nap was stealing.

I was painting one afternoon, actually painting, not just thinking about painting, and I realized I felt guilty about it. About enjoying something that wasn’t productive. About sitting still long enough to make something just because I wanted to.

That’s when I knew.

This thing that got passed down to me... this need to prove I deserved space by never taking up too much of it. It wasn’t helping me…

It was eating me alive.

So I painted her.

This woman who finally stops.

Who sits down in the middle of all the chaos and says, not today.

Not because she’s given up, but because she’s figured out that running yourself into the ground isn’t love.

It’s not strength. It’s just fear wearing a different outfit.

I painted her surrounded by all the colors and patterns of everything that needs doing, everything that’s calling for attention. But she’s not listening. She’s just being.

When I look at her, I think about my grandmother’s hands, always moving. My mother’s face under the salon lights, then later in those dim hallways of strangers’ homes.

The way tired becomes a way of being, passed down like recipes or family stories.

I think about all the women I know who apologize for being sick, who work through pain, who schedule their own needs around everyone else’s calendar.

I think about what it means to break something that feels like love but acts like a chain.

My grandmother survived by never stopping.

My mother survived by never stopping.

But I want more than survival.

I want to live.

Not the version of living where you earn rest by working yourself to the bone first. Not the version where taking care of yourself comes last, if it comes at all.

The version where you remember that mules rest, and you’re not a mule.

The version where you sit down because you want to, not because you’ve collapsed.

The version where strength includes the wisdom to stop.

I don’t know if my grandmother would have understood this painting. Maybe she’d see it as wasteful, all this time spent on something that doesn’t pay bills or fix problems.

But maybe she’d see herself in it.

The woman she could have been if someone had told her that surviving and living aren’t the same thing.

My mother is 73 now, retired. Maybe she’ll stare at this painting long enough to understand my desire to do something different. That look in her face when she watched me do homework... maybe that was her hoping I’d figure out what she couldn’t.

Maybe that’s how it works.

Each generation gets a little closer to the thing the one before couldn’t reach.

My daughter will never learn that love looks like working yourself to nothing…

“When She Finally Rests”, acrylic on 22×28 canvas. Artwork by Tarra Lu