The Eldest Daughter’s New Year’s Resolution |
This year, for the first time, she didn’t make the family calendar. And she could already see what was coming. In a few months, her mom would text and ask who’s hosting the Easter holiday or what’s the plan for a Memorial Day weekend get-together. And she’d smile and text back, “I’m not sure—I haven’t checked with anyone.” How would it go? She wasn’t sure yet, but it feels like a good start. The world was not going to collapse if she failed to coordinate every holiday. Plans will be made somehow, by someone, probably. But it won’t be her, the eldest daughter. She’s taking an intentional step back. It felt strange at first, but it also felt like taking a big, deep breath. It felt like a gift to herself. She was choosing to believe that being a good daughter doesn’t have to mean being the family’s default CEO.
Many daughters can relate to this feeling, though it may be the firstborn who knows it all too well. It’s the preparedness of thinking about family before anyone else; it’s a quiet vigilance of holding together the things that nobody else will. It’s the unpaid labor of doing daughtering. Daughtering is the effort that women put into making and sustaining family connection, and its labor and resource requirements are often invisible to everyone who benefits from it (Alford, 2019). The muscle memory of being an eldest daughter and managing everyone and everything is a well-worn role with a script.
Daughtering itself is a form of labor related to the deceptively........