What Is Labor Day Really About? Invisible Labor and Rest.

Day 250 of a 365-day commitment to show up and write my truth

In my childhood, Labor Day meant a long weekend — summer ending, school starting, that strange back-to-school energy that always made September feel like a second New Year's Day. Time to get organized. Time to begin again.

Nobody explained where the day actually came from. I knew, the way kids know things, it had something to do with workers — not what it actually cost.

Funny how differently you can understand a holiday once you know what it cost.

Because now, when I hear the word labor, I don't just think about jobs. I think about motherhood, running a household, taking care of people, and building businesses after my daughter goes to sleep — because every day, that's when my workday actually begins. I think about healing, maybe the hardest work I've ever done, with nothing to put on a résumé. And I think about all the work we do every day that nobody really sees.

What Is Labor Day Really About?

Labor Day didn't start as a holiday. It started as a protest. On September 5, 1882, ten thousand New York City workers took unpaid time off — a real risk when you're already paid almost nothing — to march from City Hall to Union Square, demanding better than twelve-hour days, seven-day weeks, and workplaces that injured or killed people with no accountability. Children as young as five or six worked those same conditions instead of sitting in a classroom. It took more than a decade for that march to become a federal holiday, and only after the 1894 Pullman Strike, when federal troops broke a railroad workers' boycott and killed more than a dozen of them. Congress signed Labor Day into law days later — at least partly to calm a country that had just watched its own government kill workers for asking to be treated like human beings.

At its heart, it was never about a day off. It was about people refusing to accept that their lives were worth less than the profit they produced.

I'm not putting my own life in the same category as what those workers survived — the scale isn't close. But there's a throughline: the people doing the most essential work are easiest to write out of the story, and their labor doesn't count until someone forces the world to look. That's the lens I've been seeing Labor Day through this year — not just paid work, but the invisible labor we stopped counting somewhere along the way.

The Invisible Labor That Still Counts

There are so many days I get to the end and think, I didn't get anything done — meaning I didn't get to the business project I'd planned to finish. But if somebody had followed me around with a clipboard, the list would look different: I shopped, cooked, mothered, spoke to clients, made appointments, remembered what everyone needed, solved problems before anyone knew there was one.

And somehow I can still crawl into bed thinking I didn't do enough.

That's a strange thing, isn't it — how much work can happen inside one day while the person doing it still feels like she accomplished nothing.

I don't think I'm alone in that. I have a friend who works full-time at a demanding job and also takes care of her children, her household, and her parents — a thousand other things nobody's counting. There are women everywhere doing some version of this: working, raising kids, remembering birthdays, buying the toothpaste before anyone notices they're out, quietly holding everyone else's life together while trying to hold onto themselves.

And because so much of that work doesn't come with a paycheck, a title, or somebody standing nearby saying "great job," we've somehow convinced ourselves it doesn't count.

Of course it counts.

Motherhood is labor. Caregiving is labor. Healing is labor. Building something from nothing, starting over — all of it is labor. Sometimes the work nobody can see is the work taking the most out of us.

I Didn't Know How to Rest, Even in Hawaii

I learned something about myself in Hawaii years ago — surrounded by one of the most beautiful places in the world, and I couldn't settle down. It took three days before my body understood there wasn't somewhere else I needed to be. The answer was simply... nothing. Just be there. Just breathe.

It sounds ridiculous now — needing three days in Hawaii to learn how to be in Hawaii. I had gotten very good at going, not very good at stopping. Rest can feel uncomfortable at first, when you've spent long enough moving from one responsibility to the next — your body goes still while your mind keeps reaching for what's next.

Even now, I can't tell you I've mastered rest. I'm learning that it isn't always doing nothing — sometimes it's not measuring the moment by what it produces, or sitting somewhere beautiful and letting beautiful be enough instead of turning the hour into a chance to catch up.

I'm still working on that one.

Loving Your Work Shouldn't Require Losing Yourself

Here's the part that matters to me: I love working. This isn't a message where work is the villain and happiness means lying beneath a tree — after fifteen minutes under that tree, I'd be wondering what needed organizing.

I love being a mother, building Karma Penguin, creating something that didn't exist before, cooking for my family, taking care of people. There's labor in my life that exhausts me and fills my heart at the same time — motherhood might be the best example.

The answer isn't a life without work. It's learning that meaningful work and suffering don't have to be the same thing — I don't have to destroy myself to prove I care, or fill every empty space just because it appeared, or complete some invisible quota before I'm allowed to rest.

What This Labor Day Is Teaching Me

Maybe that's what I want to remember about Labor Day now. Yes, I want to remember its history — the workers who came before us, the people who fought to make work more humane. But I also want to look around at the labor happening right now, especially the quiet, invisible kind.

The mother who feels like she "did nothing today" after twelve hours caring for everyone around her. The person caring for aging parents while holding down a job. The entrepreneur working after bedtime because bedtime was the first quiet moment she had all day. The one doing the invisible work of healing, wondering why everyone else seems to be handling life better.

I want to tell them something I'm still learning to tell myself: count it. Count the dinner you made, the appointment you remembered, the child you comforted, the healing, the thing nobody else noticed you carried.

Your life doesn't become valuable only when it's productive enough for somebody else to measure. And when you've done what you can, you're allowed to stop.

You're allowed to stop before you've done everything — there will always be another email, another load of laundry, another list waiting for tomorrow.

Maybe Labor Day can be about honoring all of it — the work we're paid for and the work we aren't, the work we chose and the work life handed us — and the person doing it too: work doesn't have to mean you suffer, and rest is not something you have to earn.

Maybe you've already done enough.

Maybe you were enough before you did any of it.

About the Author | Day 250 of 365

I'm a soul-led coach, entrepreneur, mother, and recovering perfectionist who is still learning that a full life does not have to mean an exhausted one.

These days, my life is a mix of motherhood, marriage, healing, building businesses, managing a household, and occasionally wondering how it's already bedtime when I haven't gotten to half of what I planned.

For a long time, I was very good at counting the things I hadn't finished. I'm trying to become just as good at noticing everything I did.

Motherhood and healing both taught me that the most important work often happens quietly, with no finished product to point to — a child who felt safe in your arms, dinner on the table, finally listening when your body asks you to stop. And sometimes the work is learning you're still worthy when you aren't working at all.

This is Day 250 of a promise I made to myself: to show up and write my truth for 365 days. Some days that truth is funny. Some days it's messy. Some days I discover what I think only after I start writing it down.

Today, I think the truth is this: there is probably more work happening in your life than you give yourself credit for. And you don't have to exhaust yourself before you're allowed to put it down.

Day 250 of 365. Come back tomorrow. I will still be here. 🐧