Imagining the value of care

Care is essential to all of us, how can we make sure it is recognized for what it is worth?

For more than a decade, I’ve wondered how to create a meaningful career. While spending my days caring for my children, my home, my garden, my family, I’ve had trouble shaking the feeling that I should be doing more. Don’t good feminists have careers, earn income, and show their children that they can do anything?

I ponder how to create a career while making time for writing and creativity and tending to the life around me. I have a partnership with my husband that ends up leaving a lot of the unpaid work to me while he works to earn the money we need. This is one of the ways that we care for each other and our family, but it is hard to shake the feeling that doing this care work isn’t enough.

I want all of us to feel our inherent value regardless of what we do or how we spend our days. But care work, especially, is diminished and devalued in much larger ways. Paid care workers, like teachers, nurses, hospitality workers, and many others, often don’t make a living wage, despite being absolutely essential to the the functioning of our society. Systems of support are being brutally demolished right now, but even before this, programs like the Affordable Care Act, universal child care, and paid family leave have been treated as handouts rather than important elements of a functioning society. Food and housing assistance so stigmatized that people are hesitant to access the help they need.

In her Culture Study newsletter, Anne Helen Petersen recently wrote that most of the things that make life survivable are not profitable. But, for a long time, Americans agreed that there was value in the arts, in National Parks, libraries, scientific research, and education, and we elected officials who allocated money and created programs to support this. We also believed there was at least some value in caring for others, in funding Social Security, Medicaid, USAID, and other programs that might not directly benefit us, but that are important for building a safer and healthier world.

Now, American individualism and ongoing disconnection from our communities makes it easier for people to question the purpose of paying for something they don’t need, want, or directly benefit from. Government programs and services are defunded and reduced, providing less care and fewer benefits to those who need it. Eventually many of these services will be privatized, reducing access and increasing what individuals must spend to bridge the gap.

Caring doesn’t make billionaires. Oil companies, tech companies, and the stock market demonstrate that the opposite is true; not caring about people and planet are necessary if you want to make a lot of money. When you believe that money and power are the things that matter most, it is easy to disregard the tenuous threads of care that help our society function.

Lane Anderson, from Matriarchy Report, writes,

Care is often unpaid, made to be invisible, and often unrecognized in our society right now. Care is not part of the language that powerful men use or share. Most of their actions seek to bury it—make us believe that it’s worthless, or worse yet…that it just doesn’t really exist.

But care creates the intimacy that is the glue between us, across generations; the thing that has lifted us across the span of time to the current moment where we still feed and clothe each other, cheer each other up, teach each other, dance with each other, keep it all going in spite of everything.

This beautiful essential glue that adds so much goodness and worth to our lives begins with the small interactions and the ways we give and help to each other daily. A text message, planting seeds, bringing cup of coffee, getting that thing for her, putting a meal on the table, reading to him. Care is often so ordinary we hardly notice it but grows beyond our homes and close relationships as we try to help people when they need it and offer support even if they don’t.

In a recent conversation, Anya Kamentz and Lisa Sibbett talk about cultivating a care ethic and remembering, “This is our future and everybody has a stake in that future.” They discuss the way that caring for a child can shift our perspective from individual importance to valuing more than just our close loved ones. It can grow into the understanding that our choices and actions can affect many future generations.

I wonder if it is possible for care to be the antidote to so much greed and destruction? I keep thinking of the libraries full of stories of warm hearted people who can feel and love battling the cold, heartless empires motivated by money and power. Sadly it won’t be easy for Elon Musk’s heart to grow three sizes or for Donald Scrooge to wake up changed by all the Christmas ghosts, but these stories are reminders that the struggle of care verses greed happens again and again.

Care is a deeply appreciated story book ethic, but is also seen as soft, sweet, and often sentimental characteristic that is not associated with power. It can seem trite to express how much meaning and value care really does have. But when we remember that care is not a commodity, not something to be hoarded like a billionaire’s wealth, maybe we can at least consider that caring can be a powerful commitment. Maybe we can begin to imagine the value of care as that essential glue, as work that is worth just as much any paycheck, as something that can be a world changing force.

Right now, thousands of people care enough to make daily calls to their senators and representatives asking them to do better. Farmers are growing food and tending the land, grandparents are playing games with grandchildren, school bus drivers are making sure kids have someone waiting at the bus stop. Doctors are trying to find the right diagnosis, friends are laughing together, someone is picking up plastic from the beach, parents are lying next to their children until they have fallen asleep.

Caring may or may not come naturally. It may be as easy as cuddling with my daughter when she wakes up in the morning or tedious and annoying like hauling the full compost bucket out to the bin at the back of my yard. It might be scary and vulnerable like asking for, or offering, help. It’s not always beautiful or noteworthy and it doesn’t often feel powerful but maybe we can acknowledge and appreciate the value of care because we are doing it every day.

I’d love to hear about ways that caring feels valuable to you. If you’d like to share you can leave a comment or reply to this email.

Warmly,
Anna

P.S. I really enjoyed this piece offering the important perspective of two moms of disabled children.