Get People Talking

plus, your paid caregiving stories and celebrating 70 years of marriage

In your Death, Sex & Money podcast feed this week, hear my conversations at Tribeca Festival about the art of getting people to open up, with Kara Swisher and Dr. Orna Guralnik of Couples Therapy (with her dog Nico).

I did some interviewing gymnastics in this one and also came away with some new techniques to connect in conversations. Listen! It was a really fun show.

Your Paid Caregiving Stories

We have been collecting stories from listeners and readers who are or have worked as paid caregivers for an upcoming Death, Sex & Money episode. Many of you have written about the wild mix of love and power dynamics — especially around money.

This recent email from a listener tracks what small children pick up about all this and how they try to make sense of a beloved caregiver also being paid staff of their family:

I have been a full time caregiver in New York City for just over ten years….What I find personally the hardest is how, on a daily basis, I witness my class dependency and a disparity that surrounds and impacts the joys of childcare….When I first begin working with a family the children are usually around two years old; often they may have an older sibling(s) as well. I noticed children between the ages of 2- 4 never question my relationship with them. As these children are in the upper class, they don’t often see or experience the lack or need for money. They don’t know what it is like to live without it. (To them, the normal is having two homes.) They grow up not really even knowing the existence of money until they begin to learn about it in school. 

So naturally, their understanding of my relationship to them is one out of love. To them, the reason I am there is because I love them. It isn’t until the child gets a bit older — I notice this happening around the age of 5 or 6 — when they start to engage with the world around them more deeply. As that curiosity to understand life’s complexities grows, the nature of my relationship to them often comes into question as well. Once at bedtime, a five year old asked me if I enjoyed working for their family. Another time (also at bedtime) this same child told me “I’ll never let my family fire you” then goes on to list all of their favorite nannies (which was myself and their previous ones before me). As awkward as these moments can be internally for me, I try to embrace their curiosity and understand they are just trying to make sense of the world around them.

As these children try to learn about class, I hope one day they will come to understand their privilege in our society. Once they asked me “How come you don’t have a big house like us? Is it because you’re poor?” In this I answered as generally and truthfully as I could. “No (name), I’m not poor, but yes the house I live in is small because it’s all I can afford” (then I tried to go down a tangent of explaining the difference between owning and renting and how most people in the city can't afford to own homes, although I’m not sure how much of this they understood). It’s moments like these that both fascinate and sadden me. 

…As a caregiver (I actually prefer the term nanny) I can only hope that one of these seemingly small moments will be a seed planted for them. Long after they’ve forgotten their early childhood years with me that maybe this seed will grow into something bigger. I hope these children will grow into adults who do not take their privilege for granted, maybe even use their privilege to help others climb up the ladder that they have always stood on top of. 

— Name withheld, 34, New York City

We’re still collecting stories of paid caregiving, whether for kids or adults. If you’ve done this work, tell us about your relationships with the people you’ve cared for, and the people who pay you. Record a voice memo and send it to us at deathsexmoney@slate.com.

And speaking of caregivers, in last week’s episode, filmmaker and actor Mark Duplass talked about buying a home for his family’s nanny and how they approached conversations about that financial relationship. Listen here.

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Back here in Cody, Wyoming, where I am for the summer with my family, I’ve been thinking a lot about place and character. There’s an exhibit at the wonderful museum here, the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, of the photographs of James Bama. Bama was a New York City-based illustrator and artist who moved west at 42 and spent the rest of his life photographing and painting the people who lived here, including Richard Williams and others active in the American Indian Movement of the 1970s.

I love the photographs in this exhibit and how the people in them capture the essence of the American West in the late 20th century. But unlike a lot of Western art, you don’t feel like any of people are play-acting a Western story in a costume. Bama’s photographs catch people at work on a ranch, hanging out on a main street, at home, at the rodeo — and each person is portrayed with interested dignity.

I was also struck by the images below — ones I snapped from the exhibit catalog — of Ben Marrowbone, watching the rodeo in Cody in 1983. He was being honored as one of the last surviving performers of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show.

I’d never seen a picture of Marrowbone before, but his great-granddaughter Anpo Kuwa Win told me about him in an interview for my book Let’s Talk About Hard Things. “You have to educate them,” Anpo said he taught her about white people. “Because these are the people who will make decisions that will affect your children.”

Anpo lives on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming, where she’s a school librarian. You may also remember her from this 2022 episode about teachers’ experiences after Covid, when she described creating a tea time ritual for her students so they’d have a new reason to gather.

If you’re looking for a reason to plan a last-minute summer road trip to Wyoming, the James Bama photography exhibit is up through August 4.

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Finally, one more dispatch from Wyoming. Last weekend, the town of Cody gathered in the city park for ice cream and big band music to celebrate the 70th wedding anniversary of Ann and Al Simpson, whom Death, Sex & Money listeners know well.

hanging tree decorations at The Simpsons' anniversary celebration

The local paper, The Cody Enterprise, ran a great profile of Ann and Al and their marriage, including this story of Al’s hospitalization for depression early in their marriage when he was serving in the military in Germany:

That’s pure Ann Simpson: always reminding us that you’ve got to reach out when you’re struggling and to not let your pride get in the way. Happy 70th Anniversary, Al and Ann. I was so glad to get to be there.

Until next week,

Anna

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Listen to our latest Death, Sex & Money episodes

6/25 Kara Swisher and Orna Guralnik on How To Get People Talking

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6/11 My Shy Bladder

6/4 I Was Afraid of Losing Myself to Motherhood. I Found Myself Instead.

5/28 Why You’re Not Having Sex

5/21 The Night Magic Mushrooms and Jam Bands Helped Me Walk Again

5/15 My Eating Disorder Turned Into an Obsession with Money

5/7 Filling the Health Care Gap (and Filling Lips!) in Appalachia