How the gauntlet of caregiving changes us

a new episode about the magic amidst the tedium

Jun 05, 2024

NEW YORK, NEW YORK: I’m doing a live show in New York City on June 11 with tech journalist legend Kara Swisher, comparing and contrasting our very different interview styles. To prepare, I’ve been listening to her bestseller Burn Book: A Tech Love Story, and reading this Washington Post piece from 1989 about moving her father’s remains back home to West Virginia, 20 years after his death. If you can be in New York next Tuesday, you won’t want to miss this. Get your tickets.

I got word about Elissa Strauss’ book during the month when I was not working. Or rather, during the month that I was not employed as Death, Sex & Money moved from WNYC to Slate. Around that time, I was playing around with the language I used for that time. It was “time off” and “without a job.” But I was also only really “off” from school drop-off to pick-up, and my day was still peppered with plenty of have-to-do’s to keep my family’s household on track.

But not having a job was definitely less frantic, and a merciful break from turbo-multitasking all day every day. That gave me time to be more present with the tasks I was doing for my family — like, turning down new aisles in Costco just to explore! — and also to notice how my kids, and my experience of mothering, were transforming day by day as they changed, discovering sarcasm, jokes, and for the 8-year-old, how repeating my words back to me was a very effective way to make me aware of my contradictions.

A caregiving action shot from a few years back, taken by one child while I watched to make sure the other didn't hurl herself off the high thing at the playground. I look vigilant and 100% humor-less.

When I saw the mention of Elissa’s upcoming book, When You Care: the Unexpected Magic of Caring for Others, I was excited. I wanted to read something about the process of transformation that happens in caregiving relationships, in a way that is awe-filled but also not naive to their rigors, costs, and tedium.

That’s what our new episode is about this week. You’ll hear the conversation Elissa and I had in her home, where she works as a writer and works to care for her family. For her, discovering the magic of care involved slowly letting go of the impulse to protect herself from it. When Elissa became a mother, she was very careful to not let it take over her identity. She liked her pre-motherhood self, she appreciated her ambitions, and she had been raised by feminist texts that warned her from letting parenting crowd out everything else. These are important warnings, of course! There is only so much time in the day and caregiving eats up much of it. But Elissa came to realize that her resistance to embracing her identity as a mother— and especially from finding community with other moms — was denigrating the wild and vibrant experience she was in the midst of. (You can also read a recent piece she wrote for Slate’s website called “It’s Weird Times to Be a Happy Mother.”)

Let us know what the episode makes you think about because we plan to keep exploring the dimensions of caregiving with you. In particular, if you have worked as a paid caregiver, we are asking for stories of your experiences. How’d you learn what to ask for as an employee? What wild things have you had to navigate? Did the amount you earned for caregiving feel fair or way too little for the amount of work you put in? How would you describe the mix of feelings you’ve had for the people you’ve cared for…if they were older and eventually died…where did the grief go? Or if they just…moved on to preschool…what have you made of these intimate relationships after they’re over? Record a voice memo or write an email and send it to us at deathsexmoney@slate.com.

Last week, I asked you about your experiences of love and care as it relates to place, in a newsletter titled, “...but where are you really from?”. Some of you left comments, others emailed me back directly, but you’ve given me a lot to think about. Here are a few highlights:

From watruttle: home is a strange one. in my experience i just moved up to ontario from florida a few years ago and am still in the process of getting permenant residence status up here. where i lived in florida was a really small town compared to the mess that the greater toronto area is. it took me a year+ to adjust to the amount of people. i grew up partially...farming, now getting to a huge city in a different country. the thing that makes it hard though is not having a "home" up here the costs of housing versus what we make is just....not going to work out. i and many others are in that same boat. especially many immigrants. my partner and her family are from taiwan actually, so they just went through this a decade back...and it was hard for them. I don't know what my future will hold, maybe i'll end up here, maybe somewhere else. we have three different countries we could try! i suppose i'm looking for that "home" and what it means to be from such a different place from most of who i interact with around me.
From Sherry H: The title of this newsletter immediately brings up all kinds of feelings (mostly dread). I am a Taiwanese person living in North America. I speak English fluently with an American accent, but I spent the first 18 years of my life in Taiwan... where I am really from. In the 10 years I spent studying and working in the US, whenever (mostly white) people ask me that question, even though there is only one correct answer, the alienation behind that question complicates how I want to answer it. As I prepare for a move back to the US from Canada, where I spent the last 5 years in grad school, I am asking myself this question again. I think I will spend the rest of my life figuring that one out. For right now, all I know is, I don't feel at home anywhere.
From George Nie: I used music (singing, in particular) to connect and reconnect to the many cultures and cities that I have living in or many socio-linguistic identities which I feel I was a part of. For example, this past month I hosted BEFORE DUSK, my first-ever concert! Friends and artists gathered to celebrate our shared paths and new beginnings with Jazz, Poetry, and Opera in 7 languages at the cozy, magical, and warm Clarion Performing Arts Center in the heart of San Francisco: https://www.honolulumailman.com/blog/curating-my-first-concert-5-essential-lessons-from-a-berklee-professor
From Elaine T: My somewhere else is not a place but a time. The time before when my husband was alive and the time after when he died.

On another Substack I follow, Rural Magic, the writer Sara Ramsey wrote a post this week about straddling two very different worlds: San Francisco-based tech work, which she does remotely, and life in her small town in Iowa, where she recently moved back.

I lived in San Francisco for almost two decades, but I would come back to Iowa four times a year. On both the outbound and the return trips, I went through the same dislocation — the same “first day back” in which I felt wholly alien even though I was intimately familiar with both places.
Living in Iowa while working for a San Francisco-based company has cut those reentry periods from days to seconds.
Take last Tuesday. I sat through an afternoon of Zoom meetings. My brain was buzzing with to-dos when every weather alarm in the house went off. It was yet another tornado warning — we’ve had several this spring — and I watched the sky turn suspicious colors before I briefly fled to the basement.
The tornado didn’t materialize and my house was still standing, so I got back to work. I kept sending Slack messages as I put on my shoes and switched gears from “tech worker” to “library board member.”
I sped over to one of the only restaurants within twenty miles to join the evening meeting of a local charitable club. I slowed my speech cadence and asked some seventy-year-old men, whom I’ve known my whole life, to donate $500 to cover the library’s ebook program for a couple of months.
The cost of my last flight to San Francisco could have covered a summer’s worth of ebooks for my whole town, but that’s not how capitalism works.
I made the faux pas of ordering a margarita — my brain was still in California mode and I forgot that most local volunteer groups are dry during their business meetings. I know many of those guys drink because I used to sell them beer when I worked at the gas station as a teenager. But it didn’t make my margarita any easier to swallow.

In conclusion, there are a lot of us out here with mixed-up place identities. That can lead to confusion, and you’ve reminded me, it can also be a marker of all the different ways we are learning to love.

One more thing. While I drove from California to Wyoming last weekend, I listened to this great new podcast miniseries from LAist’s show Imperfect Paradise. It’s called “The Gen Z Water Dealmaker,” and in it, journalist Emily Guerin introduces us to the high-stakes dealmaking around Colorado River water use in the American West and the 28 year-old who is California’s lead negotiator. The storytelling is really well-crafted, with vivid writing and characters I’ll think about for a long time. And the key tensions it underlines — Boots versus Suits, ie rural communities with thirsty land-based industries versus urban areas with millions of thirty residents — will be one we keep circling this election year. Take a listen, and then, keep listening to the next great series in the Imperfect Paradise podcast feed called Inheriting, about Asian American histories across generations.

Until next week,

Anna

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