Caring for the People You Love.

It's not just for Tradwives.

“Sometimes we care in the present tense, for care's sake alone, with no future or potential for growth in sight. We care because we agree there is a value to life, and we demonstrate this value by showing life, one life at a time, respect.”

-Elissa Strauss

I’ve quit my job, and packed up my house.

I’m home. In Australia. For a little while.

Since my daughter was born, 6 months ago, I’ve had the desire to be in the home with her, hanging out every day, you know, shootin’ the shit baby babble style forever always. But I live in the world, and have to pay my mortgage. I’m also a feminist, so admittedly, I thought that taking on the full-time unpaid care role of ‘stay at home mom’ meant aligning myself with the values of Tradwife Christian fundamentalist types. This has meant that I’ve very much felt torn between what I want, and my limited perception of care work.

But things changed when I got the call from home letting me know that my Mum is sick. I knew then that I needed to (at least temporarily) take on that full-time unpaid care role because, mortgage and Tradwives aside, what the f#ck else is life for, if not caring for the people you love.

A picture of me and my baby having a cuddle.

As it turns out, there is a lot of feminist thought and theory about the radical nature of care, including basically every word within

Elissa Strauss

’s new book, When You Care: The Unexpected Magic of Caring for Others. Strauss talks about the desire to care for your loved ones and the broader community, not as a form of submission to the patriarchy, but as a transcendent act. Caring for others, she says, allows for rich complexity, intimacy, profound love and yes, sometimes, a lot of boredom.

Caregiving, Strauss says, ‘can change us and the world around us for the better’ and:

It’s time to stop seeing caring for others as an obstacle to the good life and to start seeing it as an essential part of a meaningful one, individually and collectively. All of us receive care, and most of us, at some point provide it… What if we saw caring well as more than obligation? What if we also saw it as a privilege, opportunity, and right? That will only happen when we acknowledge the power of care.

Up until now, I have put a lot of pressure on myself to ‘be something’, and because care work is not valued within patriarchal society, I have never been able to imagine myself in an unpaid and undervalued caregiving role: I could not permit my already low self-esteem to go any lower through a full commitment to the invisible labor of care. I’ve always known bad arse stay at home moms (including the sometimes stay-at-home mum that raised me!!) and zero actual Tradwives, yet I still bought into the bulldust notion that offering care didn’t count toward a purposeful life.

Unlike ding dong me, who is only now figuring this stuff out, the power and necessity of care, is not something new to folks within the disability justice world. From this lens, care is essential, and it’s the more privileged of us who should be properly stepping up. Care should also be valued, affordable, and accessible to all.

Author and disability justice activist,

Leah Piepzna-Samarasinha

says the following:

I don't think there is any one single answer to the need for care. I just want, to echo my friend Dori, more care, more of the time. I want us to dream mutual aid in our post-apocalyptic revolutionary societies where everyone gets to access many kinds of care-from friends and internet strangers, from disabled community centers, and from some kind of non-fucked-up non-state state that would pay caregivers well and give them health benefits and time off and enshrine sick and disabled autonomy and choice. I want us to keep dreaming and experimenting with all these big, ambitious ways we dream care for each other into being.

Sign for the Albury Wodonga Cancer Centre. The Torres Strait Islander, Australian Aboriginal, and Australian National flags are flying in the background.

Not everyone is in the position to make the change that I’m making, even if it’s something they long for. For me, this decision has required a certain level of privilege and sacrifice. I’m also not suggesting that everyone should up and quit their job, because there should be room for both. There should be avenues for us to have both a professional/creative outlet whilst caring effectively for others and not burning ourselves all the way out. As Piepzna-Samarasinha shares, there should also be help (so much help) for folks who are experiencing care fatigue because the bulk of the load has fallen upon them. Current systems don’t allow for any of this, and that is partly why I’ve been stuck in binary thinking: work outside of the home= good, and unpaid care work, which is primarily within the home= olden timey and bad. Up until now, my understanding of care has been from a ‘white feminist’ framework (if you don’t know this reference please read

Koa Beck

!), rather than an intersectional one, and that’s where I’ve gotten it all wrong. This is not just about me and my white lady ambition, care is bigger than that.

In her book Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change,

Angela Garbes

speaks of a Betty Friedan style of white feminism, which mobilized middle and upper class white women to leave the home and enter the workplace. The domestic labor and care work that was left behind still needed to be done, though, and was, therefore, left to underpaid (and historically unpaid) Black and Brown women.

Garbes also diversifies the concept of Mothering, describing it as expansive act of care pertaining to people of all genders. That’s partly why it’s important not to buy into the Tradwife narrative that perpetuates normative and oppressive gender roles. Caring for others is not something that comes more naturally to those assigned female at birth. Nor is it synonymous with prairie dresses.

Little tiny clothes on a clothes line in Australia.

It’s also important to acknowledge that the majority of care work, as well as domestic labour, emotional labour and all the rest of it disproportionately falls upon women and people assigned female at birth. This unfair division of labour perpetuates power imbalances and oppressive structures within relationships, households, and society and whilst care work remains unpaid and undervalued, it often maintains the subordination of these people.

When it comes to caregiving, there can be a fine and often blurry line between enlightenment and oppression.

Nonetheless, I’m home because I value life; my life and the life of the people I love. I’m embracing this opportunity to immerse myself within the mundane: of meals, bathing, dirty nappies, conversation, appointments, tummy time, company, connection, sickness, and health (whatever that actually means).

I’m embracing this opportunity to immerse myself within the profound experience of love, and of being a human who shares the world with other humans.

I’m home and I’m changing the way I think about and practice care.

… Mortgage, I’m not quite sure what I’ll do about you.

Lastly, if you are one of my people in Australia, please go easy on me. I definitely want to see you, but this time will mostly be spent with my nearest and dearest and so time will move at a different pace and probably won’t be divided much. With that said, if I don’t respond to requests to hang out, or I have to say no, please understand and don’t be mad at me xxoo

This email was composed where I am currently staying, which is the region now known as Central Victoria. I would, therefore, like to acknowledge the people of the Kulin Nation (in particular the Taungurung Nation), Traditional Custodians of the land for which I am on. I pay my respects to their Elders past and present.