A couple of months ago I came across an article in the Atlantic on caregiving that led me to a book by the same author. Elissa Straus: The Unexpected Magic of Caring for Others.
That’s a switch, I thought. Because a glance at typical university offerings in 2024 and the emerging feminist books I read as a 20-something (Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan…) all seemed to sing the same song: caregiving gets in women’s way. A woman needs to find her way out of the home, apart from clinging children, helpless spouses, and parents who depend on her. Only THEN will she have a chance to find fulfillment.
We’ve talked about this some on the podcast. The conversation about “losing yourself” when you become a mother. As if it’s a zero-sum game. To succeed at motherhood means to fail at selfhood and vice-versa.
The script seems to say: Motherhood is fine, as far as it goes, as long as it fits into the gaps of a noble & varied life. Ideally, you can be a mother without sacrificing whatever splendid existence you’d imagined for yourself. You don’t have to let motherhood change you or alter your fate if you don’t want to.
Strauss dives into all these feelings as she writes about motherhood. But, she’s surprised to find, keeping parenthood in the gaps isn’t only near impossible—but it’s undesirable. The experience of care itself is an enlightening force. The wise, interesting future person she sought was actually emerging thru caring.
Around the mid-1980’s a new branch of philosophy—care ethics—arose. Before then, care—a typically female role—wasn’t deemed worth studying.
Care ethicists look at what it means to care well for another and how this care affects people’s capacity to live what’s called a good life.
Strauss says: When people reflect on their life, burrowing around for what really matters and who they really are, the care they gave and the care they received is almost always top of mind. Yet philosophical reckonings with morality have long failed to acknowledge this. Thinkers have instead been preoccupied with defining right or wrong based on interactions between independents, two people who are essentially equals. But humans spend much of their lives in dependency relationships: We start as children dependent on parents, become adults who care for our children, move on to caring for our parents or other adults, and later become older and require care again. Not always in that order, not always with all the steps. But true independence is the anomaly, not the norm.
A relatively recent attempt to integrate care into everyday thinking is the Social Science of Caregiving. The project, based at Stanford University, is led by the UC Berkeley psychology professor Alison Gopnik. One of the project’s big aims is to consider the ways in which government policies and culture rest on the assumption that people are independent, and to reimagine a social contract that acknowledges the ubiquity of dependency.
In the US, where support for caregivers lags far behind other developed nations, is not yet structured to reflect this ubiquity. When a country truly supports parents and caregivers, when it treats care as a core value, it doesn’t just offer people relief in the form of rest and financial resources. It also increases and embraces the possibility that people might grow from the experience of caring for others—that they might see care, the giving and receiving of it, as an indispensable part of living “the good life.”
Here’s something I bet you didn’t learn in high school:
Randal Keynes, the great great grandson of Charles Darwin, wrote about the impact fatherhood had on his grandfather’s work, particularly the loss of his 10-yr-old daughter, Anne. As part of his Origin of the Species work, Darwin also concluded that humans come into the world primed to cooperate and connect.
In Descent of Man (1871), he wrote our inclination to be good is, evolutionarily speaking, a product of our inclination to love and care for our children. He believed sympathy and compassion to be part of the social instinct. We can’t take good care of our children without sympathy and without it our children wouldn’t survive. Therefore, Communities which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members would flourish best and rear the greatest number of offspring.”
This got shortened into the one-liner you’re probably familiar with: “survival of the fittest.” But for Darwin it was only meaningful when paired with “survival of the most sympathetic.” That last part never got much traction.
Sarah Hrdy worked in primatology and anthropology and asked different questions than her male colleagues. She found that humans’ success depended on quality caregiving AND collective caregiving…babies need a lot of care to survive, too much for one person to give. Our species depends on collective caregiving –which leads to deeper connections with families and communities, deeper trust of one another. (!!)
We’ve heard a lot about attachment—there’s been a lot written about it…what it’s like to be cared FOR. But what it’s like TO CARE for someone and how that changes us has only begun to be researched in just the last couple of decades.
Until 1850, 1 out of 3 mothers died in childbirth. Who raised the children? Neighbors and aunts; women who hadn’t given birth often took in the children. The attachment network in these women’s brains started to activate.
The brains of new moms are radically reshaped in the first year of parenting. (Dads too.) Caring literally changes us biologically & chemically.
THE NEGATIVE CARING SLANT
Strauss says that around 2012 (when she first became a mother), the narrative that caregivers hate caregiving went mainstream. “Exhausted” “burdened,” “unhappy,” “overwhelmed” competed for the most commonly used descriptions of caregivers to children and adults in essays, books, blogs, research.
This narrative may be partly political—people want the world to know how hard caregivers have it in a culture that pounds the “independence” drum. A whole generation (Gen Xers) have been renamed the Sandwich Generation b/c they juggle caregiving on both ends.
When the main word we associate with care is “burden” we demean the experience. It’s not a cake walk but it’s also not a horror story. It can be very stressful and caregivers can experience real burnout. It’s physically and emotionally hard, particularly on those who care for old, sick and disabled people.
But watch how it’s presented/talked about: it’s most often shown ONLY as a burden. Never as an opportunity. Researchers have found that both parents and caregivers to old and disabled people tend to live longer than the non-caregiving. It keeps us physically & mentally active.
Some polls show caregivers over 40 who care for the sick consider it positive and rewarding. They believe caring for another makes them a better person or more resilient. They feel gratitude, a sense of accomplishment and say it added meaning to their lives and strengthened their relationship…
For parents, it can disrupt the stories you’ve been telling yourself. Caregiving might show you how productivity obsessed you are, how much of a perfectionist, how concerned you are with image, or that you’re really good at intimacy and connection. That being imperfect or having to learn as you go is ok.
MEANING or HAPPINESS?
The more time people spent taking care of their children the more meaningful they found their lives but they weren’t’ necessarily happier.
Satisfying their needs/wants increased happiness but was irrelevant to meaningfulness. Happiness was largely present oriented, while meaningfulness involves connecting past, present and future. Happiness was linked to being a taker while meaningfulness went with being a giver. Happiness is determined by what HAPPENS to you. Happiness demands ease, not a characteristic of care, while meaningfulness demands friction and growth. Joy, on the other hand, is a fruit of the Spirit, rooted in faith in God, and is “sturdier” than, or less dependent on, what happens to us.
Jordan Peterson:
“It’s all very well to think the meaning of life is happiness, but what happens when you’re unhappy? Happiness is a great side effect. When it comes, accept it gratefully. But it’s fleeting and unpredictable. It’s not something to aim at – because it’s not an aim. And if happiness is the purpose of life, what happens when you’re unhappy? Then you’re a failure. And perhaps a suicidal failure. Happiness is like cotton candy. It’s just not going to do the job.”
“‘Happiness’ is a pointless goal. Don’t compare yourself with other people, compare yourself with who you were yesterday. No one gets away with anything, ever, so take responsibility for your own life. You conjure your own world, not only metaphorically but also literally and neurologically. These lessons are what the great stories and myths have been telling us since civilisation began.” J.P
https://www.theguardian.com/global/2018/jan/21/jordan-peterson-self-help-author-12-steps-interview
We get meaning from things that matter to us, push us to see ourselves more clearly, and grow. It takes time.
The mere mention of meaning helped people see the present in a more positive light. Are we buying groceries? Or are we going to buy food to nurture people who depend on us and will grow stronger?
Caring for others can lead us to self-discovery. Emotional strength. A more honest relationship with ourselves—highlighting our own ignored traumas or baggage.
As we help our children learn to make meaning of their own lives, we’re discovering ways to make meaning in our own.
As a mom of two young children, an older mom, one about 10 years older than I was, told me to think of all my caregiving for my two kids as if I were doing it for Jesus. Changing diapers for Jesus. Bathing babies for Jesus. Making breakfast, lunch, and dinner for Jesus. It actually worked!
How? Because Proverbs 23:7 says that “as a man thinks in his heart, so is he” and Romans 12 says that we can be changed into a new person “by changing the way we think”. And because, as Elder Thaddeus of Vetovnica wrote in a book by the same name, Our Thoughts Determine our Lives.
Caregiving as unto the Lord elevated the sometimes anonymous and thankless work of my days to the status of the holy in my mind… where it actually was all along, but I just couldn’t see it.
As Paul wrote in Colossians,
23 Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters, 24 since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving.