Caregiving duties fell to women, millions of whom had to leave the workforce, including the nurses and teachers who had previously left their families every day to watch over the old and the sick and the young. Many child-care facilities, often staffed by women who can’t afford child care, shut down, or ran at a loss parents unravelled, trying to work while homeschooling their children. And yet, as the pandemic made brutally clear, without a broad system of shared care, the modern world devolves into screeching impossibility.
During nap time one day, I left a note for myself: “Maybe I eventually should write about caregiving, how I can only care for her because I’m being cared for, how we have to make of ourselves and our situations a soft place for others to land.”Ībout a third of the child-care workers in the United States live in or close to poverty the average annual pay for such workers is less than twenty-six thousand dollars. I needed not only my partner but our parents, our friends, and the mercy and labor of strangers, desperately. Even with a partner who did eighty per cent of everything not related to breast-feeding, I could be scorched to a brittle skeleton by a mere half hour of my baby’s screaming.
Caregiving was humiliating and transcendent and unending, and I was unnerved by how quickly it could decimate me. (This was part of a larger life philosophy of mine: to better my chances at happiness by expecting nothing, or the worst.) The work demanded creativity and intuition: spending a day alone with my infant daughter reminded me of shepherding a friend through a first-time acid trip, continually gauging whether she needed to look at a flower, or listen to music, or sob for ten minutes, or be alone in the dark. I had deliberately not thought much about what caring for a baby would be like. We could afford to do this because a person can get paid more to sit in front of her computer and send a bunch of e-mails than she can to do a job so crucial and difficult that it seems objectively holy: to clean excrement off a body, to hold a person while they are crying, to cherish them because of and not despite their vulnerability. My boyfriend and I had just hired a nanny to spend three days a week caring for our baby, to do a kind of work that I’d been shocked to find intimately rewarding but also far harder than anything I’d ever tried to do for eight hours straight. That sentence rattled around in my head for most of seasons one through four of the pandemic, and, once, on a winter night in 2020, when I was struggling to nurse my five-month-old, the bald fact of it made me crumple in tears. “In our society, there seems a general rule that, the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it,” the late anthropologist and activist David Graeber wrote, in 2018.
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