Angela Garbes on Power and Pleasure in Caregiving

A conversation with the author of "Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change"

Photo Credit: Elizabeth Rudge

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When I first reached out to Angela Garbes to talk about her book, Essential Labor, Mothering as Social Change, I got her email auto-reply.  

”Thanks for your message. I accept email as a necessary form of communication, but can't live by its constant rhythm.”

She would get back to me as soon as possible, the message said. And she did. But in the meantime, I was able to take a breath. Her auto-reply, I realized, was a much-needed invitation to me to slow my own pace a bit. 

Angela Garbes is one of my heroes. Her work, she says, is about changing the cultural conversation around caregiving. Her first book, Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy, is part memoir and part science journalism and delves deeply into the experience of pregnancy. 

Essential Labor was a national bestseller and on The New Yorker and NPR’s lists of the Best Books of 2022.

In it, Garbes ties together her personal history of being a mother with the history of mothering in the U.S, and its ties to colonialism and the legacy of slavery.

She also celebrates mothering: the possibilities it provides for pleasure and sensuality, for community building and for political solidarity – for building the structures and systems of support that all families need in order to thrive.

When Angela Garbes and I did meet, it was for a luxurious hour-long conversation where we talked about everything from political action to sex after pregnancy to how to be better friends with our neighbors. The interview below has been edited for length and clarity.

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Part of the story that you tell in the book is the story of Filipinx care workers and the history of care in this country. There’s a shocking statistic that you've talked about many times, that Filipino nurses are 4% of our nursing workforce but 34% of COVID-related nursing deaths.

So I wanted to know how that information landed with you and your own family experience, and how that became such a central piece of this book?

I rely on a lot of personal narratives in my work, and I wondered: “How do I tell this story?” As an Asian-American, a lot of what I'm able to do is because of black women and because of black writers and people who came before me. All people of color owe a debt to black people – because of black people, we get to do what we do. And so I’m always thinking about that.  

And then, I was listening to NPR Code Switch and a story about Filipino nurses. It was a lightbulb moment: This is a story that I've wanted to tell about my own family. 

My parents came to the United States, because the Philippines was an American colony. For the first half of the 20th century, my parents received English language education, and were able to go to medical and nursing school because those were set up by the United States in the Philippines. They were presented as a path towards economic opportunity, which is true. It's simultaneously true that American officials were like, “This is how we sanitize a population of dirty, diseased people who are inherently backwards.” 

Then, there was a healthcare worker shortage, post-World War Two. The United States was like, “Oh, there are all of these educated nurses in the Philippines and doctors. We’re going to lift the quotas, and now allow them to migrate after having severe limitations on them, because we need them.” 

The home was always a place of work for enslaved black women and black men, but mainly black women, who were nursing babies, caring for babies, cooking, cleaning all of that. We got rid of slavery in the form that we had it, but that’s the legacy that allows us to pay women of color less, to consider them less human. 

Child care workers are three times more likely to live in poverty than any other worker, which is deeply shameful. 

The parallel that I saw then was like: I don't have to tell the specific story of enslaved women. I can tell the story of my family, because our individual family stories are different, but it's all of the same forces. It's capitalism and colonialism, it’s exploitation, it’s extraction. 

These stories can exist together, and can be an opportunity for solidarity. It’s a way of highlighting this history, while also telling a story that has been underrepresented.

It became like the driving force of the book, and that's what I mean when I say like I’ve been writing this book my whole life. 

I've had so many questions about my family's immigration, about my parents, and why they came, and what brought them here, and how they feel about that.  And their role in working within a healthcare system that I don't think has ever really valued them. 

It's like a real privilege to be able to tell a Filipino-American story. 

Has anything surprised you since you've started talking about that personal family history? Either within your own family or when you’re in conversation with other fellow Filipinos, or other communities of color?

I hear from a fair number of Filipino-American women, or Filipinx people who are like, “I feel like you're telling my family story.” When I write people back, I'm literally like, “I did it for us.” To know that people are reading it and feel it in the way that I do is really special. 

People of color kind of have to squint and turn their heads to see themselves in stories.

So to think that there are readers who don't have to do that for my book is such a huge honor. 

And, I mean, white women have told me so often, “I just feel so seen by your work,” and I’m like, “Whoa, okay, cool!,” because it feels so specific to me. But this idea that my work could be understood by anyone and is remotely universal is really so cool. And, because of internalized whiteness and racism, it’s mind-blowing to me.

In Essential Labor you describe the relationship you built with another family during the pandemic, around childcare and just general community support. You describe all these scenes of clothing swaps, and sharing meals, and just this flow between your families. What's the community that you're living in now? 

It’s still very much alive. I feel really lucky for this. We still have family dinner probably once or twice a week whenever we can. But our circles have expanded. So sometimes it'll be two or three weeks before we can really catch up with them. And I'm always like, “Oh, I missed you.”  Nothing's going to be quite like that. I'm developing nice relationships with other people too. I am realizing that that's just what I want. And I've basically reoriented my whole life to lean more that way. 

As you're saying this, the word that's coming to mind is “labor.” It's work. Not laborious, like, “I don't want to do this,” but it’s work to maintain relationships. 

Yeah, and it’s hard, right? Finding people like that takes effort. And we don't always feel like we have as much time in our life to do so.  

Yeah, it’s something that I'm really aware of right now.  It’s easier for me to call a sitter than it is for me to arrange a childcare swap. But that's a choice that I'm making. And if I want something different, I have to choose that. And I have to do the work to make it happen, in terms of continuing these relationships or having this kind of exchange of care.

I wanted to read a part of your book back to you, because it made me think about this idea of how we choose to use our energy. It’s a quote from a writer and Anishinaabe activist, Andrea Landry: “Countering these systems, colonialism, capitalism means remembering they are constructions and therefore can be abandoned…It's not about putting energy into colonial systems to change and dismantle them. It's about putting it into energy and investing our time into indigenous systems and revitalizing them.”

I remember doing that interview with Andrea. When she said that, I was like, “Whoa.” She was someone who had worked in her youth as an activist. She was at the Capitol building in Canada. She was a youth indigenous leader. And then she said, “These people don't want me. They don't actually want the change that I want.” Now she has children. And she’s like, “This is where I'm putting my energy.”

I'm so grateful for every single person that's lobbying for us on Capitol Hill. I want to uplift that work. I want to support that. That is not where I feel called to put my energy.

We need people within the system. I don't have to be that person, because there are people who in good faith are doing that. It is about choices. It's a trade off.

I want people to stay home with their families, if that's what they want to do, and not feel like they're giving something up. I don't want people to have to choose between a career and a family, which is what women – especially in America - that's the defining thing in many ways.

So, how do you find pleasure in care work? What do you think about finding new ways into sexuality and pleasure in the context of mothering?

Many mothers, not everyone, but some, are inherently sexual, because many mothers have had sex to have the babies. But in any discussion of us, we are very quickly desexualized. When I was nursing my oldest daughter, initially, I was like, “This feels weird and this is uncomfortable,” and I had a friend that I could talk to about it, where I was like, “It feels more like romantic love.” It's not sexual, but it feels so deeply pleasurable. Like it's holding hands with sexual pleasure. 

For me, becoming a mother just made me a more fully embodied person. I felt so much more appreciation for my body, and I wanted to feel more pleasure. I didn't grow up being allowed to really own sexual pleasure or understand it or talk about it. 

And, also, after you have children and raising children will make you feel very unsexy and afraid of intimacy and your changing body. It was important for me to talk about: there was a deep, physical pleasure that I derive from caring for my children and taking care of their bodies.

And I was also thinking about what I want for my children. I want them to have a better understanding of pleasure, and their right to pleasure.

And I just wanted sex to feel like lower stakes. Lower stakes, higher pleasure. And so I realized: “Who even decides  what sex is?” We get to decide. That's why I was really inspired by queer sex, and by crip sex. It can be anything you want it to be, as long as there is connection and feeling good. It's very liberating.

It can be anything you want it to be as long as there's connection and feeling good.

I want us to feel as good as we can for as long as possible, in ways that seem right. That’s a much more interesting way of approaching sexuality and sex than all of the scripts we've been handed and that have not worked for me.

Yes, that’s the interdependence you’re talking about in the book, it seems. That there are all kinds of care. 

I was on the phone with one of my best friends this morning. And being in her presence, that sort of platonic intimacy – what would I do without it?  It’s deeply pleasurable, and it is sensual, and important.

Platonic intimacy is no less important than romantic intimacy, than caregiving intimacy. And we should be allowed to experience the pleasure of all of it.

Lane and I have talked a lot about how the pandemic made these issues – lack of childcare, elder care, support for parents, come into focus for a lot of people - middle-class white women -  in a way that many working-class people, immigrants and women of color, have lived with for a long time.

So now you’ve been talking and traveling all over talking about the book and these ideas, and I’m wondering: Do you feel like things are changing? 

When I published this book, I was like, “I think this book is going to mean something to people.” But the reception of the book, and the publicity and the success of the book was truly beyond anything I could have imagined. So many of us have been traumatized, scarred, changed, deeply changed by what we saw. 

People want to be involved. The option is not to just stop or give up. There's a place for everyone here. We can't afford to stop. What's the option? What a privilege to be hopeless, right?

I'm in front of a lot of people. And they’re like, “What do we do?” And I try to encourage people: You can call your senators. That's a thing that you can do. You can donate to campaigns. You can do things at the community level.

Eight out of 10 U.S. voters support paid family leave, and in-home care funding and community care. So when you're talking about eight out of 10, that transcends party. That’s a majority of people. So in this country, we actually do have a caring majority. 

I do think things are changing. I just think they will never change as quickly as I want them to. 

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MATRIARCHY REPORT is written by Lane Anderson and Allison Lichter.

Lane Anderson is a writer, journalist, and Clinical Associate Professor at NYU who has won several awards for her writing on inequality and family social issues. She has an MFA from Columbia University. She was raised in Utah and is based in New York City with her partner and young daughter.

Allison Lichter is the Associate Dean at the Newmark School of Journalism at the City University of New York. She has been a writer, producer and editor for radio and print, covering the arts, politics, and the workplace. She was born and raised in Queens, and lives in Brooklyn with her partner and daughter.