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Here are some things I did to take care of myself before I had a kid:
Yoga classes, yoga retreats, couples yoga, yoga teacher training.
Massage, Thai massage, Reiki, spa treatments, Korean spas, Turkish spas, tinctures of various kinds.
Talk therapy, movement therapy, group therapy, meditation groups, camping with friends, solo camping trips, Five Rhythms dance™.
Improv classes, classes in clowning, workshops on designing vision boards.
Nonviolent communication training. Kickboxing.
Getting a dog, giving away a dog, drinking more, drinking less, eating more, eating less, eating mung beans in the morning.
Supplements, gluten-free diets, crying alone in public.
I have, of course, given up almost all of these things. Who’s got the time? Who’s got the cash? The ones I’ve held on to I appreciate so much more now than I did pre-kid.
Even the simple experience of being alone in my apartment, which Lane described so well last week, feels like a great gift.
But I have been reading a little pink book called “The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence,” and it’s changing the way I’m thinking about what it means to really take care.
It’s written by a group of British academics who call themselves The Care Collective.
For the past several decades, we have come to expect that it will be a struggle to get adequate childcare, to be surprised and relieved when we don’t have an enormous co-pay on a medical bill, and to tense up as we contemplate caring for aging parents or the immense cost of our kid’s college educations.
Of course, the pandemic has made this much worse for many more people.
But even before the pandemic, we’d become used to the idea that every aspect of our caregiving lives would be expensive, exhausting, and that we’re on our own to figure out how to make it all work out.
The Care Collective thinks we can get unused to this idea.
“We've had several decades of this neoliberal idea that, above all, it's the individual that counts,” Jo Littler, a sociology professor at City, University of London and one of the Manifesto’s authors, told me. “It’s you as an individual, who needs to make your way in the world, who needs to look after yourself, who needs to practice self-care.”
But that belief in individualism is toxic, she said, and full of blame.
“No one can manage on their own. So you're just setting people up to fail and have feelings of guilt around that, apart from everything else.” Littler said.
The Manifesto deals with caregiving at many levels of our lives: Our families, our local communities, the state, the planet. It’s a radical revisioning of our priorities.
I am particularly taken with the Manifesto’s idea of “promiscuous care.” Instead of “leaning in,” the idea is to lean on each other.
This isn’t promiscuity in the sense of careless and short-lived sexual encounters (which can be nice! But not a sustainable life strategy, per se.)
It’s promiscuity in the sense of being experimental, wide-spread, non-discriminating.
It’s a kind of care that would look like caring for people who aren’t our immediate kin. It would mean looking out for each other, not just for ourselves.
The Manifesto’s idea of “promiscuous care” was inspired by the actions of gay men and trans women, who came together for mutual support during the devastation of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. A 1987 piece, “How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic,” explored the ways that these folks organized and “served as the basis for safer sex initiatives, developed by groups like ACT UP, which went on to save countless lives.”
What does promiscuous care look like for families and communities today, in our crises of caregiving?
It looks like the mutual aid groups that have popped up around the country to provide food and supplies to isolated, elderly and sick people. It looks like co-housing communities, which are growing around the world as ways to lower housing costs and provide community connections. It looks like adequate funding for childcare, especially Black-owned childcare centers, which have been disproportionately impacted by the pandemic.
Many marginalized communities in the U.S., and around the world, have had this approach for generations. They’ve been excluded from state support or don’t have access to wealth or political power, and they’ve created pathways for caregiving that we should all be learning from.
But the authors of the Manifesto would argue that, in the U.S. and the U.K, inadequate state funding and sexist and racist disdain for caregivers has made people more fearful and more focused on looking after “their own.”
Wouldn’t adequate funding, time and labor make us more likely to want to look out for each other?
The other great thing about the idea of promiscuous care is that it recognizes that not all women want to be mothers.
“Caring for the children who are not your own, or caring for the community, or caring for the environment are all equally valuable tasks that must be adequately resourced and appreciated,” the Manifesto argues.
Oh, and also: Being a mother is hard. “We like the idea of promiscuous care,” Littler told me when we spoke, because it expanded the idea of who has the potential to be a caregiver, and shows “how we are already interdependent.”
Promiscuous care uproots the stereotypical ideas of who does care work, she said, “which is necessary if we're going to – put bluntly – get more men to care, and get women to be valued.”
Last week, I read that “broken-heart syndrome” – a stress-induced heart condition – is on the rise among older women.
This syndrome – technically called Takotsubo Syndrome – occurs when the brain releases a rush of stress hormones as a result of emotional or physical distress. The brain basically stuns the heart into pumping less efficiently. Researchers say it’s strong evidence of the connection between our brains and our hearts.
To be clear, it’s a rare condition. But it made me think about the burden of the stress so many women are carrying, and the ways often invisible pressures bear down on us.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
All that self-care I used to do? The kick-boxing? The clown class? I miss that stuff!
But I know that these days, with kiddo in tow, community care would go a lot further to helping me feel good.
Community care would make that kind of self-care possible, and not just for me. For everyone.
All of our systems are designed so the burden is on us to take care of ourselves.
What if we adopted the Care Manifesto, and we could start to take care of each other?
I recently became a caregiver to my partner due his acute transverse myelitis. If I hear someone say to me one more time, "make sure you take care of you" I am going to scream. I know they probably mean well, but I don't even know what that means. It reminds me of someone telling me when I was raising my three children - I had a newborn, a two year old, and a four year old - that I just needed a nice long bubble bath.
I loved this piece and it is good to know about the Care Manifesto. It makes all the difference to know you are not alone with life's challenges, and to experience the joy in helping and being helped. Creative solutions emerge from these networks of care.