Caring for Caregivers
From my desk I can see a print given to me by a dear friend, with a quote from Asian American activist and writer, Grace Lee Boggs:
“The only way to survive is by taking care of each other.”
This quote is how I understand social justice - we cannot thrive as a society when only some people’s needs are met. And there’s nothing like a global pandemic to remind us that care work is vital, and that there are intentional and unintentional gaps in our society that leave some people more vulnerable than others. Caring for others, be it children, parents and elders, loved ones, or strangers, requires organizational skills, tact, empathy, time, money, and boundless patience. As artist and activist Nicole Manganelli writes: “Care work is exhausting, necessary, life changing, highly skilled, emotional, sometimes a job, sometimes a calling, and filled with moments of mundane magnificence.”
Caregiving means recognizing the vulnerability of the human experience. That in childhood or our older years, or when faced with illness, disability, and hardship, we need support to meet our needs. And that this need for support does not make us less than or inferior to others, but is a natural part of life. We are not meant to be individual islands, able to meet all of our own needs all of the time. Caregiving is also common - a recent New York Times article, “The Agony of Putting Your Life On Hold to Care for Your Parents,” highlights: “the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in early 2021 that 34.1 percent of Americans 18 and older are either caring for an adult or juggling the care of both adults and children”.
Yet the pandemic made the precarity of our care systems so clear, with childcare and eldercare being even more scarce and expensive, and healthcare workers risking their lives for others. Care workers, be it daycare providers, home health aides, or family members, are often underpaid or unpaid. Those holding our society together and doing the skilled work of showing up for others are asked to take on immense burdens, often without support. Care work can be isolating, both in the nature of the work and in feeling that the rest of the world does not acknowledge or value this huge part of your life.
As I wade deeper into my work as a therapist, I find myself asking, “Who takes care of the caregivers?” I talk to people who are balancing paying jobs while caring for children, aging parents, or both. And yet people sometimes don’t see themselves as caregivers or acknowledge the full demand of this work, because it feels expected - a role they have to play. I am drawn to helping caregivers explore their identities and sense of selves outside of caregiving, because it can be difficult to shift out of the survival mentality of giving to others and prioritizing others’ needs before your own.
Trauma-informed yoga teacher Zabie Yamaski recently wrote on Instagram:
“For most of my life I have been so comfortable pouring into others. But some of the most moving moments of my healing journey are when I finally learned to pour into myself. And not just the ‘let me squeeze that yoga class in at the end of an exhausting day’ type of pouring, but the radical, everyday life choices and boundaries that centered my care and moved me as a higher priority on my to-do list. This is about finally taking up more space in my own life.”
Prioritizing your own care as a caregiver disrupts the assumption that your worth or identity is rooted in what you do or provide to others. There is something so beautiful in seeing someone in a caregiver role (re)discover their inherent worth, joy, and playfulness. It models for those around you that you have needs too, and that you won’t forget about them. It also disrupts entire systems that have been built on undervaluing care work (often done by women, often women of color). As Angela Garbes writes in her book “Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change,”
“How might we properly value care? It requires a new way of seeing the work and the world, bringing forth a new vision. We need to question our entire system of values. Productivity, efficiency, and hustle must share the stage with wholeness, health, stability, and self-regard. We must start by acknowledging mothering [and care work] as highly skilled work that deserves respect and compensation.”
While we collectively change the larger systems that devalue caregiving, there are individual ways we can honor ourselves or the caregivers in our lives. Creating space to step outside of that role, to be supported and held, to have your needs met, is good for everyone.
Hannah leads a virtual support group, Caring for Caregivers, every other Monday at 1 pm CT. Contact Hannah at Hannah@RoomToBreatheChicago.Com to join.