It’s been important to me to make sure that The Caregiver Space welcomes anyone who does care work, regardless of how they label that work and their role. Adrienne has always been clear that she wants this to be a community for all caregivers, including people providing care to clients and those supporting people who aren’t family. There are a lot of people out there providing care to friends and neighbors.
Labels make things simpler. They also leave a lot of people out.
Who we consider part of our family can be pretty complicated. That gets more complicated when someone needs care. I'm always happy to come across stories like this one, where people discuss caring for extended...and former extended...family members.
Having seen the long-term dedication and commitment of many friendships, I'm intrigued by the idea of the platonic marriage. Declaring someone our platonic spouse has more power than declaring them the sibling we never had, since sibling relationships aren’t protected by laws and regulations the same way monogamous romantic partnerships are.
Two sisters in Nova Scotia who've been sharing a household for a very long time have been fighting for survivor benefits. It’s not an uncommon situation for siblings and other extended family members to live together:
“I know many, many people — sisters living together, parents and an adult healthy child that are sharing expenses. In my career as a nurse I came across this many, many times,” she said.
Sisters can't share benefits, no matter how long they’ve shared a household. That right is reserved for romantic partners and their dependent children.1 Who has the right to financial support is defined very narrowly, with no attention paid to the actual level of interdependence.
Why do we need to have a sexual relationship in order to share a prescription insurance plan or get survivor benefits? Two friends who live together can’t share these benefits unless those two friends declare their relationship to be romantic. There are all sorts of little benefits to marriage, like not having to pay extra to add your spouse as an additional driver when renting a car.
Quebec and Ontario have no legal definition of a common-law marriage or a registration process, yet both provinces still allow people to claim government benefits as common-law partners. Canada allows residents to sponsor conjugal partners for immigration, not BFFs.
Polyamorous families face complex logistical hurdles. I know that sharing a home with multiple adults who aren't legal kin can be difficult in terms of getting things like homeowners insurance and co-op board approval. Many communities have zoning restrictions on the books outlawing unrelated adults from living together.
There are a lot of household situations that aren't technically legal, it's just that no one is enforcing the rules, leaving chosen families in a precarious situation. When my cousin (really my first cousin once removed, I think) lived with my parents, could they claim her as a dependent on their taxes? Did she have any health insurance? Was it covered by insurance if she borrowed my mom’s car?
The history of how we live is surprisingly varied. The laws controlling who we can live with and where (and when they're enforced) change with time. In some times and places it was illegal for a woman to live alone. What gets built (and how things are renovated) is controlled through the availability of funding and zoning more than it's shaped by the preferences of the people who will live in these places.
"Many of the Founding Fathers resided in congregate living setups for their stays in Philadelphia during the Constitutional Convention of 1787. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, between one-third and one-fourth of urban households took in boarders. In the 1950s, single-room occupancy hotels (SROs) comprised 10 percent of New York’s housing stock."
People who bemoan the end of the multi-generational family ignore the fact that federal mortgage policy and other regulations put significant hurdles in the way of anyone other than the nuclear family. I loved this story about finding a "stable condition" in a Bruderhof community. Imagine how different life would be if more of us had access to flexible housing options so we could meet our changing housing needs while staying in the same community.
Brent Hartinger reflects on the history of the chosen family. In an era when LGBTQ+ people were largely rejected by their families of origin, chosen families were a necessity. They were particularly vital sources of caregiving and support during the AIDS crisis.
The experience of chosen family has shifted, as its become less common to disown people for coming out. It’s also become far more common for people of any sexual orientation and gender identity to choose to opt out of complicated family dynamics. Instagram has normalized the idea of labeling people “toxic” and ending our relationship with them. At the same time, the idea of who Americans are talking about when we say “family” has become narrower, coming to mean only the nuclear family or the people we share a home with.
We get to decide who we consider family. We decide who we live with, who we prioritize, who we spend holidays with. We decide who we have interdependent relationships with. Few of us have complete freedom. We all have some degree of freedom.
The legal side is more complicated. Changing your legal relationship with another person is often complicated, slow, and expensive. That legal relationship is what determines our benefits and obligations. If you’ve ever tried to sponsor a family member for immigration or access government assistance, you know the government has clear expectations for what financial interdependence should look like. There is a formula for how much college tuition parents are expected to cover for their children, even when they’re legally adults. There are formulas for how much of our partner’s debt we take on when we marry and when we divorce.
In Modern Loss, there’s an essay by Eileen Smith on her would-be inlaws, from the days when only heterosexual couples could marry. The gap between who is and who would be family causes all sorts of little harms. Sometimes it causes big harms, too.
I had no interest in marriage or the fight for marriage equality until I understood the many legal and financial rights marriage gives couples and families. As someone who then went on to get married for legal and financial reasons, in order to access those rights, I wouldn’t recommend it. Governments that believe families are important use these policies to coerce people into entering and remaining in marriage. It’s perverse that our rights to medical care, home care, financial support, and family leave are restricted based on who we’re in a sexual relationship with.
This is nothing new or unique. Israel doesn’t allow civil marriages and thus doesn’t recognize interfaith unions. We all know that the US forbade interracial marriage. Among many notes I have for things to learn more about later is the note that for a long time non-Catholics couldn’t marry or register births in Portugal. These aren’t just little quirks of history. They’re the boring rules that determine the circumstances of our lives.
Those laws shift with time and, in practice, are determined by court cases. Nursing homes have long sued the children of residents with unpaid bills, especially in states with filial piety laws.2 Now they’ve expanded their scope and are suing siblings, extended family members, and friends. It’s giving us a new reason for people to be wary of accompanying someone to the ER, on doctors visits, helping them move into assisted living, or even visiting them and thus being required to sign a visitor log. You can’t share your benefits; apparently you can’t escape sharing their liabilities.
Is it wise for love to come at such a cost?
Ashley Abercrombie gives us a reminder that life never stops being disappointing and we never stop making mistakes.
Clementine Morrigan addresses how to manage situations where one person’s emotional needs conflict with another person’s boundaries.
Nagin Cox’s piece, illustrated by Anuj Shrestha, on what it’s like to live on Mars time actually feels very relatable. So many caregivers and shift workers live similarly out of sync with the rest of the world. Maybe caregiving is its own planet.
Garrett Buck has a great series of questions on care and community, including:
“When did you first realize that whatever messages you were taught about care and love and empathy for all were so frequently drowned out by messages that life is a competition, that there are winners and losers, and that the goal is for you and yours alone to be the winners?”
And a nugget of wisdom from Garrett:
“We often imagine that we move from a complicated world to a grounded one, but actually we often trade one set of complications for a whole new set of complications. The potential gift, of course, is what growth/lessons/perspective/new relationships we pick up along the way, and how those allow us to live in a different relationship to the new complicated reality than we did our old one.”
People who murdered their spouses were entitled to survivors benefits in both Canada and the US until recently.
Wow. I had no idea - friends are liable for debts?! Unbelievable! This sounds like the next policy agenda item for AARP and CARP (if it applies in Canada too). Unreal!