There’s something about mentioning caregiving that conjures up nostalgic notions of the good old days.
Perhaps this is because it’s so difficult to imagine a future where care work is not a burden. Thanks to childhood memories and Hallmark movies, we can imagine a version of the past where caregiving was integrated into life without issue.
In novels and film, care work is rarely mentioned — just as characters rarely run errands, use the toilet, or take care of bookkeeping. There simply are people with disabilities who are supported by invisible acts of care.
From my vantage point as a child, my parents seemed to take care of everyone without any trouble. They ran errands for neighbors, coordinated things from a distance for relatives, helped family friends with home repairs and yard work, and of course took care of a succession of elderly family members as they grew frail and died. I happily tagged along, oblivious to the hassles that were hidden from me.
Reading historic accounts, sometimes I’m struck by how contemporary they feel. Certain emotional experiences are timeless.
At other times, I’m struck by just how impossible it is to comprehend life in another time and place. The quotidian is so rarely mentioned, I don’t notice that I’m filling in the story with my own expectations until they’re dispelled.
Caregiving today is so often a solitary responsibility. One person bears responsibility for another, this shift in relationship status often erecting a wall between them. One person is the point person for care, because our hierarchical world demands someone be in charge. That person typically falls into not only coordinating the work, but also carrying it out.
There is a sense that this is a modern phenomena. That not so long ago care work was a responsibility of the family as a whole and the community. Just as it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to provide care. Only today most of us find ourselves without a village.
I once spent an evening brainstorming reasons for the decline of community over beers. For weeks, friends who were there that night would text me words and phrases of ideas to add to our list:
air conditioning (instead of opening your windows and hearing your neighbors, instead of sitting on the front porch, instead of sleeping on the roof of your apartment building, instead of going to the swimming hole, instead of summers in the mountains)
disposable razors (instead of going to the barber)
radios and TVs becoming affordable (instead of gathering together at a neighbor’s house)
cars becoming the primary mode of transportation (rather than walking or taking the streetcar)
backyard pools (and the closing of public pools in America)
garages and then garage door openers (you drive right into your house without even stopping to open a gate, so your neighbors no longer know if you’re home)
home hair dye kits (instead of going to the salon)
Nintendo’s gameboy (instead of going to the arcade)
direct deposit and ATMs (instead of waiting in line with your neighbors to cash a paycheck and then talking to the bank clerk)
Anna North notes how work is a big, often overlooked, cause for the decay of communities:
“When you’re working constantly — or when you’re perpetually on call, never sure if or when you’ll have to go to work — you might not have the energy to volunteer with your local mutual aid group. You might not have time for political activism, even if it’s a cause you care about. You might not be able to get together with others in your workplace or your industry to advocate for better conditions because your schedules never overlap enough to organize.”
When an article made the rounds with the christening of “polywork” multiple friends sent it to me in bemused disgust. What is the “gig economy” other than being forced to work multiple jobs to make ends meet or be able to save for the future? What is “polywork” other than assuming your employer will abandon you at a moment’s notice so you need to avoid putting all your eggs in one basket?
Whether you’re working 80 hours a week at a high-pressure office job or trying to make ends meet with multiple hourly gigs, “the end result is that you are left with very little time that you would see as being open,” Jenny Odell, author of the book How to Do Nothing, told Vox.
Michael Sacasas writes: “the dominant techno-social configuration of modern society demands that human beings operate at a scale and pace that is not conducive to their well-being—let alone rest, rightly understood—but by now most of us have been born into this state of affairs and take it more or less for granted.”
Even when we’re not actually working, we’re supposed to be productive. We should be developing a side hustle. We should be learning new skills. We should be networking. We should be working out. We should be meditating. We should be resting optimally, sleeping the right way, doing self care the scientifically proven way.
No wonder even the person you know who appears to have the least amount of responsibility is somehow always too busy to help.
I can’t remember what I read that first made this clear, but years after first reading Bowling Alone, I finally learned that all those clubs we’re mourning the loss of weren’t optional. You had to be involved in those community groups if you wanted to get promoted at work — and sometimes if you even wanted to keep your job. We’re mourning the loss of mandatory after work happy hours.
Being a member of the club was as voluntary as owning a smartphone. Sure, it’s not legally required to own a smartphone. Go ahead and try to get a job without one. I made an appointment to get fingerprinted for a background check — a routine requirement for work as a home health aid, nursing home staff, security guard, hospital employee, and school employee — and in order to do so I’m required to show a digital vaccine certificate. Printouts are not accepted.
I have yet to find the good old days of caregiving. Most of what I can find about the history of care work sounds pretty familiar. The sandwich generation is nothing new, which is not terribly surprising, since human beings have aged at roughly the same rate for a very long time, regardless of how many headlines proclaim 60 is the new 30 or panic that girls are going through puberty early.
Mostly, what I find is that the ability of the equivalent of the middle class to access support for caregiving — both to afford the financial cost and the social acceptability of doing so — ebbs and flows.
When you live in a culture where you are born into a family occupation or with family property rights, there is no option of putting your elderly father in a nursing home because the head of household calls all the shots.
In places with individual property rights, the elderly were warned against transferring family property to children before they died. People were told to save for old age back then, too.
The oldest wills include elaborate instructions on the requirements to care for the surviving parent and disabled siblings. You probably know what life rights are. They’ve been popular for a long time.
Paying for residential care with a religious order, then known as hospitals, was normal back in the 13th century. Adult children could pay to board their parents with another family for care, just as they sent their children off to the countryside to stay with wet nurses, then boarding schools, apprenticeships, or work as live-in domestics.
So many of the things that were captured in the written record are legal documents. We don’t write legal documents requiring something to be done when it’s something everyone does without question.
By 1601, England had made it law that children support their parents in their old age and only those without children, or whose children were destitute, could get support from the parish.
In Growing Old in the Middle Ages, Shulamith Shahar explains:
“The real situation of old people was determined by the structure of the family, the patterns of property ownership, and the laws of inheritance, which varied from place to place; it was also evidently affected by the demographic and economic transitions which occurred in the course of the years.”
The way its done in most of the US and Canada, caregiving is another thing that pulls apart a community.
Caregivers are too busy to eat, bathe, and sleep. They don’t have time for friends. They certainly aren’t participating in the community. They do not care what the latest gossip is or what’s being built where or whatever because none of that is life and death. They have more than enough to deal with.
When a single person is responsible for providing 24/7 care there is no time for community. When a home health aid is juggling multiple clients at multiple locations they don’t have spare time to help anyone else. When someone is caring for their kids, their parents, and working full-time, they’re certainly not active in anything beyond getting through today.
What does it mean when the only people who can be part of a community are those who aren’t working and aren’t providing care? Who does that even leave us with?
It’s employers who create systems that assign schedules 72 hours ahead of time, without any regard for the employee’s needs. It’s our politicians who don’t pass laws protecting our working conditions. It’s our politicians who decide that’s okay for employers to not provide paid family leave. It’s our politicians who decide it’s fine that there is no guaranteed source of income for family caregivers. It’s politicians who create the hurdles involved in enrolling in disability and accessing respite care. It’s politicians who decide the closest living relative is required to provide all necessary care, with no concern for the autonomy of the person needing care or the person who finds themselves responsible for providing it.
Politicians point the finger at smartphones for the demise of community. Oh, and kids these days.
It’s hard to demand more when there’s no time. But it’s been done before. Things were not always like this and won’t always be like this. We can demand more.
ARD has information on abolishing conservatorships and community-based research projects.
Alex Fox has a piece on what it means to really design and run programs in partnership with the people you’re serving.
Psyche reminds us that the body is not a machine.
The New York Times asks if there’s no such thing as closure (a gift article, so no paywall).