I find it interesting that people so often say no one talks about caregiving, when it seems like I can’t escape the topic. The sheer volume of caregiving memoirs and guides is a little overwhelming. It’s as if every cancer diagnosis results in a cancer memoir, a caregiving memoir, and a cancer guide.
It feels wrong to be so glib about people’s desire to share such a profound experience. Still, there are just so many caregiving memoirs lining the shelves (and many more self-published or unpublished…then there are the blogs, vlogs, podcasts, and social media accounts).
Even the non-caregiving memoirs so often include caregiving as a subplot. My current favorite memoir mashup is Tessa Fonataine weaving together the story of caring for her mother after a stroke and joining her experience traveling with the sideshow.
There seems to be no way through care work without getting lost in bureaucracy. Many of us try to make the path clearer for theose traveling after us.
I have read and re-read instructions that were meant to be comprehensible, that became clear only after I’d managed to struggle through it. I’ve rewritting plenty instructions in what I hope is actually coherent English to those figuring out a process for the first time.
Someone who is one or two steps ahead of us in a process can often explain things better than someone who’s done it many times, because they remember what it’s like to be a beginner.
That classic high school assignment of writing out instructions for how to tie your shoelaces or make a sandwich is surprisingly challenging.
Someone who’s worked as a nurse for 30 years will understandably struggle to explain how to do the things they do every day, automatically. We lose the words to describe physical knowledge. Someone who’s using every one of their vacation days to help a friend recovering from surgery may not be confident in their ability to provide wound care, but they can detail every single step that needs to be done.
There’s more to the desire to write a guide than the simple drive to save others from repeating our struggles.
Sure, some of us would like a little recognition for our work and our expertise. I’m happy to see money deposited into my bank account every month for my self-published guides.
Are those really compelling enough reasons that so many people write books? I doubt it. There are easier ways to get accolades. There are more promising ways to earn a little money. There are simpler topics to write about.
The other day, Judy Chicago paraphrased Anais Nin in explaining what drove her to write her memoirs:
We write our way out of things we can’t solve.
Judy Chicago’s work turns invisible aspects of the female experience into performance. It’s difficult to not be ashamed of the things we hide. Releasing ourselves from shame can entail making the private public.
The ways care work is so often done in secret does something to us.
It reinforces the idea that care needs are shameful and thus care work must be hidden in order to preserve the dignity of a care recipient.
It reinforces that idea that care work is natural and thus not labor at all.
The person giving care is imbued with the potential to be a tyrant, since they have the ability to make decisions for and control over someone who relies on their care for survival.
The person giving care is diminished and degraded, since their labor is seen as both the ultimate fulfillment of their destiny and of no value.
In discussing hierarchies of power and the distribution of emotional labor, David Graeber mentions another classic high school writing assignment: an essay describing what it would be like to spend a day as someone of the opposite sex.
The pattern teachers report is that girls write detailed ideas of what it would be like to be a boy for a day. Boys punt on the assignment, insisting they have no way of knowing what it would be like to be a girl.
This anecdote stuck with me because I find it impossible to believe anyone is truly cisgender, rather than simply capable of embracing an assigned role. One set of people is assigned to understand the experiences of, and cater to the needs of, another.
Care work and gender are toxic at the extremes. If one fully embodies the feminine, without any male attributes, or vice versa, it’s to their detriment. It results in a fascinatingly codependent couple, where they are only capable of functioning as an integrated unit.
In care work, any relationship where the lines between giver and recipient are completely clear is alarmingly problematic. The recipient of care becomes an object to be acted upon. The giver of care is stripped bare, like a building that’s been emptied of anything of value, where the copper wire is long gone and the facade soon goes missing.
Care work, gender, being a human being, caring about other people — these are all problems with no solution. We don’t want to solve them.
So we write our way through it.
As Tessa Fontane says, the trick is that there is no trick.
Please share your favorite memoirs on care work in the comments. If you’d like a steady stream of them, I share quite a few books on care work on Instagram.
You hit it right in the center of the target for me with; "We write our way out of things we can’t solve." That is why I sat in my husband's hospital and rehab rooms all day and often all night writing my thoughts on what the heck was happening (physically, emotionally, medically) as, together, we struggled through the devastating consequences of his cancer and strokes. Writing the words as they spewed forth from my head as incoherent thoughts, helped me understand and cope. It was when enough readers suggested I write a book that I began to realize I might be able to help others. And so the book was written - not without much emotional pain. And now my daughter is struggling to make sense of her husband's recent stroke and her new life as caregiver. That which I had experienced is allowing me to support her.
And, that is why we caregivers write. And blog. And post. And reach out to others. We have learned much that we can share. The problem arises when a caregiver starts to believe he/she knows it all. We don't. And never will.
This is perhaps my favourite post of all my favourite Cori reflections. Thank you! And for further musings on this subject, I highly recommend Eva Kittay's Love's Labor or her Learning From My Daughter. Because this is really about moral philosophy - Eva's bailiwick.