Wired for care

How are you building a village in your own life?

A couple of weeks ago I took a train down to London to help a close friend who recently had a baby. Her husband had gone back to work, and I offered to come down for a night (don’t worry, I didn’t ask her to host me) to ease the transition to being the sole caretaker of an infant for hours on end.

Before I had a baby, I wouldn’t have done this. Not only because I might’ve felt unsure about how to help, but also because I probably wouldn’t have gone this far out of my way to help a friend who hadn’t directly asked for it.

Caring for my friend required arranging daisy-chain of care on the other end: my mother-in-law looked after my son for part of the time I was away, my husband did dinner and bedtime by himself two nights in a row, and my cousin let me stay at her flat and cooked me a delicious dinner. It wasn’t like my friend was in dire straits — far from it, she’s doing incredibly well — so why go to all that trouble, right?

As I walked a peaceful, sleeping baby around a local park while my friend napped, I thought about how good it felt to extend care in this way. After two or three years of having very little capacity to think about anything beyond myself, my work, and my own immediate family, it felt healing to be able to give a friend what I knew she needed in that time, even though she didn’t ask for it: time to heal herself.

I also had the sense that in a world where our time wasn’t so dominated by jobs and screens and economic survival, this is the kind of work that would be the most obvious to spend our time doing. Not taking care of a baby, necessarily, but finding ways to take care of each other. It felt obvious and natural. My only wish was that I could have offered more help to my friend in the weeks ahead.

Last year, I wrote a piece called The Friendship Problem, the reaction to which sent me on a trajectory of thought and real-life practice that I’ve been on ever since: Trying to regain the capacity to show up for people in my life outside of myself. Those two afternoons I spent helping my friend last month felt like a tiny yet significant moment of victory. This is the kind of thing I’ve been wanting to make the time for.

Funnily enough, I put very little thought into the title of that essay, which probably helped it go viral, because that’s how these things tend to work. And though many people resonated with it as a meditation on friendship, what I was really writing about was about care. I was arguing that we are an interdependent species designed to take care of one another, but we live in a society and economic system that incentivizes us to retreat into ourselves and pretend we’re doing just fine alone.

I recently came across the phrase “ecologies of care” from the author and journalist Lucy Jones. (Her book, Matrescence, is the one I give to every woman I know who has a baby.) When I look up that phrase, I get a bunch of academic articles that are impenetrable to me, with their theoretical language and needlessly complicated sentence structure. But the truth is I don’t need the definition — I can intuit what it means without looking it up.

When I became a mother a little over two years ago, I didn’t realize at first that what I was actually becoming was a caretaker. And that was a state of being, a continuous act of labor, an expansive human capacity that I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t know existed before that day.

It took me a while, but I came to appreciate how the human capacity to care for each other — to put someone in front of our own needs over and over and over again because there is no other choice — is at once a superpower and the most mundane, elemental part of us. Having a kid is just one, yet perhaps among the most extreme, way of doing it.

Once I understood what care was, it appeared absolutely everywhere I looked. Like a natural ecosystem, it’s not made up of any one species or location or thing you can point to — it’s everywhere and everything, interacting and supporting and depending on one other. An ecology of care.

In a recent piece for the Guardian about the loneliness of new motherhood, Jones cites a study which found that in modern hunter-gatherer communities in the Republic of the Congo, “multiple caregiving adults, known as ‘alloparents’ — responded to a crying child more than 40% of the time.”

When the so-called village it took to raise a child was less proverbial and more literal, we all would have been part of that 40% at some point in our lives. Whether we ever became biological parents, or not, we’d know that when a mother has a baby, she needs a daisy-chain of people to step in to take care of her. We’d implicitly know lots of things about taking care of kids, like the mysterious fact that it’s somehow easier to entertain two or three toddlers at once versus one (especially on Friday afternoon).

In an ecology of care, we’d also know that taking care of one another feels good. When care is shared and distributed in the way intended — not borne predominately by women who are isolated, burned out, and economically disadvantaged — it can feel generative and expansive. Care expands and rewires our brains (literally) and gives us a sense of our place in the vast expanse of time and space. It gives a meaning and purpose to our lives that material accumulation, online connections, and fleeting career achievements do not. It’s why some of us choose to have children, but also why so many people have houseplants and gardens and pets.

But we don’t have the infrastructure that supports caregiving in that way. Which is why this week, the U.S. Surgeon General released an public health advisory concerning the widespread stress and poor mental health of parents. Validating, but also depressing.

Much is written about the societal policies that are desperately needed to support parents — especially women — and I support every single one of them. But sometimes I feel disheartened by the conversation. It’s like we’re all waiting for male politicians who have never even changed a diaper to deliver the Scandinavian policies of our dreams. By the time they do, we’ll have moved onto a different life stage. The bizarre amnesia of early parenthood will mean we all forget how foundational that time is, how its conditions shape the life of a mother and child dyad, a dynamic which ends up shaping the world itself. 

What I’ve been thinking about over the past year is how we might go about creating our own ecologies of care now, alongside lobbying for the policies we so desperately need in the future. This effort would only work if it includes all of us: parents and non-parents. People who have families nearby and people who don’t. People who want to live in tidy apartments and people who want to live in intentional communities with overflowing jars of kombucha and chickens. All of these people are wired for care. And despite what JD Vance and the weirdly divisive rhetoric about “family values” suggests, these people need not be pitted against each other. I think they actually need each other more than ever.

I’m interested in taking this question out of the theoretical and into the practical. In an upcoming piece, I’m going share the changes my family and I have made in our own lives since I wrote The Friendship Problem last year. The kinds of things we’ve hoped will address (if not entirely fix) the problem I outlined in that piece.

But I would also love to hear from you all, and include your responses: How are you building a village in your own life? You can answer this question however you see fit, but if you want a little more direction, I think it is made up of two questions:

One is, how are you seeking out the help you need? 

The other is, how are you finding the capacity to extend some help outwards, to people outside yourself or immediate family?

Please don’t feel like I’m just talking to parents here, because I’m definitely not. Child-free people are an essential, too often ignored part of this conversation. And if your answers to all of these questions are: “I’m not doing any of those things because I am too burned out and exhausted to think beyond dinner time.” Then, welcome, you’re in the right place. I was you a year ago. But please stay tuned for more. 

You can leave your responses in the comments, or hit reply to this email. Please let me know if you’d like to remain anonymous.

Things I enjoyed reading

• I really enjoyed this meandering deep dive into the history of the porch, which are “semi-magical spaces, intermediate between inside and outside.” [New Yorker]

• I did not have the energy to write about the Ballerina Farm profile in The Times, but lucky for me

  Sarah Menkedick
  captures everything I thought about it with elegance and nuance in her Substack, Terms of Endearment. (You can also read the piece I wrote about BF a year ago here.)

• If you want to feel better about your life choices, read this somewhat maddening tale of four people who made terrible ones — and then published books about it. [NY Mag]

• What do adults lose when kids stop playing on the street outside? [The Atlantic]

• A sensitively-reported piece about the tragic death of a true crime TV producer. This explores the impact that our appetite for true crime has on the journalists and storytellers who work to meet it. [The Guardian]

• Lena Dunham on working in New York versus London, creative freedom, and Gen-Z discovering “Girls.” [New Yorker]

Things I enjoyed listening to

• What does it feel like to believe in God? Such a winding, curious episode that I thought about for days afterwards. [Search Engine]

• Loved the funny and wise Taffy Brodesser Akner on

  sam baker
  ’s podcast talking about money, nose jobs, and accepting criticism. [The Shift]

From the archives

A piece I published in December 2022: “In writing this essay, I am adding to what has become an emblematic genre for members of my generation: the justification of why I am (or am not) having children in the era of climate emergency.”

Life's longing for itself

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Word Soup

Do not ask your children
to strive for extraordinary lives.
Such striving may seem admirable,
but it is the way of foolishness.
Help them instead to find the wonder
and the marvel of an ordinary life.
Show them the joy of tasting
tomatoes, apples and pears.
Show them how to cry
when pets and people die.
Show them the infinite pleasure
in the touch of a hand.
And make the ordinary come alive for them.
The extraordinary will take care of itself.

—William Martin

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