"I Went Into Motherhood Determined Not To Lose Myself In It."

On the unexpected magic of caring for others

The headline is a bit of a bait and switch: it’s what Elissa Strauss, who I’m interviewing today, promised herself when she first got pregnant. It’s what a lot of parents I known promise themselves — because parenting, particularly the intensive parenting that has become the aspirational bourgeois norm, looks like a blizzard from the outside. Like once you find yourself on the inside, it’ll take years to find your way out.

But Strauss found that mindset ill-fitting — not because she didn’t feel some form of ambivalence, but because it felt like it required bifurcating pieces of her personality: her parenting self vs. her actual self. She wanted to find a different way — of thinking of parenting, sure, but also of thinking of the expansive, enriching role care can take in our lives.

If you’ve been itching for a different way of thinking about caregiving, this interview — and Elissa’s book — is for you. If you feel ambivalent about care, as I can often be, this book is also for you. . It challenged me (in the best way, not the annoying way) in ways I had not anticipated — and I think it’ll do the same for you.

You can buy When You Care here — and subscribe to Elissa’s Substack, Made With Care, here.

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I found the story of your shifting ambivalence around caregiving both relatable and surprisingly moving — can you share some of that story with readers to give them a bit of grounding in the book and your own perspective?

“I went into motherhood determined not to lose myself in it. The obliteration of who I was, or thought I was, who I could be, or thought I could be, all felt inevitable without a conscious defense.” 

This is where I begin the book, and it is where my story starts.

It was 2012, and I got these ideas from the broader culture in which motherhood was generally seen as only creatively or intellectually worthy when it was paired with ambivalence, suspicion or rejection. A woman frames motherhood as an assault to her identity, or runs away from motherhood to find herself: bestselling, buzzy book. Everyone’s talking about her. I’m talking about her on the Brooklyn playgrounds while my son attempts to climb up a slide. Meanwhile, stories about finding the experience challenging in a meaningful way, not to mention sometimes pleasurable, seemed relegated to conservative mom blogs. 

So what could a feminist woman who knew she wanted kids, and was lucky enough to easily connect with her first kid, but didn’t want to be rendered unserious or uncool by motherhood do? My solution was to love my kid, but build some kind of imaginary firewall between my mom self and all my other selves. No “mom juice,” no “mom friends,” no new moms groups, etc. No doing anything “mom” or identifying as a mom, internally or externally, outside of my relationship with my son.

What I soon realized is that maintaining a firewall between my “mom” self and the rest of my self was making motherhood much less interesting. The rest of myself was being so challenged — psychologically, spiritually, philosophically, creatively and intellectually — by caring for my son. But I resisted it, and tried to keep care small because nobody had ever told me care could be so rich and interesting; nobody told me it could be filled with as much productive friction as all those other epiphany-seeking things I did in my youth including long hikes, psychedelics and meditation retreats.

Eventually, I stopped and let the experience of motherhood be big and seep into my big messy self, my big messy existence, and I began to enjoy it more. And, I must emphasize, I didn’t let motherhood be big in the traditional sense that motherhood is big: I didn’t stop working; I didn’t stop aiming for a 50/50 co-parenting arrangement with my husband, elusive as that can be; I didn’t suddenly devote myself to a particular parenting style or think parenting is something one can perfect; I didn’t give up other interests or abandon other identities; I didn’t primarily identify as a mom and value that identity more than others. (Not that the last one is a bad thing at all! Why shouldn’t motherhood be a primary identity for some?) Instead what I did is let my mothering self inspire and inform all my other selves. It was about motherhood as a form of identity expansion rather than colonization. 

This made me really curious about why the experience of giving care-- parenting as well as caregiving to old, ill, and disabled people--has been systematically denied curiosity for so long. I myself wasn’t curious about care because I live in a world that isn’t, fundamentally speaking, curious about care. I began to dig and discover that care had been left out of all of our meaning-making systems, from philosophy to economics and theology. And then, I dug some more and discovered so many wonderful thinkers and doers who are trying to put care back at the center of the human story where it belongs. 

I want to drill down on one aspect of the intro, too, because I think it’s essential: how has care “curdled,” for lack of a better word, in our minds? And what have been the implications of that degradation? 

Definitely curdled. When I say the word “care” I think it often brings to mind the smell of diapers or that unpleasant combo of urine and disinfectant one experiences at an old age home -- and people are turned-off. Care is broken, needy, oozy bodies; it’s unfiltered emotions; it’s vulnerability and neediness; it's an activity that takes us away from doing other things society sees as productive and interesting; and it’s a task that isn’t collectively valued or supported. This is quite a hurdle I have to climb over here. 

The causes of this curdling are manyfold. Historically speaking, men flattened care into an easy and tidy fairytale. In this version, care comes easy to women, caregivers never have any other needs, and care is something a person can do on one’s own. All convenient fiction to keep women limited to caregiving while men pursued more public, lucrative and prestigious pursuits!  They told us motherhood is the most important job in the world, and yet never voted a mother into office. If it was actually the most important job in the world, shouldn’t this be someone we are learning from? Someone whose care-honed skills might be of value in larger arenas for larger populations? I think so!)

As such, care has been a burden to women who have done most of it. They weren’t supported in it when they very much should be, they weren’t free to pursue other sides of themselves, and nobody thought parents or caregivers were interesting. Nobody turned to the mom or caregiver at a dinner party and asked her for broader insights into life or human psychology or philosophy. Much better to ask that guy who just climbed Mt. Everest what he learned about humanity while on his hero’s journey.

When we open ourselves up to care in all its richness, tension and might, when we turn to it with authentic curiosity, we begin to see how it is huge, fleshy, enlightening, challenging, a dark soul of the night, a fiery furnace that might sting and singe while revealing what’s underneath. It is a million hikes up Mt. Everest! 

Eventually, we also see how central it is to our ongoing process of becoming who we are as humans, and to the fact that we, as a collective, exist. And, just as importantly, 

how it is absolutely bananas to expect caregivers to provide care without structural support of cultural validation.

I found your arguments about the value of care compelling — but I also found myself thinking this is exactly where conservatives want us, this has been the goal all along. There are several points in the book where you seem to be acknowledging this danger, and I’m hoping you could talk a bit about how you wrote about these ideas while also understanding how patriarchy has benefited wildly from the fetishization of domesticity. 

I am so glad you asked this question and detangling care from the patriarchy can absolutely feel like a tight-rope act. This is largely in part because care and the patriarchy are still very much tangled up in our culture. 

So yes, there is a risk to saying, “hey, wait a minute, care is great,” even when these words are said by me, a pro-choice feminist who loves her job and autonomy and premarital sex and that some of her friends are choosing not to have kids and feeling supported for this decision, while other friends, queer friends, are building these nontraditional, nonheteronormative family units that bring them so much stability, meaning and joy. 

I think there is a risk to letting the patriarchy/ those whose aim it is to perpetuate the patriarchy, own the good side of care. To me, this must also be feminist project because care isn’t just something that held women back, historically speaking. Care is also what shaped us for the better, and made us more empathetic, relational and willing to accept that humans are needy, vulnerable, fragile and dependent beings. Men could have used more of this type of cultivation.

I found some of my courage in embracing care in lesser known feminisms, mostly Black feminisms, in which a culture of raising up care and caregivers was much more common than it was in more career-focused White feminism. We forget that while some women fought for the right to work, other, poorer women who, who have long been working, fought for the right to care.

Also, I fell absolutely in love with the work of philosophers known as care ethicists who were like: “Wait a minute, how did philosophy ignore the reality of human dependency for so long?” They took care super seriously, valued it very highly, and wrote about it with the same intensity they would any other concept. Did men treat them like their work was smaller for it? Yep. But they weren’t afraid and I carry a little bit of this chutzpah with me.

Sometimes I think about all this through the lens of a Virgin Mary portrait, of which we have all seen hundreds if not thousands. In the patriarchal fetishized version of valuing care, she stays there, locked up in a glossy painting, harmonious and unconflicted and silent. In my version of valuing care, we start with asking her if we can carry the baby for a bit -- her arm must be very tired! Then we ask her what it has been like for her. What has she learned? What can she teach us? We let her speak.

I recently wrote about teen babysitting and what it taught me about care work, and I know readers here have so many stories of learning the parameters of care work (both how it is valued and devalued) in their own lives, whether caring for other people’s kids, caring for their siblings, or caring for their elders.

The richer you get, and the more scheduled a kid/teen becomes, the less time there is for this sort of caregiving work…..and while I have complicated feelings about compelled/coerced caregiving, I do feel strongly that something crucial is lost when you have no caregiving responsibilities as a developing young adult.  I just keep thinking of how many parents I know, of all genders, who felt utterly unprepared for parenting in part because they’d never done this sort of work, never woven it into their daily lives, never diapered a baby, sure, but also never figured out how to get through a boring day. How do you think about these ideas? 

I agree that care experience during youth is important — for a number of reasons. Also, I definitely want to make the caveat that compelled caregiving/too much caregiving is not ideal, even if people have very different ideas of what too much is. I spent a lot of my teens and 20s messing around, having fun, discovering obsessions etc., but mixed into that was a period of six months after college when I stayed home, worked as a waitress, and helped care for my mom during cancer treatment. That felt like the right amount to me and if it had gone on for years I very well may have felt like I lost an important opportunity to live mostly for myself for a period of time. And yet I hear stories from dedicated adult children caregivers to their parents who are in their 20s and 30s and while yes, they could imagine life otherwise, they also feel very unseen when people assume their life is a tragedy. They find a lot of purpose and meaning in this care that would have, I believe, been too much for me.

Back to the question: I think care responsibilities for teens — and we are generally talking about babysitting here — are so important for all the reasons you mention. We live in a culture in which we have very little intergenerational mingling and that is bad for everyone because when we get to new stages of life we think: Why did nobody tell me this? How did I not know what this entailed? This includes practical things like putting on a diaper, as well as the chance to cultivate empathy for one self for not being as “productive” (according to a world that doesn’t see care as productive!) after becoming a parent or a caregiver. 

Also, and I might even find this argument more compelling, deep human truths are exposed in care. We, as a species, must rely on each other. We are fragile, vulnerable, and poop in our pants — figuratively and metaphorically speaking. There is a certain liberation to be found in human dependency, weakness, and vulnerability when one is a teen or young adult, feeling invincible, and on the cusp of tasting the wonders of independence. 

I think many of us have come to think of contemporary caregiving as an incredibly isolated experience — in part, I think, because of the cult of individualism, and how it informs how we think we should be doing the work of care (e.g., on our own — or within our own family units).

This is a very Culture Study question, but you touch on it explicitly: how can a different understanding of care lead to a different sort of community and connection? 

Our culture is really doing a ten out of ten job in caring in the worst possible ways. There is no infrastructure to support parents of caregivers, so care makes you poor and exhausts you. (Solution: Pay caregivers! Universal and affordable childcare and eldercare!) Parenting has become more instrumental than it used to be: kids are a project, another container for our ambitions or fears, something to win or lose at. The more instrumental parenting becomes, the less we see it as something we can do collectively because what if that other person, the grandparent or neighbor or family friend, deviates from the plan? I try to fully let go of my ideas of ideal parenting when I send my kids to someone’s else. This is good for my kids to have exposure to another conception of order and mattering, and it is good for me because I get a break.

Also, the more instrumental care is, the less relational it becomes; the less we really listen to our kids and enjoy the process of letting them unfold with, yes, some intervention from us, but a much looser and less frequent grip on the reins.

Another one: when public spaces don’t accommodate the dependent, including children or anyone else, they also don’t accommodate their caregivers. When parents feel deep shame when their kids act like kids in public, or an adult child feels deep shame when their parent with dementia says something unexpected in public, this works to make the caregivers feel like they shouldn’t leave the house. We need to make more space for all humans in public! One of the biggest reasons I have become a regular attendee at my synagogue’s Shabbat services is because it is one of few public spaces where I can go where my caregiver self isn’t just welcomed, but supported. Nobody hushes kids there; there is childcare every weekend; there is a collective lunch I don’t have to cook or clean; the Rabbi is actually interested in my kids and gives them a warm smile and asks them questions about their lives. Now, not everybody has to be interested in my kids, but imagine a world in which just being out in public with them didn’t feel like a regular imposition on others!

The other thing we miss, and philosopher Eva Feder Kittay writes about this brilliantly, is that when you care for someone you, the parent or caregiver, are no longer independent. If you are tethered to someone by way of care, you can’t just go and do whatever you want in this world. As such, you, the parent or caregivers, need care, too. You need someone to make you dinner sometimes, or take you to a movie--or, the care often comes by way of covering some of your care responsibilities so you can care for yourself.

We need to really internalize, deeply so, that we all live in networks of care, Russian nesting dolls of care. I hope for policy change that will help us see this and be able to act accordingly, and culture change that will make us less blind to the reality of care in our workplaces, houses of worship, institutions of higher education (one of my friends is a single mom doing a PhD and holy crap does nobody get it at all!) and elsewhere. We need to stop treating people who are giving care as inconveniences, and instead as people living utterly ordinary lives, doing the work of maintaining, preserving, or cultivating humanity, and, as such, are abundantly worthy of collective support.

As I see it, that support can’t be limited to policy change. It has to come with a cultural shift I discuss above, one in which curiosity and real respect for care — not the fairytale fetishizing stuff! — is felt by all. ●

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You can buy When You Care here — and subscribe to Elissa’s Substack, Made With Care, here.