The unexpected magic of caring for others

5 questions for writer, curator and care evangelist Elissa Strauss

Who do you care for on a daily basis? Who cares for you?

These questions are rarely asked, and yet they are at the absolute core of our human experience. I care for two wildly different daughters, which in my case means—even just today (it’s is 3:11pm)—making bagels and cream cheese and oatmeal with the exact right amount of honey and cinnamon, teaching how to swallow vitamins in hopes of an immune boost for the one whose cough has lingered far too long, revisiting the homework failures of last month and getting the youngest on board for a fresh start, talking through the eldest’s feelings of alienation in class, getting the two to share some conflicted feelings about the after school cheerleading class without falling down a rabbit hole of bad vibes first thing in the morning (one is the “captain” and finding a source of much-needed control and confidence through the role; one hates rules and being told what to do by her older sister, but craves the team sport experience), calling about the dentist appointment that somehow none of us have clarity on, sorting through an old bin of toys etc etc. It’s the mundane and the sacred all smooshed together each day and it is fundamental to my joy and meaning in life.

And yet, despite so much talk about mothering, I don’t often feel like I read something that gets at the mundane-sacred of my experience. Enter Elissa Strauss’ new book, When You Care: The Unexpected Magic of Caring for Others. It’s out next week and I have to say, it really took my breath away. It felt like I had found a kindred spirit, someone who always understood that caring was core to thriving, but also worried a lot about what it meant to her own identity and freedom and Important Work in the World (whatever that actually means). She is someone who cares about systems and theology, but also the most minute of relational moments. In short, it was an edifying joy to find her writing. I hope it will be for you, too. Meet Elissa…

Courtney Martin: You wrote so viscerally and relatability of your initial loneliness within the experience of motherhood--trying not to become “one of those moms” at the coffee shop talking about the mundanity of care. What do you see as the root of that resistance (which you eventually complicate in wonderful ways)? 

Elissa Strauss: The terrors of new motherhood were twofold for me. There was the immutable truth that a very fragile being was now under my and my husband’s direct care and my early adult years marked by freedom and spontaneity had to come to an end. That alone would have been enough! But far worse for me was this deeper, more intractable fear that motherhood would inevitably make me less interesting, creative and smart. 

These messages come from all directions. I heard them most loudly in my 11th grade high school English curriculum in which stories about men who left home to experience epiphanies and find themselves dominated the year. I’m talking about the work of Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac and so many others. The domestic space = confinement and myopia in the great American novel. I also heard them quite clearly in the marquee name feminist books I read, including The Second Sex and The Feminine Mystique, neither of which offer a model for the home and care as a place of growth or transcendence. And then, neither the sex positive feminism of my 20s or the #bossbabe career feminism of my early 30s, offered me much in terms of thinking about motherhood as anything other than vampiric -- sucking me of vitality and creativity and potential to matter in the world-at-large.

This big mess of misogyny, Thoreau living deep and sucking the marrow of life alone in his cabin at Walden, and a mainstream feminist movement with a blindspot to care was all in me when I’d see groups of moms at coffee shops and think: “Warning! Stay away! Whatever they do, do the opposite!”

The pandemic felt like a “coming out” moment for care, and yet so much of the conversation and momentum feels like it has dissipated. You write that the Overton window shifted, nonetheless, but to what impact? What makes you hopeful?

On an anecdotal front, I hear from many “laptop class” working parents and caregivers that they feel they can speak more freely about their care responsibilities at work and are offered more flexibility. We are far from done on that front, but for so long we lived in a state of illusion, a state of denial, in which the realities in our homes and the realities in our office were expected to be completely separate. 

There is still tension, there is still conflict, there are still unreasonable demands, but more and more these are spoken out loud and there seems to be more openness to resolving the problem instead of burying it. Unfortunately, I have no reason to believe the similar progress has been made for those whose work can’t be done virtually, which is why the problem of care will never be fixed by the private sector alone.

Other moments of hope: the Biden administration keeps pushing to help lower the costs of child care. There have been state-by-state gains in the fight for universal paid leave. We are getting closer to household production being counted as part of the big economic picture by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Simply put, if you don’t count it, then you don’t know how much it is worth, nor do you know how much you stand to gain by investing it. Lastly, care activism is getting louder and bolder by the day. Sexier even! Sometimes I think if I saw a single t-shirt from Chamber of Mothers when I was a new mom it would have changed my perception of motherhood entirely. My favorite: “The Mothers Will Save Us All.” With this vision in my head I would have joined the new moms’ group! 

Also…yes, I lean optimistic. 

In the care space, there is a lot of conversation about the untapped market in care -- what The Holding Co puts at a $648B economy. Obviously so much policy work needs to be done, particularly here in the U.S., but also there is a striking lack of entrepreneurship and venture investment around care. Why do you think that is and how do relate to the for-profit possibilities--skeptical? intrigued? uninterested? 

I will begin with this from the Harvard Kennedy School: “Data and research prove that there is a significant gender gap in venture capital funding. Even though women are underrepresented as entrepreneurs to begin with, they receive a disproportionately small share of VC funding: 2.3% for all-female founding teams and 10%.4 for mixed-gender founding teams.”

But wait, you might say, surely things are changing in a more equitable direction. Alas. “These numbers have stagnated in the last three decades, as the 30-year average of all-female founders’ share of VC funding is 2.4%.”

Of course, who is getting the money has a lot to do with who is giving the money: “Currently in the United States, women make up approximately 11% of investing partners at VC firms.”

I adopt a posture of complete humility when it comes to the best way to solve big problems like our care crisis. That said, it strikes me as responsible to encourage creativity and ingenuity from all sides. We clearly need large-scale federal support, policies and laws to make sure nobody goes broke or loses their job because they care for another. But as to the best way to make this happen among diverse populations, economic and otherwise, or ways in which businesses can best support and protect caregiver employees, why not let the entrepreneur class get to work and see what they can do? This is an all-hands-on-deck problem right now, as long as we remember that solving the problem for the aforementioned laptop class is not enough.

I positively geeked out on your philosophy and theology chapters. Clearly you are a person who is comfortable wading into the deep. What was your favorite thing you discovered while writing those chapters? 

Those were my favorite chapters to write! And now you are making me pick one thing…which I will submit to because otherwise I would absolutely pick all the things.

I treasure this remark from Protestant theologian Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, which I often offer as a shorthand description of my whole book:

There is a passage from Matthew that tells us that we will be judged if we don’t visit the sick or help the poor, and it has been interpreted as meaning that you have to get out of the house. But sometimes the poor and unclothed, sometimes the ‘sufferer,’ is the child in your house.

I’m not Protestant, or even Christian, but boy do I believe in the same God as Bonnie -- a God for whom care of my sons is seen as valuable and holy work. I run into mothers all the time who feel so bad because having kids has limited their capacity for political activism. If I want readers to take anything away from my book, it is to kick this guilt about not doing enough to the curb. They are doing so much! 

Care is the one human-to-one human process through which we grant enough dignity, and allow that one-and-only dependent consciousness the ability to live a life to their fullest capability. This is noble work. This is holy work.

Your sons are in their twenties and they read your book cover to cover for the first time. What do they say about it? 

I love this question. I hope above there is something almost Proustian in it for them, that it surfaces a visceral, kishkes, embedded in the deepest recesses of their subconscious, memory of being cared for by me, and allows that feeling to inform and inspire their capacity and desire to care for others. I did my best to intellectualize and anecdotal-ize the value of care, but most of all I hope I succeeded in reminding readers of  that magic feeling that comes from a reciprocally beneficial care relationship. Without this, I doubt I will convince anyone of anything. 

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Isn’t she the best? We will donate to Caring Across in honor of her labor.

Buy the book here. And, hey, if you’re in the Bay Area, I’ll be interviewing Elissa at Mrs. Dalloway’s on Saturday, May 11th at 7pm. Register here. It would be so fun to see you there.