Journalist, essayist, and opinion writer! Elissa Strauss, WHEN YOU CARE: The Unexpected Magic of Caring for Others
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[0:31]Alyssa Strauss is the author of When You Care, the Unexpected Magic of Caring for Others.
[0:36]Alyssa has been a journalist, essayist, and opinion writer for the past 15 years.
[0:40]Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Glamour, El, Alure, the American Prospect, and elsewhere.
[0:46]She's been a contributing writer for CNN, where she covered the culture and politics of parenthood,
[0:51]as well as at Slate, where she wrote on feminism and motherhood.
[0:54]Since 2011, she has been an artistic director of Laba, L-A-B-A, a laboratory for Jewish culture.
[1:01]She lives in Oakland, California with her family.
[1:03]Welcome, Alyssa. Thank you so much for coming.
[1:06]On Mom's Don't Have Time to Read Books to discuss when you care the unexpected magic of caring for others.
[1:11]Congratulations.
[1:12]Thank you. It's nice to have a book that doesn't demonize sort of caregiving completely.
[1:20]That's not just like, there's too much on your plate, take it off.
[1:24]But that embraces the fact that this is something that we do.
[1:28]And we are still people, even though we care for other people.
[1:32]Right.
[1:33]Essentially.
[1:34]Yes.
[1:35]Yeah.
[1:36]And in fact, we're sometimes more of people because we care for exactly right.
[1:40]It adds, it takes away, but it also adds a great.
[1:44]So tell me about how you started writing this book.
[1:47]Tell me about your career before the book.
[1:49]I've been in the kind of, that was, you know, part of the great feminist blogosphere of the 10s, which was a really fun moment in women's writing.
[2:04]And around the time I had kids, I wrote a lot about the intersection of motherhood and feminism, mostly focused on all the ways moms are left out discriminated against in the workplace.
[2:16]The maternal mortality crisis, the fact that we don't have paid leave, the fact that we don't have universal and affordable childcare.
[2:23]All these things that hold moms back that are so real, so very real.
[2:27]And I kind of wrote story after story.
[2:29]And at some point, actually, there was a discrete moment where I saw a story in the New York Times and which a source was quoted about how poorly we treat, you know, new mothers and hospitals.
[2:43]And it was the same source giving the same quote in New York Times for years after I've written about what written, you know, about the same story with the same source and slate.
[2:51]And it didn't, to me, it didn't mean like, oh, everyone just stopped writing about this.
[2:55]Like, absolutely, we need to keep, you know, banging on that drum as loud as we can.
[2:59]But there was something in me that felt like, you know what, this is bigger than policy.
[3:03]We can say over and over again, hey, we're the only industrialized country in the world that doesn't have paid leave.
[3:09]But like, it's not just politicians, nothing, you're figuring out how to make this work.
[3:15]There's must be like something deeper underneath it like cultural roots of the care crisis.
[3:20]So that set me off.
[3:23]Meanwhile, the other kind of thread that led me to this book is when I became a mom, I felt very strongly I had almost protect myself from the colonizing force that I perceived motherhood to be.
[3:36]Now, I want to be clear, I wasn't ambivalent about having kids. I grew up one of four. My parents seem to just really genuinely authentically loving parents. I always like kids.
[3:46]So it wasn't the question of if I should have kids. And it also wasn't a question of ambivalence about my, you know, feelings for my kids. I live with lucky to not have any real postpartum anxiety or just depression.
[3:58]And that of relatively, you know, babies aren't kind of a nightmare. Even the sweetest cutest babies, these easiest babies are kind of, you know, they're hard.
[4:06]But, you know, a few years into it, like I was enjoying parenting. I felt natural for me to be with hockey, my first son.
[4:13]But I felt very much like I had a keep motherhood separate from everything else because it would make me unserious intellectually uncool and creative circles that it was kind of, you know, the part of me that I shouldn't talk about anywhere.
[4:27]else except when I was being a mom. So it took me a minute to realize that I had spent all this time being like furious at the world for not valuing care, but actually I didn't value care.
[4:41]I didn't see it as actually part of a meaningful, interesting life in a deep way. And I once I realized that I was like, Oh, you know, this there's work to do like this isn't just about blaming everyone else.
[4:54]It's actually digging into myself and into our society and figure out like, why don't we see parenting and caregiving as a hero's journey. Why do we view it as a footnote to life instead of the, you know, very material of life itself.
[5:09]And so I began.
[5:13]It's funny because when I first saw the book, I was like, Oh, this is going to be about elder care, which God knows why I thought that there's nothing that.
[5:20]No, it's I think the word care is mostly associated with elder care. And you know, that's part of like the challenge of the book is to really point out like cares everywhere.
[5:29]We spend half of our lives in care relationships and some of us spend base fair whole lives on one side of a care relationship. So right, but it's it's it's a tricky thing. We still don't have the language.
[5:40]I don't think you're alone.
[5:42]Interesting.
[5:43]Well, I mean, when you think about the importance of off putting not off putting loneliness stemming loneliness, right, the importance of not being lonely. Yeah.
[5:53]Caregiving is the immediate antidote to that, right. And people live longer when they're with other people. I mean, you point of it.
[5:59]I mean, you obviously you're the expert in all of this, but it seems like so fundamental to longevity and life itself and satisfaction and all these basic things to be in a
[6:11]relationship in which you care deeply about the person, whether you have to, you know, brush their hair or change a diaper or, you know, wheeled them down the hall in whatever a wheelchair or a stroller, whatever, right.
[6:24]Then you're you've got this immediate protection against ever feeling that loneliness and isolation. Yeah. And you know, and it can be like lonely to right has a care giver.
[6:36]The be they can have high rates of loneliness, but I think it's.
[6:40]But at the same time, like right, when we kind of invest in our relationships, and we see relationships as part of self actualization of learning who we are.
[6:51]And what it means to be a human and it kind of changes right the whole experience and it makes it a place of growth and excitement and challenge and struggle, but not one that only somehow detract from who we are one that brings us more fully into ourselves and into our connections with other people.
[7:11]So when you approach this as a book, how did you conceive of this originally? How close is this to how you set out to write it all of that?
[7:20]Yeah, so I think originally it was a mom book, you know, it was just going to be about my experience with motherhood and my agent thought that it would be interesting to expand it to care more broadly.
[7:31]And you know, there's a challenge to that because caring for kids is generally a more optimistic endeavor than caring for someone with terminal cancer, obviously, or Louis body dementia.
[7:43]So there is a challenge to it, but I still felt like I wanted to rise up to the challenge and really kind of dig into just the reality that humans depend on other humans, but we'd like to think of ourselves as is like independent beings that can always take care of ourselves, but that's just not the reality of life.
[8:00]And so that's one way it changed. And then again, the other way it changed was seeing that like my story really had to be part of it that it's a first I thought it would kind of just be in the introduction and then pass it over to the research.
[8:17]But it actually, and then, you know, the first pass with my editors is like, where are you? And I was like, I thought you didn't want me. I was just another Brooklyn mom like who needs to, you know, and then she's like, no, we want you.
[8:29]And that actually it was a whole other layer of challenge. So we have a chapter on parent philosophy and care, you know, that parenting and caregiving.
[8:38]It's like a real philosophical awakening, but also one that Western philosophy ignored until like literally 1980, the fact that, you know, we're not we depend on each other relationships just like didn't occur to most Western philosophers.
[8:53]And so I hadn't so not only did I dig into all these amazing philosophers who are digging into care and showing how it's this place of like real epiphany of what does it mean to be a person to live a good life to do the right thing.
[9:06]But actually, I think about like what does that mean for me.
[9:09]And the same with a chapter on care and spirituality or theology.
[9:15]There's always like amazing great confeminist theologians that are like, why isn't care at the center of the religious experience like what's more kind of holy and whatever that means to anyone, whether that there's actually God behind holy or just a sense of like transcendence and otherness and being part of something bigger.
[9:32]You know, what's really more holy than care. It's like honoring that that holy quality, the divine in another. And I had to think about how actually my experience with something some days I call God, even if I don't know what it means was totally changed by care.
[9:49]And I'm Jewish and I like deepen and enrich and enriched my practice as a Jew and my kind of sounds so big.
[10:00]It might be, but my sense of connection with the universe
[10:03]caring for my kids.
[10:04]And also now I love Shabbat because it's like a Friday night
[10:07]dinner.
[10:08]We actually talk to each other.
[10:09]There's no sense of homework.
[10:11]And it's like that ancient technology
[10:14]on a practical level is huge for my ability
[10:18]to like appreciate and enjoy and grow from care.
[10:21]So that's, you know, that was like the second layer of this book
[10:24]was not just looking at how this is working for everyone else.
[10:27]And all these really cool thinkers who are thinking
[10:29]about, you know, care and economics and care and psychology,
[10:32]but having to bring it to myself and really
[10:34]put myself to the test and be like, how are you
[10:36]with a list of being changed by care?
[10:39]And so how have you changed the most?
[10:41]Yeah, so I think the biggest thing for me,
[10:44]the first, my first big, like epiphany by way of care,
[10:49]came with the Augie, my first son, who,
[10:54]he was always a very practical reserved kid.
[10:57]He didn't.
[10:57]He wasn't your typical tantrum toddler.
[11:00]I had one of those Levi's.
[11:02]So don't worry, everyone knows what it's like.
[11:05]But Augie was always like almost too reasonable, too rational.
[11:09]If he, you know, had taken that marshmallow test,
[11:12]that, you know, if you wait, you get a marshmallow,
[11:14]that there's this psychology test that teaches kids
[11:16]and abilities to like think of a future.
[11:18]And he would almost do too well on it.
[11:21]You know, he would, it's like, you know,
[11:22]he was the kind of kid, you're like, just eat the marshmallow,
[11:25]stop like thinking through everything so much.
[11:28]So I just could really want to understand the world
[11:31]who didn't actually rely on intuition and impulse,
[11:35]like most, you know, those peers.
[11:39]But really had this like needs to figure it out.
[11:42]And at the time, I was, you know,
[11:45]back in that feminist blogosphere,
[11:47]it was literally my job every day to send my editor
[11:52]six ideas of pieces I would write.
[11:56]Shoot a pick one.
[11:57]And by the end of the day, I would turn out, you know,
[12:00]800 words with a hard edge opinion
[12:02]on something that was happening in the world.
[12:04]And it was just a little opinion machine.
[12:07]And I didn't realize until being with Augie
[12:10]and having to take a step back and not just know everything
[12:13]and, you know, think like I had this sense
[12:15]that I was just understood the world
[12:17]and I knew exactly where everything stood
[12:18]and like this was good and this was bad
[12:20]and this was okay and this wasn't okay.
[12:23]And we do this, but we don't do that.
[12:25]And then I have this kid Augie
[12:27]who like needs actually need a not be that way.
[12:30]Needs me to make space for him.
[12:32]Needs me to get him not to listen to me
[12:35]but listen to himself.
[12:37]And it really, you know, I joke like motherhood ruin
[12:39]my career but not how people think.
[12:41]I got really tired of thinking that way.
[12:44]And maybe realize what a closed way of living that was.
[12:48]And that was actually, you know,
[12:49]thinking I understood everything
[12:50]and thinking I was getting everything right,
[12:52]but actually was just constantly like slamming
[12:55]the window shut on other possibilities.
[12:58]And it was really profound for me to, you know,
[13:01]I think we speak a lot about how do we be less certain
[13:04]and how psychologically healthy that is.
[13:06]But I rarely see hair giving and parenting
[13:09]is like a vehicle for that.
[13:11]You know, people go in meditation retreats
[13:13]and do all sorts of things.
[13:14]And for me being so close to another human
[13:17]and having to look for the world through their eyes
[13:20]held this mirror to the self that was like unlike anything
[13:23]I had ever experienced.
[13:25]So interesting.
[13:27]You know, it's funny my husband and I were talking.
[13:29]I have four kids and, you know,
[13:31]one of them is sort of going through
[13:33]just like responding to things differently
[13:35]than the other ones and whatever.
[13:37]And he was like, you know, my husband's a big football fan.
[13:40]He's like, you can't call the same place on every job.
[13:43]You know, like every kid is different.
[13:45]Like you have to change how you are parenting.
[13:48]Because the same thing is not going to work.
[13:50]And I was like, I thought I was good at that.
[13:52]But actually, I guess I'm not, you know,
[13:54]he's like, you like to do everything right away.
[13:56]That doesn't mean your kids are all going to like
[13:59]get everything done right away.
[14:00]And I was like, everybody doesn't like that.
[14:03]I'm like, let's just order the shooting, you know.
[14:05]But I think you're right.
[14:06]You know, you have to, if you don't look at yourself,
[14:09]you can't be as good a parent even, you know.
[14:11]And it's humbling because it never ends.
[14:15]Right. Exactly.
[14:17]And it's, you know, I feel like we people seek
[14:19]this kind of realization, self-actualization,
[14:24]all these places, all the time that they get celebrated for,
[14:27]you know, if someone hikes Mount Everest and, you know,
[14:30]and you go to a dinner party on one side of the table,
[14:33]there's a parent of three girls in the six-year-old
[14:35]and the other side of the table,
[14:36]there's someone who just hikes Mount Everest.
[14:39]Everyone's eyes are on, you know, Mr. Everest
[14:41]and the one who like learned a lot about what it means
[14:43]to live and be a human.
[14:45]No one's eyes are on the parent,
[14:47]but I feel like that parent, like, they both should be
[14:50]on the menu, you know, that parent is also learning a lot.
[14:54]Right, that's constantly changing.
[14:56]And it's, and it's just this like constant source
[15:00]of kind of growth and renewal and challenge
[15:02]and sometimes it just sucks.
[15:03]I don't want to ignore that.
[15:04]And it's just hard.
[15:06]And there's not this kind of necessarily positive growth,
[15:10]but I think so often the hard stuff is actually so bound up
[15:14]with this kind of expansion of self that's so meaningful.
[15:20]So where do you go from here?
[15:22]In terms of care, right?
[15:23]No.
[15:24]In terms of everything.
[15:26]Like, is there, I'm waiting for you to say like,
[15:28]and I've started a non-profit.
[15:30]We're dedicated to, you know, like,
[15:32]are we doing advocacy, education, more writing?
[15:36]Like, where do we take this message?
[15:39]Yeah, I mean, I think from me,
[15:40]like honestly, the most important thing
[15:42]I want people to get from my book
[15:45]is real curiosity about care.
[15:47]If that is what we get, I think it's a win.
[15:51]I want people to, in curiosity about themselves,
[15:54]you know, again, when I say as caregivers, parents
[15:56]and caregivers, like view what you're doing
[15:59]as a hero's journey, view yourself on this like,
[16:02]you know, I was in December,
[16:05]George Clinton had the book, that's why I had the movie
[16:07]come out the boy in the boat
[16:09]and was kind of a classic Hollywood hero's journey trailer,
[16:11]the music kind of gets slow,
[16:13]and then it's faster and louder.
[16:14]Like, listen to that soundtrack for yourself
[16:17]as a parent and caregiver.
[16:18]Like, see it as this big, amazing thing
[16:22]that's as important as anything else people do
[16:26]and not, again, this footnote to life,
[16:28]but like life itself.
[16:30]And I really hope this book helps us understand
[16:33]that we're not gonna solve the very real care crisis
[16:36]that we're in until we look at the cultural roots of it.
[16:39]You know, we see writing Christianity, for example,
[16:43]so many cool Christian theologians.
[16:45]I spoke to her for the book.
[16:46]One points out that if you go and volunteer
[16:49]and care for a stranger, you're like literally a saint.
[16:52]I mean, Mother Teresa, you're like,
[16:53]actually it could be, if you care for strangers, saints,
[16:56]you care for it as you put at the naked import in your home.
[17:00]No one's even interested in you.
[17:02]No one's trying to make the religious community work for you.
[17:05]And it's like, these blind spots are so woven
[17:08]into our culture, when they were creating the GDP,
[17:13]back in the 40s, it was something they created
[17:15]after the Great Depression of female economists,
[17:18]Philistine went with the group of economists
[17:20]to Africa to figure out like,
[17:21]how are we gonna determine a nation as well?
[17:24]Like, what would this even look like?
[17:25]And at the time, she was like,
[17:27]I think you guys are forgetting something,
[17:29]like you're forgetting woman's work.
[17:31]And we still don't count as part of the GDP.
[17:34]And you know, so that's, it's like these blind spots
[17:37]to care are so woven.
[17:38]If we counted care economically,
[17:41]it would be worth basically as much as the whole retail sector.
[17:45]It is a huge part of the economic engine,
[17:47]but we don't.
[17:48]And I think caregivers moms we internalize that.
[17:52]When I took, I've been, you know,
[17:54]I'm no economist, I'm a lousy mathematician,
[17:57]but I did some back in the envelope accounting
[18:00]after I like learned how these economists
[18:02]like figured out the value of care economically.
[18:05]And I did it for my own households.
[18:06]And I was like, wait a minute,
[18:08]I earned as much as my husband.
[18:10]And it was so profound and not that we should feel
[18:13]like we only matter, you know,
[18:15]our worth in the world is connected to how much money
[18:19]we make or don't make.
[18:20]But let me tell you,
[18:21]there's something of like realizing
[18:23]that if we actually value care,
[18:24]if we were able to put a dollar sign on it,
[18:27]like I'm not, this is,
[18:29]I am not contributing to the wage gap.
[18:31]We're both contributing to the economy and equal measure.
[18:34]So I think we need to pull off all these layers
[18:39]of these cultural narratives that ignore care
[18:41]and put it back at the center of the human story
[18:44]where it belongs.
[18:46]One more example, Charles Darwin.
[18:48]We all think like survival of the fittest, right?
[18:50]Humans are competitive.
[18:52]Actually, Darwin was equally invested in sympathy
[18:55]or what we might call care today
[18:57]as one of like the main reasons we evolved
[18:59]and survived as a species.
[19:02]But like, we don't learn that.
[19:04]None of us learn that.
[19:05]We just think survival of the fittest,
[19:06]survival of the fittest competition.
[19:08]So that's a big objective
[19:10]with the put care back at the center where it belongs.
[19:13]See, all the ways it's been kind of systemically
[19:15]like pushed aside over the years.
[19:18]And then from there, hopefully builds a world
[19:20]that actually values and supports moms and other dads
[19:24]and all types of caregivers.
[19:26]I love that.
[19:27]On the writing front, how did that go?
[19:29]And then what advice would you give for aspiring authors?
[19:33]Yeah, the writing, I think because I've been writing
[19:38]on deadline forever, it's just been my job.
[19:40]It's that part is, it was training.
[19:43]I'd spend 10 years on.
[19:44]It's like a mostly online journalist
[19:46]again turning out stuff.
[19:48]So that part went okay.
[19:50]It's a slow process, which I think many people know,
[19:53]like publishing is much lower than online journalism.
[19:57]But it's also for me such a gift to have time.
[20:00]to digest, dig deeper and think.
[20:02]And I think her aspiring authors,
[20:05]you know, it's so hard to like believe.
[20:08]This was the, I think the big thing from me, right?
[20:10]And to believe your story matters,
[20:12]to believe what you think matters.
[20:14]It's still something I'm undoing, I'm learning that,
[20:18]you know, and I think it's,
[20:20]we can definitely attribute it to the patriarchy
[20:23]as a woman, like that your ideas matter,
[20:27]that your story matters,
[20:29]that especially domestic care stories,
[20:32]these things that happen in our homes,
[20:35]they really matter.
[20:36]And again, we've always seen them as somehow smaller
[20:40]than what happens outside the home.
[20:42]And they're not, they're just as big.
[20:44]Amazing.
[20:45]And a quick writing advice, any writing advice?
[20:49]Writing advice.
[20:50]That is a quick question.
[20:51]What is it?
[20:52]Let me think.
[20:53]Or research.
[20:53]I mean, you did so much research.
[20:54]Yeah.
[20:55]I think we're writing advice.
[20:56]Don't be afraid to take your time.
[20:58]I think, you know, there's a sense that we're in a hurry,
[21:01]but like this book, you know, it's here now.
[21:04]And it lives here.
[21:05]And it's this found object.
[21:07]And I'm glad it took me time.
[21:09]You know, I'm glad I spent a year thinking of this
[21:12]as a motherhood book.
[21:13]And then another year realizing it's a caregiving book.
[21:15]And then selling in and having these long breaks
[21:18]between edits, we live in such a fast culture.
[21:21]We live in such a time of like, you know,
[21:23]it's either it happens now or never,
[21:25]immediate gratification.
[21:27]And a book is an object that lives on, you know?
[21:30]And so I think it just really enjoy
[21:32]the slower pace of writing a book.
[21:35]Let it be almost like the shabot of your writing career
[21:40]that it's a time to slow down and be just in that moment
[21:43]and have patience with it.
[21:45]Maybe that could be a new writing technique
[21:48]only writing on Shabbat, you know?
[21:49]I have, I know someone in San Francisco
[21:51]doesn't have Shabbat yet.
[21:53]Oh my gosh.
[21:55]Yeah.
[21:56]How many Shabbat's would it take to write a book?
[21:58]I mean, there's something though right like you,
[22:02]if it can really like it just creates a one more tool
[22:06]to kind of push the noise outside,
[22:09]push the like hustle culture aside
[22:11]and just be in your head.
[22:13]And it's a gift plus books for you too, right?
[22:16]You know, it's not just for you.
[22:18]It's not, it's for your readers, but it's also for you.
[22:20]It's true.
[22:21]Plus, you know, wine, hola.
[22:23]It's a good deal.
[22:24]Yeah, exactly.
[22:25]Yeah, I could hear.
[22:27]Yeah, I hear.
[22:28]Family, I put it up.
[22:29]Couldn't have a good better.
[22:30]Yeah, exactly.
[22:31]Well, Alyssa, congratulations on when you care, well done.
[22:35]And, you know, very important and really important
[22:38]for everybody to read and internalize.
[22:40]And, you know, lots of marriages suck out of this one.
[22:45]Thank you.
[22:46]All right, we'll take care.
[22:47]Thanks so much.
[22:48]Thank you.
[22:49]Okay, bye-bye.
[22:52]Thanks for listening to Mom's Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[22:54]If you love it, please leave a review.
[22:56]And follow us on social at city Owens and at city readers.