Today's Heartlift with Janell
Sometimes the story we tell ourselves is not really true. Sometimes the story others tell about us is not really true. On "Today's Heartlift with Janell," Author, Trauma-informed, board-certified marriage and family specialist, and Professional Heartlifter, Janell Rardon, opens conversations about how emotional health and mental fitness effects absolutely every area of our lives. When we possess and practice healthy, strong, resilient emotional health practices, life is so much better. Read Janell's newest book, "Stronger Every Day: 9 Tools for an Emotionally Healthy You."
Today's Heartlift with Janell
292. The Unexpected Magic of Caring for Others
"Caring for another person is like the hero's journey, a transformative experience. Except unlike in the common formula, one does not need to leave the home" (Elissa Strauss, "When You Care").
Imagine balancing a thriving journalism career while navigating the uncharted waters of motherhood. That’s precisely what Elissa Strauss, our guest for this episode, has done. Elissa is the author of "When You Care: The Unexpected Magic of Caring for Others." In her new book, Elissa shares her compelling transition from reporting on the structural inadequacies caregivers face to uncovering the deep-rooted cultural issues that undervalue care. She unveils the profound transformation she experienced upon becoming a mother and the intense challenge of reconciling her professional identity with her new, crucial role as a caregiver.
Elissa delves into maternal instincts and the essential role of caregiving in shaping both individuals and society. By challenging societal expectations and the stigma that caregiving is somehow less intellectually fulfilling, Elissa brings a fresh perspective on how deeply estranged maternal relationships can impact society at large.
This episode examines the urgent need for policy changes and societal shifts to honor and support caregivers. Tune in to celebrate the sacred role of care and discover the immense value and dignity inherent in these everyday acts.
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today's episode is brought to you in full by heartlift international, a 501c3 dedicated to making home and family the safest, most secure place on earth. Learn how you can donate and support the podcast at heartliftcentralcom. Now settle in for today's remarkable conversation with Janelle. Wherever you find yourself today, may these words help you become stronger in every way.
Speaker 2:Alyssa Strauss has been writing about the politics and culture of parenting and caregiving for more than 15 years. Her work appears in publications like the Atlantic, the New York Times, glamour and elsewhere, and she was a former contributing writer at CNNcom and Slate, where her cultural criticism about motherhood appeared weekly on XX. She lives in Oakland, california, with her family. Today we talk to Alyssa about when you care the unexpected magic of caring for others. Hello and welcome to today's Heart Lift with Janelle. Hello and welcome to today's Heart Lift with Janelle. And today we bring a very important conversation to the table with a very lovely woman named Alyssa Strauss. Thank you, alyssa, and thank you for writing your book when you Care the Unexpected Magic of Caring for Others. This is such a good read. Thank you for coming today. Thank you so much.
Speaker 2:I'm so excited to have this chat. I mean it's such an important topic. It is so near and dear to my heart, as I spent nine years caregiving for my mama and having to navigate all of the things assisted living, aging in place, 50,000 surgeries and medical treatments and it was just the death of me on many accounts. Like I can't keep going, but you are framing it the way that I ended up framing it and so that's what I wanted to talk about today and, of course, to bring the topic of mothering, which is the most important topic in my heart other than now, grandmothering. So why this book? You are an incredible journalist, you've got accolades and all of the things, and, uh, I've already told my heart lifters all about your journey as a professional journalist. Uh, why this book? And why this book? First, this is your first book.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's my first big book. I've been done other smaller book projects, anthologies and whatnot, but yes, yes, yeah, I feel like for me it was a product of writing about the lack of structural support for caregivers, parents and caregivers for so long and reaching a point where I couldn't I felt like I couldn't write one more article why we don't have paid leave. Basically that there was something deeper going on here, that this was a problem that's not just a policy issue, it's not just a structural matter of how are we going to pay for paid leave. There's actually something deeper, deeper, deeper in the roots of our culture that has created this total blind spot to care, which is something. If there's ever something in hiding in plain sight, it's care.
Speaker 3:But we have a complete blind spot to it. And what's going on there, like how did care get left out of so many of the ways we make meaning or define the good life or talk about what matters and doesn't matter? So it was kind of like I had this realization that there's a whole cultural piece to this and at the end of the day, I'm more of a humanities person than a social science person. So I leaned into that piece and really tried to unravel how care was left out of how we make meaning and how we value our lives.
Speaker 2:What do we take.
Speaker 3:To put it back in I want caregivers to feel good about giving care. I want caregivers to feel good about giving care, to be proud of it and to see how big it is, I love it.
Speaker 2:I person, I like personify words when I'm writing and so I feel like you personified care and I just feel like I get to know her very well when I'm reading your book. I mean I make her a her because care seems maternal.
Speaker 2:I guess it's not just maternal. I've been really studying and writing a book proposal on matriarchs and I guess because I'm entering that phase of life now in my 60s, mid 60s yikes, I don't know how I got here, but being the matriarch of my family is very important to me and I think it is important to you, and you said it took becoming a mom. In all reality. Like you were a professional journalist, you you written for the big guns and your husband is also a professional writer. So you become a mom. And where does your journalist mind go? I love your journalist mind, by the way. I just love it.
Speaker 3:Thank you. So I think for me it was I mean, it really started as kind of a personal epiphany that I had a sense that I was never ambivalent about wanting children. That was not my I can. Always I always had like an in my gut sense that my parents, they had four kids and those, raising those four kids was really just one of the greatest pleasures, if not the greatest pleasure of their lives. So I had this. I had a sense of like I wanted my own children. I always enjoyed kids. You know I wasn't like conflicted about that, right, but I was very concerned of how motherhood could take over one's identity, and particularly in these kind of literary intellectual circles in Brooklyn where I lived at the time.
Speaker 3:That was a very strong narrative.
Speaker 2:And I mean.
Speaker 3:the reality is we have not yet figured out and my book is my effort to try to help us figure out. We haven't really figured out and my book is my effort to try to help us figure out we haven't really figured out how to untangle care from the patriarchy. Right To say care is its own good thing, but yes, and also women haven't always had consent around care right or care has held them back in many ways.
Speaker 3:So, I was kind of in the mess of that and my plan foolish in hindsight was that I would, you know, be a mom. I'd love my kid, but I wouldn't. I'd kind of keep it separate from everything else. I wouldn't let it take over my identity. I wouldn't go to mommy groups or mommy yoga or drink mom juice.
Speaker 2:You know mommy juice, yeah we had nothing like that and I think it's hysterical. I would have been an alcoholic. I think I had twins and three kids under four. I don't know. I'm from a family of alcoholics, so I think, oh, I was a teetotaler back then. If I I'm, I'm afraid what might have happened with my mommy juice.
Speaker 3:Yeah, listen, I drank wine.
Speaker 2:I just didn't know how we do you know, yeah, um, but it's not really funny.
Speaker 3:There is probably no well actually no, there's actually a big issue there, um which there always has been. You know, it was drugs back in the 50s and 60s. It's like you can't lock a woman in her home with a child all day and expect her not to lose her mind. I mean, obviously I love care, I love my kids, but we're not supposed to do it alone all day. So, um, yeah, so I think for me, the big surprising moment was that I, you know, before I had kids, I did all these things. I call them epiphany seeking experiences. They will be familiar to everyone. I traveled the world, I did meditation retreats, I tried psychedelics, I hiked tall mountains. You know all these things that, in our culture, are traditionally rewarded as things that bring you wisdom. Wisdom, you know, like obsessive wisdom seeker Eat, pray love. Yes, yeah, eat, pray love, exactly Wild. You know all these narratives that we have of like this is how you find yourself, this is how you find wisdom.
Speaker 3:So I'm glad they're out there. It's not about one thing versus the other, but the end of the day, I realized that I was learning so much more about myself and the nature of life itself by caring for my kids. And it started, yeah, yeah, when my little one well, no, my, he was a little bit, and I was 11 when my my uh, when he started talking and I realized like, oh, there's a whole human, I know it's so exciting. Yeah, I mean, now it's a grandchild, she's talking totally.
Speaker 3:it's like they're. They're these like singular consciousnesses that somehow enter your orbit and you have to relate to them and protect them but give them space. And the whole dance of it blew my mind, philosophically, intellectually, spiritually, psychologically, creatively, and that was really a turning point for me. I was like oh wait, we have really really devalued this care thing turning point for me.
Speaker 2:I was like oh wait, we have really, really devalued this care thing. Do you remember a moment when you really did have that epiphany, like is it when your child started talking? When was it? What? What moment? I don't know if there was one moment but I'm thinking back to my life. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean I'm sure. Sure there were moments, but like one of them that sticks out was I would take my uh, take Augie then, and we live in California now but we lived in New York.
Speaker 1:New.
Speaker 3:York City then, where I would take him to a little Friday afternoon music singing group right you know where someone would play guitar and and the children would sing along and it was cute it was. It was. It was a Jewish one. We did some Shabbat Friday night blessings after they got challah and grape juice and we'd leave Um a taught Shabbat, they call it.
Speaker 2:Oh, this is amazing.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I would take him. I didn't sit there quiet the whole time, not a word, not a word, never saying. All the other kids are singing and he's just sitting there, and then I, and then I put him in the stroller and I'd wheel him home, back to our apartment and then he would start singing and sing every single song. And we all know, you know, toddlers are quirky. I mean they like by their very nature.
Speaker 2:He's probably a little journalist, though he's just observing it all. No, I think he's right.
Speaker 3:It's very insightful, but it was like I was like you know, why aren't you singing? Why am I taking it? It was the first moment where I was like, oh, I have those expectations and hang on. He's a human, like a whole human sense of, like internal motivations and ways of being in the world, and it's so small, but it's also the biggest thing ever to realize that other people aren't the same as us.
Speaker 3:Right, like if we all could really do that the world would be a better place. Right, and we know it. Right, we all know.
Speaker 2:We have had knowledge. It's head knowledge, but the distance to the heart is very long. That's why I say that's the longest journey ever.
Speaker 3:Exactly, and so when it gets to the heart, you know, in Yiddish we say kishkas a lot and it's like guts, but I think it's the same Kishkas, kishkas, yeah, exactly, and so right, and that's the difference, right, that's what care did for me. It took these kinds of abstract concepts that you know, of course I have someone asked me is someone else different than you? I'd be like, yeah, but I don't think most of us feel that in our hearts or our guts, or you know I't. I think that's a big, and so that was that one moment. I was like, oh, wait a minute, you know, but before he talked, before he like it was, you know, I could tend to him without really reckoning with that, but once he was verbal and engaging in the world as his own being.
Speaker 3:Oh, I stepped back and and it was eye opening. It's the best.
Speaker 2:I'm just like I mean I'm going to just keep referencing, I'm such a brand new grandma, but it's just like I've got chills everywhere because it's like she's starting the first one. I have had four in two and a half years, with one coming at the end of September, so five and it's like it's just the first one. You know is two and a half and I mean she's bilingual, so she's a little delayed, but she's now talking more and it's just the best and animated expressing and just oh, I'm like girl, this is fun.
Speaker 3:It is, I mean it's its own birth right.
Speaker 1:You know, maybe obviously I'm a verbally inclined person.
Speaker 3:I'm a writer but it's its own birth, you know, and it's like, yes, there's, there's, there's something revealed, then that is real.
Speaker 2:It's really real. But I feel like in your work, in this, in your cause, it really is written from a journalistic point of view, in the sense of you watching mommy groups and, you know, sitting alone with your own and watching you write about that and I love your keen sense of observation and I think it serves the book. But it's going to serve the world in such a beautiful way if people will listen, Because I feel like, personally, what's missing is the maternal spirit and the maternal spirit is definitely what is more associated with caregiving. So I love that you are giving it the credence and actually the vital importance. It's vital. I've listened more keenly the past couple of years because I'm working on my own work on the matriarchy and how important it is. But when they come and talk about a school shooter and I just distinctly remember one of the last ones they just said he's very estranged from his mother, and then the other one estranged from his mother, I just kept hearing estranged from the mother and I thought, wow, the mother is really, really missing and you write that. You write a beautiful question why care? And I love that.
Speaker 2:But you one of the old, I guess, mindsets. It's a mindset, isn't it? Caregiving Is caregiving gets in a mother's way. Yeah, you know, and you write about Doris Lessing and I just thought this quote is just very hard to read. It was hard for me to even write. I wrote it down. There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children. Oh, it's hard to swallow. Yeah, why did that speak to you Like, why didn't that you write about in the beginning?
Speaker 3:Yeah, you know, I think that's kind of the the sea I was swimming in when I had kids, that it was somehow antithetical to intelligence to engage with small children. Now of course she says endless and listen, there is. I mean, I too expired when I had small children. I had help, I worked. You know, it wasn't though I'm promoting one way to mother.
Speaker 2:We're not. It's not what we're saying here.
Speaker 3:Right, but and and and I actually think this is it's like a hard point to express, but it's so important when we, when we put it as a zero sum game and we juxtapose, it's like intelligent women don't like kids, and then therefore the implication is unintelligent women do like kids. We're just minimizing what care is, and or if we're like you either like kids and want to spend all day with them, or you don't like kids and don't want to spend all day with them, you're also missing how actually care is like rich and hard work. It's not. It can be a burden and it's often a burden, but it's also so much else. And to actually be in that dance of care takes a lot out of a person, and and and it doesn't mean that you hate it or it doesn't mean that it's stupid and bad and smart woman shouldn't do it.
Speaker 3:It just means care is a really big, rich thing it's. It doesn't make you a saint, it just makes you more human rich thing it's.
Speaker 2:It doesn't make you a saint, it just makes you more human. Well, that's the key, and you bring that point out over and over again. And I just want everyone to just especially. I come from the Judeo Christian world, right, this is where I was taught. No self care, right? Just you, just you, just give. And so now you know I understand how critically important it is to care for myself and put my oxygen mask on first.
Speaker 2:But I feel like what you're saying in this is it is all about service, serving one human serving another human, serving one human serving another human, and serving in a hard place, but serving with attention and inner awareness. So it's like that's what I shared with you before we started recording that I had spent nine years, you know, almost a decade caring, being the primary caregiver, poa, in charge of my mother's aging, and so that involved really difficult life movement and I just kept saying this is getting in my way. You know I had that. I would have that internal dialogue and that internal war. I mean those were.
Speaker 2:That was a decade of my productivity, yeah, as an author, as all the things that I do and you can't help, I can just walking down the hall of her assisted living to her room 59. I. That was just for me like a crucible, that I learned more about myself than I would have ever learned in a million years. I mean, I can just see myself, you know and I'm chilling up because it was hard or pacing hospitals and sitting in chapels, but that was the time. There's that word in the Greek eudaimonia, right.
Speaker 2:Where you find true meaning in life, yeah, and meaningfulness, yeah, and that is what truly makes a great life, not just hedonia. You know happiness, right?
Speaker 3:Right. Is that what you're trying to? Say to us yeah, I think right care is really just one of the main vehicles that we make meaning.
Speaker 1:There's no question about it?
Speaker 3:I think so. I think we have a very real problem though, today that caregivers aren't adequately supported, whether by communities or by social services and government policies, that the burden piece can become so big it can disrupt the capacity to make that meaning. Oh, and talk to us, yes, yeah, and so that's what I'm like. I want us to fight not just to relieve caregiver burden, but so we can all have the right to get meaning from our care experiences. I am lucky. My parenting experience involved having two kids that like knock wood so far, pretty easy kids, you know, and that's I'll take some credit. I think I'm a good mom, which I heard, but also it's luck.
Speaker 3:It's luck too you know, um, you know kids, and so they were pretty good sleepers, pretty good eaters, you know um they they're like, they function, you know, well enough at school, you know. So, um, but I also was lucky that we were able to afford a nanny. It doesn't mean it was pretty, it doesn't mean our finances are in great shape, because the hit of childcare and summer camps and everything is just enormous. But we could do it. Listen, I have a house, you know I could do it. Um, yes, a lot of people don't have it. It is a privilege, a luxury.
Speaker 3:I was able to find this meaning and care because I'm lucky enough to have many layers of privilege and good fortune, basically, and you know very honest, very honest to be allowed me to access the meeting and I'm not alone, you know, I think a lot of people that you know and they they're able to have better versus worse experiences caring for a parent with dementia, because they can afford to put the parent in a safe and kind of a healthy in all terms right, you know environment for the parent, whether they have a in-house home, healthcare aid or they're able to put their parent in a home and they can visit often, you know.
Speaker 3:So then then the meaning's possible Someone I write about in my book, Robert, who's a menza who cared for his wife with Marie with Parkinson's. He had a really meaningful experience of care, but it came really largely because he had the privilege, right, you know. But so I think that's the important thing. Like we can often access deep meaning, like you mean, through care we really can, and I think it's just been left out of the human story in a way that makes me angry and sad every day.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:When I ask a caregiver to a parent or to an elder parent or a fellow parent to young children, you know, tell me about your care experience. I'm like you don't want to hear that that's boring, like no, no, I want to hear more than I want to hear your story of climbing Mount Everest frankly like that.
Speaker 1:I know, you know it's so good.
Speaker 3:The crucible of raising that one and only human, or humans, are tending to a parent when their cognitive functions declining. But they're still a human. You know, and how?
Speaker 1:do you? What is that?
Speaker 3:teaching you about the essence of life, like I want to hear all of it Um and and yeah, and I think that's the tricky part of we need to speak about the good parts of care, not because care is actually easy and we don't need support, but because it's so valuable and it's so meaningful and we're being denied that experience like systemically right now by a society that's totally blind to caregiver needs.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I am shaking my head so hard, I'm going to get it it's. This is not a message that is being told. That is being told and I'm so glad that you have the innate capacity is one of my favorite words that you know to have deconstructed this subject and put it in such tangible, beautiful words I mean just beautiful. I'm going to just read this right now. The shame and fear about letting motherhood get the best of me in my own life metabolized into rage in my essays and blog posts. So this is when you were first becoming a mom and you were looking at everything.
Speaker 2:I became one of those journalists whose work filled me with guilt, writing often and fiercely about the perils of caregiving and the ways women suffered as a result of doing it. This was early in your work. I pushed for changes to individuals, men in particular, governments, workplaces. You've said that I raged about the way mothers were discriminated against when seeking out paid work and how the demands of motherhood made it hard for women from all income brackets to achieve financial independence. You go on and you go on, but then you say this what I didn't say, certainly not in my writing and not even to myself at first, which was what I thought was critically important, was that parenthood was far more compelling than I thought it would be.
Speaker 2:This to me, Alyssa, is the crux. And Alyssa is the crux Like I want you on every morning, show everything where you can just shout this from the top of Mount Kil. And then, even more so when my second son, Levi, was born four and a half years later. I always anticipated feeling some amount of joy as a parent, and after making it through the dark and narrow tunnel of our first four months of parenthood, I found lots of it. Children in flesh and spirit can be a wonder, but what I discovered was something more and more complicated than just joy. I want you to tell everyone listening what you found that was even more important than joy. That's a huge statement. Yeah, that's so good.
Speaker 3:So I think yeah, I think for me more than joy. I found this deep self-knowledge and an ability to see myself more clearly than I ever have. I've always considered myself an introspective person. You know I was an avid diary keeper. I read poetry, you know, by bodies of water and would take long walks you know, contemplating yeah, exactly, contemplating Right.
Speaker 3:And I think when I had kids, in trying to respond to the needs of another, did I learn some stuff about myself, stuff that therapy didn't reveal, stuff that all this diary writing didn't reveal, as I write about in the book and this one may take a minute because it's a little counterintuitive but I actually realized that I had a compulsive caregiving instinct by doing the very real caregiving of being my children's mother.
Speaker 2:Unfolded.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I was, um, you know, child of divorce. I was always kind of the the wise child and one of four, you know I was and when my parents got divorced in my late teens they really turned to me as like their confidant and best friend, which is a very common thing, yeah, and I also felt the sense that kind of keeping the family together and organized was my responsibility. I have to say it's not like these things. They're layered, they're complicated, right.
Speaker 2:Very subconscious, very layered. All not no one's mean your parents didn't mean bad responsibility on you, no, just yeah, it's all part of the package.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and you know in part I what came along with it. I do have a real strong sense. You know I was like the mom in college.
Speaker 3:I would uh organize holidays I would cook for everyone. That's a big part of my identity. I don't want to go insane and out. Oh, that was all terrible, and I was oppressed and damaged. Damaged and no, uh, there's some of that I'm really proud of. I, like I have I have always had a strong care instinct for others and I also am like a relatively high functioning organizer type. It's not, you know, I can. I can plan a dinner in three minutes of my head, or some of my friends are like Alyssa. That would have taken me two hours, so you know I got it.
Speaker 1:I'm happy to share it, yeah.
Speaker 3:So I don't want to say, oh, that was it and I was damaged by that, but it wasn't all healthy either, and I did leave me with the sense that kind of I have to help fix everyone all the time, like everyone is mine, if a friend comes to me with a problem, oh, do x, y and z, and it may be great advice I mean it with a full heart but there's something about having kids that made me realize like hey, it's not my responsibility to fix everyone, and be like maybe not everybody who actually wants me to fix them all the time.
Speaker 3:Maybe, yeah, they just may want someone to listen, and it sounds funny that I learned this through intensive caregiving, but I think that's the thing about when you really are caring for someone. So it's different than caring for a friend or my sister. When I'm really caring for someone who's really dependent on me to survive and thrive and grow as a human, like my children are. I had to come face to face with the fact that, like I can't fix it all for them, I cannot fix it all. Please learn that now.
Speaker 3:Please learn that now please yeah. Yeah, Because adult children it's tough, I know. And then I was like oh, maybe I can't fix everything for everyone, like, maybe that's actually not what I'm supposed to be doing this life. I can care for people without trying to fix everything all the time. I can separate those two because you know, my, my sons, have been through heartbreaks and struggles that like, like shit happens. It does, it really really does, and I deluded myself that I could be the one to stop the shit.
Speaker 2:I know Exactly.
Speaker 3:And then and then I was like, oh, I can't, and that's really liberating and that brought me a lot of self-awareness, and so that's the kind of stuff I think when we really think of our care experiences as these deep life journeys, as these hero's journeys and I write about so many different people's stories in the book, so much self-revelation and life revelation by way of care, when we change the frame on care, when we widen the aperture and see care as this big, meaty, transcendent, sometimes annoying, sometimes wild, sometimes joyful, sometimes disappointing.
Speaker 3:Yes, exactly when we really let it be as big as it actually is in our lives, those kinds of revelations can emerge. Yeah, doesn't mean we want to wake up at 6am when our kids vomited, you know. It doesn't mean we love it at all. It's. We're not saints. This isn't no fairy tale version of care, but it's not the nightmare version either.
Speaker 2:It's the real life version. No, it's not binary by any means, and I think what you say is to build a culture or a culture of feminism. Building, I'll get it out. Help building a feminism of care. I love that. I think I know what you mean, but I would love for you to tell us what you mean.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so as I write about in my book, and this was how I experienced feminism personally, it wasn't. I didn't do large scale, you know quantitative or qualitative research on this. But my experience of feminism was basically devoid of care um whether it was, uh, career feminism. You know, go, go be in the corner suite. Great, love it. My sister's like an awesome career lady. She's got this beautiful big office, so glad she's, there.
Speaker 3:We need a woman, you know it it's not that that's not bad, um, but that doesn't acknowledge care, really, right um. The other kind of feminisms, reproductive right feminisms I the reproductive justice in the way I experienced it did not also include the right to have a healthy birth or the right to not pay seven thousand dollars for your birth or the right to have support with breastfeeding, you know. So that's again like how you know, not rejecting what, what I experienced, but realizing like, wait, what doesn't care part of that story. Or you know, kind of what they call sex positive feminism, sex in the city feminism. Great, like, glad that women have choices, glad that women, you know, can like I did not that long, honestly.
Speaker 3:I met my husband, kind of young, but live in cities and date, do their thing for themselves outside of marriage, support it up to you also like that show was pretty hostile to motherhood it really was you know, when someone had a baby, it was like they were others, like they, they, you know they were just off, like it is funny that carrie never has a baby. It was like they were others, like they, they, you know they were just off.
Speaker 2:Like it is funny that carrie never has a baby yet right in the city. That's very fascinating, yeah bringing that to the table.
Speaker 3:I'm just now thinking that she never had a baby, right and not that, oh woman no well, I know not that you, oh right, no, exactly no, totally, and I don't think you think that I'm saying like it's about, but still like it's not. It didn't celebrate care or think about care as a path to none of these celebrated care. It was care if anything was something you had to run from, because it was the consensual care that I mean non sorry, non consensual care that did oppress a woman historically was something we had to run from and do all these other things instead.
Speaker 2:It would get in your way and get in the way of what. That was the ended question. That's the question. After walking down that hallway for nine years, I was like, what is this getting in the way of? Yeah?
Speaker 3:I love that.
Speaker 2:What is this really getting in the way of Right? But that's ego.
Speaker 2:That's ego dying. That's dying in our Christian worldview. It would be dying to self, it would be picking up your cross, it would be all of those. You know, when I'm stripped of all of these ego dominated, I've got to be this, I've got to be this, I've got to be this, I've got to be this, I've got to be this, I've got to be this. You know it's, isn't it just, mother Teresa? I mean, it's just caring for that person and giving someone dignity and in the end, it increased my dignity because I was able to go. I loved well, I was able to go, I loved well. That was, that was my motivating force, was I didn't want to stand before my God and not have cared well.
Speaker 2:It was important to me to learn how to care well and it was multifaceted and I know that. I know that's what you're saying.
Speaker 2:It is a selfless, but that doesn't mean you don't care for yourself. That's not what selfless means, Right. It's just putting another human before yourself and loving yourself as well. So it's mutual. There's a mutuality in that Exactly, and that's what you're saying and that's what you're you're calling us to right. It's really a mindset. I just have to think. It's just like this paradigm shift of really finding who you really are. In those moments you can't find yourself in any other way. I don't know. Like part of the whole principle of eudaimonia is that it's hard. You have to persevere, you have to. It has to be something that you know takes you to the end of yourself, so you can come to the beginning of your truest self. You know so good, Sorry.
Speaker 3:No, I love it, and we have to ask ourselves why, when you're doing something like caring for, let's say, a dying parent, what society have we built? Yes, that being with them in that transition is something that we see as getting in the way of real work, real projectivity, real self-discovery.
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure did.
Speaker 3:If we all agree. Dignity matters, right, big picture. Oh yeah, humans deserve dignity. That's a fundamental dignity matters, right, big picture? Oh yeah, humans deserve dignity. That's a fundamental kind of claim of the human rights movement. But guess how dignity actually happens? You know, the great cathedrals of dignity are built brick by brick with care, one person caring for the other, and so those acts, that may seem small, of care are actually the scaffolding for our humanity.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's so beautifully and well said. You should be a writer.
Speaker 3:The scaffolding is really critical.
Speaker 2:That's a beautiful image if we think about it, and I've been in many cathedrals around the world and they're they're quite beautiful and they were built brick by brick, by Exactly deny women the power of going away or to deny the difficulties you've already said this of care, but for us to see both going away and staying home as sometimes challenging, potentially life changing experiences. What I want is for someone to also describe a picture of a woman doing care as an image about power, about freedom, about trusting oneself or, even better, a man. Women get to do the things they never used to get to do, like travel, have careers they're passionate about and revel in the pleasures and insights those offer, and they now, alongside everyone else, get to explore the potential in long-belled, long reduced, long ignored care. I just think that's just so. I really believe, alyssa, if we can, if women can embody that that's really the word, isn't it Embody it that this is the most important thing I can do?
Speaker 2:I don't know. I've lived long enough, I have children old enough, I'm having grandchildren, and it's nothing else that I've done really is of any vital importance. In a sense, you know, sure it's important, I've exercised my gifts and I've, you know, done what I feel like I am supposed to do, but I don't know. There's just nothing like a FaceTime call from Belgium in the morning and a little two-year-old going book, book, book. Because now, all of a sudden, I'm back to the point where this could be getting in my way. Yeah, I don't really want to leave that point because.
Speaker 2:I think we're so undermining what's really important in today's social media culture. And what's really important is reading a book to my. I'm just talking to myself now, yeah, yeah, and not thinking she's getting in the way. I have a sub stack to write, I have a book to work on, I have a fill in the blank. Anyone who's listening Right? What's more important than enriching someone else's life, no matter how old they are?
Speaker 3:Is that what?
Speaker 3:you're saying you know I think you know, I mean, I really I want to hold that. That's all important, but I want that enriching someone's life to be given the due that it deserves and it just hasn't been. And I think we look at people. You know the research of people on their deathbeds. What are they generally thinking back about? What? What at that point is saying, okay, I lived, I lived a worthy life, just really. Their relationships, right it's did I invest in connection with other humans. We want to live. You know a lot of tech billionaires these days are putting so much money into trying to outlive mortality Care is actually a pathway to mortality.
Speaker 3:right, it's how we live, genetically or just through values and energy.
Speaker 2:It's community. The Blue Zones are all communities, Sardinia, all those places where people are taking care of each other. The women are baking their bread together every day, fresh, because that's how they do it and they're needing their bread.
Speaker 2:Just watch it on Netflix, It'll move you like no one's business, you know, and I think. But I also hear you saying which is really the difficult tension? Right, it is not either or, and in my generation it was Definitely. It really, really really was. It was not for all. I mean, there are the Jane Goodalls, you know there are those. But especially in my experience as a Christian, evangelical world, Christian, it was just home.
Speaker 2:You do not work. You were minimized if you worked, and so I love that. I love that my daughters are beyond that and that they know the value of both and they can do both, and there's no judgment there and, uh, you can be a brilliant doctor and still be a brilliant mother.
Speaker 3:Definitely you. And even better, Not only can you do both they actually Not only can you do both they actually? They feed each other. They do, yes, Like you're. I mean you're, you're care for your children. If you're an attentive, attuned mother and you're a doctor, that what you learn how to attune yourself properly to another by way of parenthood probably is going to end up in how you practice medicine.
Speaker 2:It is.
Speaker 3:How I write is absolutely been influenced by how I care. That realization that August surprise a different person changed the way I write entirely. It made me much more sensitive to the risk of being too certain about ideas, and actually ideas are so much more exciting when you're not totally certain about them.
Speaker 1:They're fluid, they're fluid, yeah.
Speaker 3:And leave openings. Leave openings in the self and how one perceives the world. What a better way to live. And I got there through parenthood. So that's the last beautiful step right. It's like not only can we do both, we can actually see how both can work to lift both sides up and also present challenges.
Speaker 2:It is tough being a working parent it's tough being a working mom you know a hundred percent, but yes, that's what I see as your feminism of care, in the sense that building communities that support each other to fully be expressing our gifts and talents. I mean, I'm all about that and yet being able to be interrupted with what's most meaningful at the moment. So you're not this is not a binary.
Speaker 3:This is so. It is both Not a binary. It's both and yeah, and you know what, like men also benefit from care, so that's the other piece, right like yes, we're talking about today exactly. But we raise up care and let's get men. You know, men do more care, we share more equitably I mean. This is, this is a beautiful vision of the future. What that means in each individual house is not up to me to say. I'm not telling, I would never tell anyone how to live.
Speaker 3:Yeah, but big picture. The more we get everybody doing this amazing thing called care, it allows more room for our other selves to develop. That also matter to us, you know, and it's my husband does a lot of care. Yeah, exactly, and my husband doesn't do care to help me importantly. I mean sometimes maybe, but that's not the lens. The lens is that he does care because being with his children, is really meaningful to him too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he's not babysitting.
Speaker 3:Oh boy, that's he's not babysitting, he's not giving mom a break, you know which. Sometimes that's how it is and that's fine, but it's not. It's like oh, I'm their dad. I actually like being their dad. I find being with them meaningful and exciting and and fun. Right, there's also the fun piece.
Speaker 2:So this is a message to all of us men, women, all of us to embrace the nurture, a nurturing spirit towards humanity.
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 2:There.
Speaker 3:Amen.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah. So in closing which I don't want to, but I just want everyone to read this book because it's just what I think is the solution to so many of the problems that we have. Because I pound the table over, home needs to be the safest, most secure place on earth, and that will not happen if we do not embrace caregiving. If we do not embrace care, capital C, as our best friend inside of our homes, we will not have a future worth looking forward to in any realm. And so what are a few of the things that perhaps we can initiate today, for those of us listening, that can help us create a culture of care in our lives. That can help us create a culture of care in our lives.
Speaker 3:So I think there's the political piece. Right, if we are the only industrialized country in the world without paid leave, and that really does get in the way, there's tons of data that gets in the way of new moms being able to properly bond with their children. So there's any other layers of cultural I mean sorry, governmental change that can happen, right, like, actually, I know people who would love to care better for their parent, but they have to work. You know what, like what can they do? They it's they have, like they will not be a roof over their parents head, that's correct elicit them.
Speaker 3:But you know. So there's lots of ideas. Again, I'm not. I don't say, I'm the, I'm the policy queen.
Speaker 2:You are not running for governor.
Speaker 3:Correct, yep, but. But we need better solutions. We need them fast, and I'll leave it to others to decide exactly what those solutions look like and how to best implement them. And then I think we need the soul change, which is really what my book is about. And we need to ask ourselves different questions about our care experiences.
Speaker 3:We need to see our care experiences as a hero's journey, as worthy and mighty as going to war or hiking that Mount Everest or any other things we do and I think when we start with that perspective change, it really can lead to a whole different way of being in the world and I want us to give that to ourselves and to others.
Speaker 3:Ask your friend how care is going, and if they just tell you, you know, oh, it's been hard because I try to get this, you know this service to come, and I couldn't, you know, push a little harder, like keep going, because you'll see, like I've spoken to so many parents and caregivers, you push a little bit when we get past of what preschool the kid's going to. Or you know, if you had to do a different home healthcare agency, you know, to find, to get your AIDS, all that kind of practical stuff. Push deeper and say, like, what's it been like for you? Like what, what does it feel like for you? What do Like, what does it feel like for you? What are you thinking about these days through care? Suddenly you see their eyes widen and you see it happening in real time that, oh wait, are you taking this experience? They're kind of like, first the shock, like oh, someone else is actually really curious about this and taking this whole care.
Speaker 2:Thing seriously.
Speaker 3:And then they start thinking and they start speaking and actually a hundred percent they're in that hero's journey.
Speaker 2:But they may not have realized it and they need to be validated, like I needed, as I needed a hand on my back that said you are? I just remember my younger daughter walking down that hallway yeah, walking down that hallway with me, my mom and her walker and I thought if she don't walk faster I'm gonna come out of my skin. Yeah, I would talk to myself and go come on back, janelle, you're okay.
Speaker 3:But then my daughter put her hand on my back and she said mom, you're taking such good care of grandma yeah, you know, and imagine if you're a pastor, a priest or an imam and a rabbi talked about it from the pulpit on a regular basis, said you know, correct, this, this is holy work, this. How would that change our perspective? When you're doing that labor, which is tedious and is repetitive and you know you don't always want to be doing it, whether it's shushing the baby or walking the parent down the hallway but if you can look, see it as holy and whatever the word holy means to you, you see, it as holy, Maybe it.
Speaker 3:maybe it changes the whole experience of it, right?
Speaker 2:It does, it does, and you can just go to sleep at night and because this is what I, this was my experience and put my head on the pillow, exhausted, but go. I'm proud of you, girl. You're taking good care of yourself.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Or you made it through another day and you sat with your eight-month-old under the table for three hours just while she explored life. You know, that's, that's holy work.
Speaker 3:It is.
Speaker 2:Thank you From the deepest part of my heart. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening today. Please meet Janelle over at Heart Lift Central on Substack at Heart Lift Central, where we can keep this remarkable conversation going. Please share today's episode with a friend and invite them to become stronger every day. Heartlifter, always remember this you have value, worth and dignity.
