Queridx Meteor reader,

We want to wish a Happy Early Mother’s Day to all the moms, mamis, muthas, mxms, fur-moms, step-moms, and angel-moms out there today. Whether you’re getting a dozen roses or a macaroni necklace, or the very cool gift that I got my mom (which is still a surprise because I love psychological warfare, and she does read this newsletter), we hope you feel loved and appreciated every day. And if today isn’t a day you care to acknowledge for whatever reason, then may it be a day you direct all that love and appreciation to yourself cause everyone can use a little extra boost. 

In today’s newsletter, author and mother Angela Garbes talks about parenting through a pandemic and how the entire U.S. economy hinges on the unpaid work of care. It’s a moving and sobering reminder that parents of all kinds are absolute heroes.

Speaking of heroes, I saw Doctor Strange: Multiverse of Madness this week, and I won’t spoil it, but it is literally a fantasy film about parenting, and Elizabeth Olsen’s performance was surprisingly moving in a way that had nothing to do with superpowers and stuff blowing up.

But before I lose you to multiversal travel, let’s take a quick news cruise.

Love,

Shannon Melero

ESSENTIAL READING FOR THE ROE-POCALYPSE

It’s been a ridiculously difficult week. Between protests, clearing out your bank account to donate to abortion funds, and figuring out who to blame—there’s a lot to keep on top of. So here are a few pieces from the week that are keeping us informed and infuriated.

• Jill Filipovic has three steps on how we all need to fight for abortion rights: get to work, get informed, get brave.

• Some Republicans are drafting legislation to stop people in their states from leaving to acquire legal, safe, out-of-state abortions.

• Abortion in the U.S. is a tale as old as time; Peggy Cooper Davis explains how enslaved women terminated their pregnancies, how the cruelty of the past shaped the constitution and how present cruelty can help us change it again.

• “An Abortion Provider Confronts the End of Roe”

• No time for a long read? Here’s a great podcast on how Ireland repealed a constitutional abortion ban and what that might mean for the U.S.

AND:

• Later this month, Karine Jean-Pierre will become the first Black (and first openly gay) White House press secretary ever.

• As if Summer 2022 wasn’t already shaping up to be crappy, bread is going to be super expensive.

• Louisiana is looking to criminalize IUDs. What episode of Black Mirror are we living in right now?

TOUGHEST JOB EVER

The Essential Work of Mothering

Angela Garbes on the unpaid domestic labor that keeps the world turning 

BY SHANNON MELERO

THE DELIGHTFUL ANGELA GARBES (PHOTO BY ELIZABETH RUDGE) 

Every Mother’s Day, I find myself asking the same question many children of single mothers do: How did my mom do it all on her own? It’s a silly question to still be pondering at my age. (The answer is so obviously witchcraft; I mean how else?) But, as I’ve come to understand more about parenting, the question has evolved: How does anyone do it? 

Even in two-parent households, the work of parenting and caregiving is accomplished without much structural support. Parental leave is a luxury, childcare costs about as much as a year of college, and despite the fact that caring for someone is a 24/7 endeavor, none of it is considered “real” work. You’re just expected to do it and do it well, and the stakes are even higher than in your actual job: Should you fail there are entire institutions built to judge you rather than one overzealous regional manager.

Author and mother Angela Garbes wrestles with these questions and more in her new book Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change. If her words don’t change how you see the caregivers in your own life, then I can’t imagine what else will.

Shannon Melero: You mention in your book that you went through a lot of emotional changes when the pandemic started, which impacted how you were doing your work as a writer and as a mother. Now that we’re two years plus into it, what changes have you seen in how you think about care? 

Angela Garbes: I think that becoming a mother radicalized me in a way. You know, once I had a child, I was like, Why don’t we have leave again? Why is my health care, which I believe is a human right, tied to paid work outside of the home? 

And in 2020 when everything shut down, I had two children at the time that were five and under, and I could do nothing but take care of them. That was the only job I could perform. I didn’t have time or space to write. I felt like my ability to do any kind of professional work was slipping away. But at the same time, it was so clear that the only important work in front of me was making sure that my family, my children, and my community were safe and healthy. And so I was kind of wrestling with those two things for a long time.

Essentially, I’ve come around to thinking that the only work, the only real work human beings have, is to survive and that that’s done through care work—through care of the body. That’s what we need to be prioritizing. It’s great that people have professional interests. And you can enjoy doing it. But work in the United States is coercive. When your health care and your basic needs are on the line—and not having a job takes away all of those things—[then] work becomes a condition of survival. That’s not how it should be.  

You also mention how care is perceived very uniquely in America in comparison to other parts of the world—can you break that down for me a little bit? 

In American capitalism, we ignore domestic labor. We really just fail to acknowledge that American capitalism needs free labor in the home in order to function.

If you look at other countries like the Netherlands, they have capitalism as well. But they have things such as paid family leave, [and] subsidized or universal health care. They have education that is affordable, and accessible child care and pre-K, and this is the number one difference I see.

The book is also very much rooted in my experience being Filipino American. And, you know, I see [how domestic labor looks] in the Philippines, which is obviously the legacy of American colonialism. But I’ve always been struck by how domestic labor in the Philippines, even though it’s problematic…there’s something very honest about it.

Everybody has nannies, everybody has maids, everybody has cooks and they are part of the home. You see them. They’re not invisible. And while it’s complicated, it’s a huge part of the workforce. And so you see the care work. It’s impossible to ignore it because it’s happening right in front of you and it involves people outside of the nuclear family.

Do you think that that’s something that could ever translate in the U.S.? Care work being visible instead of something we try to hide? Because I know you mentioned in the book that, going back decades, women of color are responsible for raising all of these white children, but they’re never in the family photos because they’re “holding the camera,” as it were.  

I have to believe we can get there. But I just think that people in a lot of ways haven’t seriously considered domestic labor. I think about the representations of motherhood and mothering—you know there are these influencers and for them part of the work of mothering is to create an Instagram or a TikTok with cleaning videos and things like that. And I’m not trying to diminish that at all because again, mothering is unpaid labor and you need money to survive.

But at the same time, there’s not a lot of prominent influencers who are featuring their nanny or their cleaning lady. No one’s saying, Here’s who is helping me. We’re still trapped in this deeply conditioned state of hiding that stuff away and thinking that the labor happening in the home is private. That it’s outside the sphere of capitalism or outside of the “real” world. Obviously, that idea is starting to shift but the way I see it, the domestic space is now a place where content is created and consumed but we’re still not really talking about it as work.

Is there anything that’s come out of the pandemic and the public’s understanding of caring and motherhood that makes you feel hopeful? 

I wrote this book from a deeply hopeful place, which is that things can be different.

A lot of Americans support paid family leave, even though our government is failing to deliver that. But there’s cultural momentum right now which [I believe] is a result of so many people being in dire financial straits.

I always hear stories about women raising the issue of paid leave in their workplace and it’s other women who are like, Well, not having it worked for us! That’s capitalist patriarchy, and it really breaks my heart. Because it was hard for you then it has to be hard for somebody else? The way I see it, I don’t want what was hard for me to be hard for anyone else.

The other thing that makes me hopeful was that during the early days of the pandemic we really saw that caring was this deeply human urge. It’s human nature to care for other people and I think we all really saw that our institutions are not set up to care for us, but we did it for each other.

No matter who you are, everyone is familiar with care on some level. You’ve been cared for at some point in your life and maybe now you care for someone, whether as a mother, auntie, nanny, mentor, etc. So I think about all of us getting back in touch with that urge to care and I feel really hopeful when I see evidence of that every day.

WILL WE SEE YOU MONDAY NIGHT?