MADE WITH CARE is having a fourth of July party and you are all invited!

America is turning 250 this year and in honor of her birthday I am bringing together four of my favorite experts on family life—Patrick T. Brown, Elliot Haspel, Ivana Greco and Joe Waters—for a bipartisan roundtable conversation on what family values means to us.

P.S. The interview below demonstrates why we need these conversations. Our current narratives are inaccurate and therefore ineffective!

We hear a lot about what is going wrong for parents in the United States.

We hear a lot from experts about how to help parents.

But rarely do we hear from parents themselves about what they think would make their lives better.

So when I heard about a new study that was designed to capture exactly that, I got very excited.

Below you will find my conversation with Amira Boland, one of the authors of this study, in which we dive into the surprising and often touching findings. Boland is the chief of staff at the New Practice Lab, a research and design lab focused on family economic security.

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ELISSA: I receive pitches about surveys showing how stressed out parents are multiple times a week. What I love about this survey is that you didn’t just capture causes of stress, you also asked parents what would relieve it. Tell me about this brilliant decision.

AMIRA: There wasn’t any good data on what people want.

There’s tons and tons of data about frustrations of today, but not on what families are seeking. Previous research, as well as our own experiences as parents, revealed that parenting and raising children isn’t just one thing, like, it’s not all stress, it’s not all joy, and to paint it as either-or is a disservice to families.

We know that family is important to families. We have seen that across demographics, political leanings, etc. family is still the top value for people in America. Even when researching very low-income families who were interacting with multiple safety net programs and, you know, experiencing housing insecurity, we heard often about the hope they have for their kids and those moments of joy. And yet all the headlines are like “Motherhood should come with a warning label” so we wanted to tease this out.

ELISSA: Before we jump in to what you found, can you quickly explain how you did the study?

AMIRA: We partnered with NORC at the University of Chicago to survey parents and caregivers of children aged six and younger, across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. In the end, we connected with over 5,000 parents, both in English and Spanish, between mid-January and the beginning of February—primarily online, though a small number of interviews were completed by telephone. (More on the methodology below.)

ELISSA: What were your main findings?

AMIRA: It really came down to parents wanting more time with their kids, and to control the time they have.

They want agency in their life, and the ability to make choices, which was also coupled with a big humility check for a lot of us that had worked in government and public service delivery for years—we learned people don’t want to interact with the government.

It made us realize that even if we made everything streamlined, if we made every benefit accessible, if everybody got every program, people still wouldn’t be made whole, because what they’re seeking is this, like, more-than-material wholeness which is a little bit different than financial security.

ELISSA: I love this idea of more-than-material wholeness. Tell me more about it.

AMIRA: Basically, it’s one thing to be able to afford to put dinner on the table, it’s another thing to be able to sit at that table and eat that dinner together as a family.

It’s also about social connection. People want communities of support, and sometimes those communities lead them to knowing about various benefits and material support. These kinds of networks are how they come to feel that they have dignity and agency over their lives.

ELISSA: And then to build on top of this theme of connection, owning one’s time, and more-than-material wholeness… I am thinking that it is one thing to be able to afford dinner, and another thing to be able to be present at the table and not feel harried from the long, crazy day. Speaking from experience!

AMIRA: Yes, often for families that are more well-off or financially secure, work is very different now, and it kind of seeps into your life at all times. Your time is all blurred.

There’s a compelling story about how post-pandemic work and care really blended together and never really separated again—many of us are all doing both, constantly. This is a different systemic challenge than other generations have faced.

ELISSA: You collected beautiful quotes about parenting from parents across the United States. Will you share a few of your favorites with me and explain why you find them so meaningful?

AMIRA: I cannot begin to describe how happy my heart was to see the significant sharing of hopes and dreams of parents to be playing outside, and playing with their kids!

I don’t know that we’ve always intuitively put infrastructure and parks on the “family supporting policy agenda,” but that really came out in this as a critical part of how families want to spend their time. What would it look like if “play” and “more time outside” were policy outcomes we were oriented to?!

If I had more time with my children, I would spend it engaging in outdoor activities and creative play, like going to the park, building projects together, or exploring nature, creating memories and strengthening our bond. Dad of 3, Georgia

Be outdoors more go on walk and get them involved in their environment and in nature. Mom of 1, Texas

And we even had multiple mentions of cuddling!

[What do you hope for] “To cuddle more.” Mom of 1, CA

And I loved this one:

I hope they create a life of meaningful relationships, grow up to be kind, gracious, driven, and compassionate, and have the tools to cope when things are challenging. Mom of 2, CO

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ELISSA: I love how these all come together to say loud and clear that we all want more opportunities to just be with our kids. I definitely relate to that! How, in any way, did this survey and its results relate to your personal experience with parenting and caregiving?

AMIRA: The three primary folks who worked on this—Alyson, Kelly, and I—are all parents of young children (as are many people on our team). So I think we felt really strongly about getting this right, and also making sure our own experiences and preferences did not skew our interpretation!

I think so many parents can look at this and see themselves or their loved ones in this data. I have several dear friends, with big careers, big jobs, that in the last three years basically got to breaking points and after wrestling with it, ultimately decided to step out of the workforce. They are stay-at-home parents, but would love more project-based work, and are nervous about when they re-enter the workforce about being penalized, or not finding a role with manageable boundaries.

The part that came out to me so strongly, too, is this concept of “seasons,” that is a story I’ve been telling myself for the past few years. I too have dialed up and down since my kids were born, and my husband has done the same. We’ve both changed our jobs in the past two years to be more present with our kids. I just love this graph and this graph because it shows the dynamism of what people prefer for their families. I think we need to have more dynamic views of families and think about policies that aren’t one time fixes, but better enable choices for families at different moments.

ELISSA: Let’s dive deeper into the finding that parents want more time with their kids. Though not just any kind of time: quality time. Why is this hard? What were the time antagonists?

AMIRA: On time antagonists, there were so many good quotes about wanting to be able to come home and actually have conversations with kids, have focused play with kids, not going straight into chores, meal prep, cleaning.

Add to this the fact that our workday doesn’t match our school day, the summer schedule of a school doesn’t work with your work year, people are expected to work seamlessly postpartum at 3 to 4 months…and that’s if you have paid leave. Then the kid is being integrated into a daycare, and they get sick multiple times in those first few months. None of this is realistic. And with today’s cost of living, it just isn’t always feasible that someone can forgo work to care.

One story that really came out, that I think is critical for policy makers to hear, is the degree to which transportation impacts the lowest income families’ time.

Nearly one in four—23 percent—of the lowest-income parents say lack of transportation prevents them from spending their time the way they would like, versus only 2 percent of the highest-income parents. My former colleague Maya and I have written about this before, because it comes up so much in maternal health barriers—just like parks, really safe, reliable public transportation is family supporting policy, too.

ELISSA: And what are some of the work-related solutions for getting parents more time with their kids? I’m thinking of Brigid Shulte’s brilliant book OverWork right now, because I know she pointed to many brilliant ones in there.

AMIRA: Yes! Brigid, in her own reporting, book writing, and her teams’ work, has done so much to lift up what is possible and what can work. As she stresses, the stories we tell are the ones we can start to realize.

This is critical, because we need to open our aperture to what’s possible. And these problems have been solved in other countries and by some leading employers in our country.

I’m really intrigued by Japan’s new requirement of employers to offer at least two flexible working options to parents with children aged 3–6. Canada has a formal recognition of the tradeoff individuals make by taking time to provide care through their establishment of a child-rearing provision that allows periods spent caring for children under age seven to be excluded from the calculation of average earnings. The Netherlands had broad use of part-time and job-sharing, and countries like Denmark have playgrounds in sight lines of restaurants and cafes. The Gap has made big scheduling shifts based on common complaints from parents, and Patagonia early on provided onsite child care.

ELISSA: You found a fair amount of heterogeneity regarding what kind of work and care system families prefer. Can you unpack that, and how that might inform future policy proposals?

AMIRA: There’s a strong desire for paid leave from BOTH moms and dads.

And while 23% of people said they didn’t want to return to work after having a child, only 12% of parents said they preferred not to work at all. This, to me, means there’s some statistical noise and interaction happening—the takeaway, I think, is that thinking about that first year of your baby’s life is when there’s the strongest preference for a parent to be around.

Our sort of extreme rhetoric of “either you’re a stay-at-home tradwife, or you’re working a 40+ hour week and dropping your kid off at a center-based universal daycare system,” does not mesh with what families are describing to us here.

When it comes to childcare and work preference, there was no clear “winner.” No single preferred work schedule (part-time, full-time, etc) was chosen by more than 46 percent of parents, no single child care arrangement by more than 31 percent.

Moms had different preferences than dads, but what also factored into what parents say they wanted was the age of their child. Parents of the youngest kids (<2) were more likely to prefer to care for their babies themselves, compared to the parents of older children, who were more comfortable with licensed settings like school and center-based care.

ELISSA: I want to dig into the finding that women are more likely to desire flexible work arrangements than men. Of course this doesn’t necessarily mean women are biologically wired to want to do more parenting than men—I would add into the mix both societal expectations to be the lead parent and, just as importantly, societal permission to professionally lean out and work less, neither of which men experience.

So with all this in mind, what do you make of this gender gap?

AMIRA: Agh you named it, there is so much wrapped up in this culturally and in terms of societal norms. Just like early childhood is not a monolith, gender preferences are not a monolith. We had amazing comments from dads who talked about wanting to stay at home. We had comments from moms about having worked so hard for their education and their career, and feeling guilty about not wanting to give it up.

It’s important to remember that this survey is of people with kids under six. I think it could look different for people with kids 5 to 10, or 10 to 15. I think women are also incredibly creative problem solvers and realize that there are different options, and maybe they see more of those possibilities than men do (who face their own societal pressures).

I think we have to change the conversation to everyone being ok with seasons. That’s employers, that’s in your partnership, that’s for yourself. It’s not just one choice, it can be many choices throughout your lifetime! We are humans, we’re not fixed-state creatures.

In terms of the gender gap, I saw this in my own marriage. I was literally working at the White House and my husband was at a prestigious firm but working with financial sector clients—we were both at the top of our field, and it was more acceptable for me to have a kid on my lap on a zoom call than him. But, I don’t want to forget how much better it is for us than it was even for my parents a generation ago!

Methodology: The survey draws on NORC’s AmeriSpeak® Panel, a probability-based panel designed to represent the U.S. household population. Results are weighted to reflect the national population of parents with young children.

The survey intentionally oversampled parents in households with incomes below 200 percent of the federal poverty level (FPL) to ensure sufficient responses for analysis (which included 2,915 completed responses).

The survey was designed to cover topics including respondent demographics, current and ideal work arrangements, current and ideal child care arrangements, leave taken and ideal leave duration, barriers to ideal time use, challenges, and hopes for the future.

The survey instrument included 37 questions, the majority of which were closed-ended (e.g., multiple-choice, rating scales, select-all-that-apply).

Five open-ended questions invited parents to respond in their own words. Responses were not required for all questions; respondents could skip or decline to answer individual items.

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America is celebrating a big birthday this year and you are all invited to the MADE WITH CARE party!

JULY 9, 11-12 PM PST/ 2-3 PM EST
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These days it is hard to escape the partisan bombast: Liberals want to lock-up two-month-olds in 18 hours of state-sponsored childcare a day! Conservatives want to lock-up women in the home, replacing their bank accounts and ballots with aprons and nursing bras!

Such messages get attention, but the data overwhelmingly shows that they don’t represent most Americans; neither who we are, nor what we desire.

America is turning 250 this year and in honor of her birthday I am bringing together four of my favorite experts on family life—Patrick T. Brown, Elliot Haspel, Ivana Greco and Joe Waters—for a bipartisan roundtable conversation on what family values means to us.

Bipartisan conversations like these are currently my greatest source of hope for the American experiment. We don’t agree about everything. But we agree about enough to talk and dream, together.

Birthdays are a moment for reflection and connection. As such, this will be an intentional break from the practicalities of policy conversations, and instead give us an opportunity to consider what matters to us as parents and caregivers, and what kind of world we want to care for our loved ones in.

The goal is to uncover shared visions for family flourishing, and then figure out how to work together to make those visions a reality.

Because, unlike with our actual relatives, estrangement isn’t really an option with our fellow citizens. So let’s do some good things together to make family life better for all.

Joining me will be:

IVANA GRECO

Ivana Greco is a homemaker and homeschooling mother of four children. She also writes and conducts research on issues impacting homemakers, mothers, children, and families. She serves on the advisory board for the Center on Child and Family Policy.

Ivana’s writing has been published with numerous think tanks and leading publications, including American Compass, National Affairs, the Institute for Family Studies, and The American Conservative. She graduated from Harvard Law School in 2011, and was a practicing attorney before becoming a homemaker.

JOE WATERS

Joe Waters is the co-founder and CEO of Capita, an independent think tank and community. Capita aspires to a future where families and their communities flourish by anticipating global changes, shifting narratives, crafting policies, and partnering with leaders to implement them.

Since starting Capita in 2018, Joe has developed forward-leaning initiatives to explore the major transformations of our time—social, demographic, cultural, technological, environmental, and economic—and anticipate their potential impacts on families and their communities worldwide.

PATRICK T. BROWN

Patrick T. Brown is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where his work focuses on developing a robust pro-family economic agenda and supporting families as the cornerstone of a healthy and flourishing society.

His writing has been published in outlets including The New York Times, National Review, The Atlantic, Politico, and The Washington Post. He is also a contributor for CNN.com, a contributing writer for the Deseret News, and a contributing editor with Public Discourse.

ELLIOT HASPEL

Elliot Haspel is a nationally-recognized family policy expert and commentator, with a specialty in child care issues. He is the author of Crawling Behind: America’s Childcare Crisis and How to Fix It and Raising a Nation: 10 Reasons Every American Has a Stake in Child Care For All, in addition to many policy reports, and the Substack The Family Frontier.

Elliot has testified before the U.S. House of Representatives, appeared on television as an analyst, and his writings have appeared in a wide variety of top publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic. He is regularly sought out by journalists, and has been quoted in such mediums as NPR, The Guardian, and TIME Magazine. He lives in Denver with his spouse and two children.

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This is the one year anniversary of MADE WITH CARE! Thank you all for reading and engaging with me on our favorite subject.

With that in mind, a few relevant updates:

1. I will now be paywalling a part two of my essays in which I will dive deeper into the ideas, research and my personal experience. I believe the non-paywalled part one will still be satisfying on its own, and meaningful for all of you who enjoy my writing but financially can’t make a paid subscription work. Paid or unpaid, I so deeply appreciate your attention, which is the ultimate currency.

2. I am running an anniversary sale. 🎈🥳 Upgrade to becoming a paid annual subscriber today and you will get 30% off forever! $28 a year for full access to essays, interviews, culture and policy round-ups, and to my intimate workshops and seminars. Also, all first-time paid subscribers get a print copy of my critically acclaimed book When You Care.

In case you haven’t heard, people have strong feelings about fertility decline. Some believe fewer babies will herald the end of civilization as we know it. Some believe it is happening, but not a big deal. Some blame feminism. Some celebrate it as the natural and inevitable result of women having control over their bodies and lives.

There is a lot of handwringing and debate about why people don’t have kids, but I see less conversation about why people do. This feels like a lost opportunity to me. When diagnosing and prescribing solutions to what is perceived as a social problem, understanding the mechanisms behind alternate decision pathways is essential.

Also, no matter where you stand on the fertility decline conversation, the conscious and not-so-conscious factors that lead us to having a kid or kids are fascinating to dig into.

When I recently stopped and thought: “Why, really, did I have kids?” The answers were hardly obvious, which deeply intrigued me as I have been professionally writing about motherhood for 13 years. So I thought a lot about the question and the results of this thinking are below.

After creating that list of reasons, I then began to reckon with how things actually turned out. How did my expectations and desires surrounding having kids match the reality of having them? Those reflections make up part two of this essay.

Before I get into why I wanted kids, I should set up what kind of person I was when my husband and I decided to have them.

Now, I most definitely don’t fit into either the tradwife or girlboss camp (and utterly detest these categories and exist in a state of shock and bewilderment that they are still used as a shorthand to describe the lives of women). But demographically and sociologically speaking, I was definitely more girlboss than tradwife when I had my first kid back in 2012. I was 32, lived in New York City, and wrote and published non-stop in an effort to make a real career out of writing. Sealing the deal is the fact that I wrote about feminism.

Also worth noting is that as a dual-writer couple we were hardly rolling in cash, but were financially stable enough to pay for childcare (as much as it stung, and boy did it sting). Lastly, I had a husband/future co-parent who seemed equally committed to seeking out the joys of parenthood as he did to the taking on the often tedious domestic work that kids bring into our lives.

So why did I, a girlboss adjacent, if never in any way girlboss identifying woman, have kids?

PART ONE: WHY I WANTED KIDS

ONE: My first answer is just because.

And while this may seem lazy on its surface, we would be remiss to ignore the fact that all living things have an evolutionarily formed drive to reproduce our genes. This is cellular, preconscious, and universal.

I wanted to have kids because people have kids, which is less tautology, and more of a deliberate acknowledgement of the fundamental instinct that drives all living matter on earth.

TWO: A fairly healthy but also somewhat problematic love of self (because a love of self always sits on that knife’s edge, and probably eternally belongs there).

There is often a narcissism in child-making: we either want replicas of ourselves, or we want to start fresh and curate a being with the goal of healing or repairing what we perceive is wrong with us. I was in the first camp. I enjoyed life, connection with humans and more-than-humans, and contemplating the everything-ness about these connections. At the risk of sounding vain, I thought my existence was a net good, and believed I could increase this good by making more me’s.

I don’t think I would have said this out loud at the time, let alone shared it with you, and I don’t think this is the “right” reason to have kids, but it is an honest and common one and not altogether a bad thing.

THREE: I wanted companions.

I grew up in a loud, chaotic family where there was a lot of turbulence, but also a lot of love, intimacy, and connection. I was one of four close siblings, and had two parents who clearly enjoyed being parents, and it all came together to create a sense of being “in place” in the world.

Now, none of this was a fairy tale—my siblings and I have our differences, and my parents’ marriage went through an extremely rocky phase beginning when I was 13 and ending in a necessary and healthy divorce when I was 22.

All that said, my nuclear family remains a bedrock of security and unconditional love for me. (Note: this isn’t meant as an attack on those in favor of forming other models of family and communal life, nor is it me saying you did something wrong if nuclear family life didn’t work out for you, nor a denial of the alienation and violence that takes place within the nuclear family unit. But to deny the power of the nuclear, biological family in my own life would be to be dishonest.)

So yes, I wanted to replicate what has probably been the greatest source of unconditional love in my life: my family. I didn’t just want kids; I wanted people who were always just kinda around whom I could talk to, lay next to, laugh with and cry with.

FOUR: I wanted to care for others.

This doesn’t make me a saint. It makes me a normal human being whose brain has a healthily functioning prosocial feedback loop, in which giving to others creates a swell of good-feeling hormones known as the “helper’s high.” I knew having kids would bring more limits and ultimately sacrifice to my life, but I imagined that the suffering from those limits would be offset by the good feeling I had long experienced when my care for another had been received and had helped that person grow.

It also marks me as a somewhat parentified child/ eldest daughter who feels most like myself in the caregiver-in-chief role which has its pros and cons. (I dig into this a lot in my book, so I’m going to move past the often mixed bag results of parentification quickly here. But fear not, I have thought a lot about this.)

FIVE: I wanted a community for life’s milestones.

I imagined the big moments, the holiday dinners, big birthdays, ambitious travels, and, on a more morose note, the illness and funerals, and I thought they all would be better with children in the mix. Children, I imagined, would be a bulwark against loneliness and hopelessness during life’s most meaningful moments and transitions.

SIX: I was kinda bored of adult life and longed for the opportunity to experience life anew, with what Buddhists might call “beginner’s mind.”

For the eight years before having my older son, my husband and I were New Yorkers who very much took advantage of the facilities. We were culture vulture types, and weekends were spent seeing art, music, theater, readings and so on, all on a strict budget. We also traveled as much as we could.

We did a lot, and for a long time it was fun and meaningful until, eventually, we grew a bit bored. It wasn’t that we had seen it all, or that we stopped enjoying new experiences. More that we were ready for some variety, and even self-imposed limitations, to counter this sense of infinite possibility that New York City brought to us, week after week.

I didn’t want to stop doing adult things altogether. But I was fine with less. And eager to watch a child experience things I had done so long they felt ordinary if not invisible to me. Taste fruit, touch dirt, listen to rain, sway, bounce—stillness. I had listened to so many songs for so long that the idea of listening to the same song every night for a while didn’t sound that bad at all. In fact, it sounded like a mix of exciting and a relief from decades of careful self-cultivation.

It’s been thirteen years, and time and experience have exposed some of these instincts as spot-on, and others as totally misguided.

PART TWO: WHAT PARENTING HAS ACTUALLY FELT LIKE
Including the surprises, confusions and the letdowns

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I spent a lot of time traveling last month. With someone else watching my kids 3000 miles away, I had free time, and with that free time I went to art museums.

I saw three shows, featuring work spanning over 500 years, and they all had me thinking a lot about motherhood and care, and representations of motherhood and care.

ONE: Mary Cassatt
An American in Paris
National Gallery
Through 8/30/2026

Cassatt was an American-born artist who, in 1874 at age 30, permanently moved to Paris where she worked among the Impressionists. She is known for her portraits of mothers and children which are filled with psychological depth, the chaos of daily life, and politics. This work upended Victorian ideals of maternity and domesticity as simple, sweet, seamless and pure.

Some contemporary critics try to rescue Cassatt from being perceived as sentimental—because apparently there is no higher praise for any woman creator than being called unsentimental. Grr, and I don’t buy that. I think Cassatt didn’t avoid sentiment, but instead saw it with unusual clarity and then managed to capture that clarity in her work.

Here in The Boating Party we have a scene that is recognizable. First, we see a gendered division of labor that doesn’t seem to make anyone too happy. He (perhaps a fisherman based on his clothes, but also maybe the father) is responsible for making the boat go, she is responsible for looking nice and keeping the child content. None seem to be convinced that this seemingly leisurely boat trip was worth the effort. And yet, mother and child, connected in their embodied messy humanity, look at the man/maybe father in an attempt to connect with him. And isn’t that really the best any of us can do on the imperfect boat rides of our lives?

Meet Little Girl in a Blue Armchair. Are you not in love?

I mostly want to say nothing and just leave this girl, in her own thoughts, in a chaotic domestic scene, her clothes as disorderly as the arrangement of the chairs, the sleeping dog somehow her partner-in-thought, right here without further comment.

But I can’t but help but draw your attention to the way Cassatt captures the inner life of a child, a girl who seems to be a little bored, a little pouty, a little remorseful—all at the same time. And remember, when we give children rich inner lives, we are raising up the work of those who care for them, because caring for small beings with rich inner lives is hard work!

In Woman with a Sunflower we have a mom help a girl see her own image, while both of their images are reflected back to them in the mirror. Mom is wearing a sunflower, a symbol of the suffrage movement, and it features as prominently as the daughter’s face in the painting. My take? Motherhood and politics are not separate. Fighting for the right to vote impacts both the kind of mom this woman can be, and the kind of person she hopes her daughter sees in the mirror: someone whose voice matters in the electorate and halls of political power as well as at home.

TWO: Carol Bove
The Guggenheim Museum
Through 8/02/2026

Carol Bove is a contemporary sculptor. Her work is abstract, large-scale, and made mostly from rigid materials, and yet, as if by magic, somehow imbued with human-grade levels of vulnerability.

In the show there are many pieces like these: steel twisted, shaped, colored and textured into forms that upend our ideas about what is solid and what isn’t. Here, the metal becomes sensitive, alive, soft, and susceptible. There is a playfulness to them, but also an almost melancholy or exhaustion. These sculptures upend our ideas that anything is eternally strong and stable. And there is relief in that.

And it wasn’t just the sculptures that made this point. Bove also took aim at how museums were designed in a way that didn’t take the sensitivity and fragility of our bodies into consideration and she made some interventions.

For one, there was a tactile room where one could touch all the materials she used. This tells us that she understands that touch is an important part of an encounter, and she did her best to make that possible without potentially harming her work.

My favorite intervention was the beds she placed all over where people could sit and lie down and reflect. “Museums are so off-putting,” Bove told the New York Times. “I think it goes all the way back to Plato, who believed the body was really inferior to the soul.” To be welcomed as a person with a body, and a body that gets tired, during a large-scale museum show doesn’t merely translate to rest. It changes the way you experience art, bodies in space encountering other bodies (sculptures) in space. I hope more museums consider beds in galleries!

THREE: Raphael: Sublime Poetry
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Through 6/28/26

So of course I have heard of Raphael, one of the Italian Renaissance masters/ namesake of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. What I didn’t know, until I saw this show, is that his work was key in changing the way the Virgin Mary was painted. Up until that time, she was most often portrayed as a symbol, distant, solemn and sacred, and without much interiority.

Raphael did something different with her. He made her intimate, conflicted, contemplative and alive, someone who was very much in the moment with her baby, but also at the same time transcendent. These portraits of Mary moved me, as they capture all the simultaneous hope and fear all moms experience in the presence of their children. We feel her dignity and the tragedy all at once, as she seems to hold on tighter in preparation of letting go. (Hello, motherhood.)

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, author of the wonderful Substack mom·osophy, is always a treat to read. She uses motherhood as a launching pad and orientation for some of the deepest questions we humans have—and will always have. Also, she avoids simple binaries when talking about motherhood, never relying on easy diagnoses and prescriptions, the kind that algorithms adore but flatten our minds. Instead, she tries to make her way through the messy, complicated in-between, forgoing easy answers in favor of authentic and meaningful pursuit.

If a quick scroll on Instagram is a bag-of-Cheetos kind of read, then the essay below is a three-course, homemade roast chicken dinner. It is rich and nourishing and takes time, but will make you feel way better than its hasty and shallow alternative.

Kulze delves into an abiding question of mine: How do our intimate, dependency relationships inform our broader connections, whether to our local communities or democratic society overall? Kulze believes that cultivating an embodied sense of self through relationships, and developing a healthy and non-binary sense of “the other,” is essential for both maternal and political well-being.

Enjoy!

by

“You are born alone. You die alone. The value of the space in between is trust and love… Everything comes to you from the other. You have to be able to reach the other. If not, you are alone…” —Louise Bourgeois, Selected Diary Notes

“The fear of going mad is basically the fear of becoming another: but we’re doing that all the time.” —Lars Gustafsson, The Death of a Beekeeper

Democracy is a Dyad

When I became a mother, I was struck by the revelation that my ego’s desire for separation and my body’s desire for union was not only the central tension of my newly postpartum life but of politics as well. I gave birth to my first child during Covid, and a lot of air time was being given to the deepening divide between people in this country, a divide that has grown even more polarized in the years since. According to recent data, the majority of Americans now view members of the opposing party as immoral, dishonest, and closeminded, while viewing themselves as precisely the opposite. More alarmingly, 20% of Democrats and 15% of Republicans say the country would be better off if large numbers of people from the opposing party “just died,” and 45% of Americans think members of the opposing party are “downright evil,” while 77% believe they are “a clear and present danger” to the country.

I’m sure none of this is news to anyone, and that like me, you’ve also felt tempted to conceive of others in such terms, but something that never ceases to fascinate me is how it’s possible for people who see themselves so differently to possess virtually identical attitudes toward one another, as well as themselves. Just last week, I listened to two pundits, who espouse opposing political ideologies, use synonymous derogatory terms to describe the proverbial “other side” whose defeat, they imply, is tantamount to the country’s salvation. As I was listening, it occurred to me that they could have been the same person, and in a sense they are, for as I discovered so viscerally in my first months as a mother, this catastrophizing, mythicizing, other-condemning, and largely irrational voice is precisely what the human ego sounds like as it struggles to navigate, endure, and integrate its own fears and confusion. This is what the ego sounds like during periods of profound change, and I think it’s quite clear that “profound change” describes the historical epoch we find ourselves in.

Driven by a deep fear of chaos and mystery, and a subsequent desire for control and clarity, the ego fragments reality into the diametrically opposed entities of self and other, the latter of which it construes as both alien and an obstacle to its own needs and desires. The ego wants to keep the other out, not only because the other is strange in his otherness, but because it’s as not-other that the ego defines itself. Thus, the dissolution of the self-other polarity is experienced by the ego as a form of annihilation, which is precisely the tension behind all forms of ideological polarization, as well as the identity crisis many new mothers experience.

But even as the ego insists on separation, on a deeper, embodied level, union with the other is precisely what we desire. The much wiser body knows that it’s through union and communion, not fragmentation and opposition, that real flourishing unfolds. It knows that our own freedom is cultivated each time we set aside our fears and defenses and choose to trust and love instead. If I could pinpoint the singular shift in consciousness that maternity has impressed upon me, it’s from seeing self and other as an endless negotiation of wanting and withholding to a relationship of mutual reciprocity. This is what the maternal dyad is, and mothers know better than anyone that to oppose, denounce, deny, or neglect one half of a dyad is ultimately to harm the whole.

And what could be a better description of our body politic than a dyad? Democracy is a dyad. It’s a relationship of mutual reciprocity in which two poles that are at once distinct and inextricably bound to one another must strive to balance their commitment to their own needs and desires with the existence of the other, whose needs and desires may or may not coincide with their own. As Maggie Nelson writes in On Freedom, paraphrasing the British psychoanalyst and essayist Adam Phillips, to acknowledge there are other people in the world we cannot control “is the beginning of political life, not to mention the birthplace of the reparative experiment.”¹

Most of us know this, at least in the theoretical or rhetorical sense. Calls for unity—which is not the same thing as consensus, by the way!— are common parlance in political stump speeches on both the left and right, and a majority of Americans reportedly believe that a willingness to compromise, collaborate, and work together across differences is essential to the nation’s success, but if this is the case, why do we find it so difficult to act on? I don’t think this is a moral or even a cultural failing, but a symptom of something much more fundamental: namely, our lack of rootedness in our sensing, feeling bodies, through which we experience ourselves and others as Subjects, and our subsequent over-identification with the ego, through which we experience ourselves and others as Objects. For when we fail to identify with the fullness of our Subjectivity, we are dispossessed of the intrinsic sense of security, power, and belonging such rootedness can provide, rendering us progressively dependent on external ideologies for corrupted versions of these spiritual necessities, as well as our sense of selfhood.

In this way, polarization is actually a direct reflection of our hunger for union, which is synonymous with our hunger for the other, only it’s being channeled in directions that ensure it will never be satisfied, cannibalizing our freedom, agency, and capacity for hope, and further empowering those entities who stand to profit from our fear and hatred of one another, which gets us to the urgency of the matter. There’s a great deal of power to be seized and money to be made by tearing at the seams that bind a dyad together, for it’s precisely these seams, which are comprised of mutual trust, respect, and even love, that give a dyad its power. Weaken the relational bond, and a dyad’s self-sufficient interdependency will be subverted by a dependency on those external entities that offer an ersatz sense of empowerment, even as they actively undermine the dyad’s mutual flourishing. As Hannah Arendt writes in The Origins of Totalitarianism, “Terror can rule absolutely only over men who are isolated against each other.”²

How we might go about resisting (from the inside out) the distorting, ideological forces that dominate our current environment, while also nurturing the relational bond that our democracy very much depends upon,³ is what I intend to explore for the remainder of this essay. I’ll do this by examining two distinct archetypes for political engagement—radicalism (used in its original sense meaning, “from the root”) and sectarianism⁴—the first of which is marked by a depth of somatic security, and the latter by the absence of it. We’ll examine the profoundly different worldviews and orientations toward the other these two archetypes possess, as well as practical ways in which we can reduce our vulnerability to sectarianism and increase our capacity for radicalism, ensuring both our individual flourishing and that of our democracy as a whole.

As I will propose, the value of democracy as a political model is that it’s a macrocosmic reflection of how human beings were intended to relate to one another on a microcosmic level: through dialogue that springs directly from our rootedness in our own distinct Subjectivity. For it’s through our intimacy with the inner light of ourselves that we can come to know, respect, and reach toward the inner light of others, who subsequently cease to be objects of fear. And it’s only on the grounds of this mutual, sacred regard for our shared Subjectivity that our differences can exist unproblematically and even enrich one another. Conversely, the totalitarian impulse to shut down the dialectical relationship and dominate the other is a clear sign that we ourselves are unfree, and thus falling woefully short of our potential as human beings.

The Sectarian: Defined by Separation and Weakened by Want

As I alluded to earlier, motherhood is an ontological and existential rupture in which the boundaries between self and other are rendered frightfully porous. This is why the new mother often feels like she’s dying unto herself, though all that’s dying is a particular form of consciousness. This process doesn’t happen overnight,⁵ and for the especially resistant, it may not happen at all, but for those of us graced with a propensity for surrender, or with challenges so great, we’re left with no other choice, a fuller picture of reality will ultimately reveal itself, in which the separation between self and other is understood as not only false, but the primary source of our ills.

It’s this false sense of separation—from our bodies, other people, and our source—that is the origin of our undying hunger for wholeness—whether in the form of success, acceptance, meaning, and/or control—and while we fear separation’s collapse with the full force of our egos, the body knows that it’s only through wholeness that we may become fully and freely ourselves. We were intended to live and act out of a wholeness the dwells within, not in pursuit of a wholeness that can never be satisfied by the external world. Wholeness, in other words, is our foundation and birthright. Thus, the person who lives from the delusion of separation (and thus in want of wholeness), is compromised at the most fundamental level.

This is the Sectarian. Taken from the Latin “secta,” which means a way, path, or school of thought, which itself comes from the Latin “sequi,” meaning “to follow,” the Sectarian is entirely directed by external forces because she doesn’t belong to herself. Defined by an internalized sense of lack and need, she readily adopts various ideologies (political or otherwise), all of which promise to make her whole, but only in so far as she relinquishes or silences her personal point-of-view, and thus, her capacity for discerning the Truth.

This is the devil’s bargain offered by an ideology: in order to reap its fruit, you must pledge your loyalty to the received ideas of the collective and repress the inner light of the self, which is the sole locus of Truth. And what is Truth? In the words of Simone Weil: “Truth is all the thoughts that surge in the mind of a thinking creature whose unique, total, and exclusive desire is for the truth.”⁶ Truth, in other words, is not a fixed entity that can be endorsed or adopted but is the product of an encounter between a unique, individual consciousness, which hungers for Truth, and the world. It is, in essence, an experience in which what is other is recognized as somehow familiar or known to oneself. And our desire for such an encounter must be total and exclusive because we cannot “desire truth plus something else,”⁷ such as “conformity with such and such received ideas.” The Sectarian, however, cannot help but desire conformity above Truth, because her principal hunger is for wholeness, and the hunger for Truth can only spring from those who reside from within their wholeness, and thus possess no other desires.

The Sectarian’s desperate need to belong is evident in her willingness to adopt and proclaim ideologies as aspects of herself, or more precisely, her “identity.” For the Sectarian, the self is an object to construct by the force of her own will and desires, so as to fit into the world, rather than the received, subjective awareness through which she encounters it (and may experience herself as an inextricable part of it). This is precisely why the other is so threatening to her and something she must exclude or defeat, never engage or integrate, for to do so would be to risk the fragile sense of selfhood and security she clings to.

This is also why the fragmented, dualistic (us v. them) worldview peddled by all ideologies so readily appeals to her, and perhaps even appears as “true.” Such a worldview is a direct projection of her fragmented inner state, in which she is estranged from the otherness of her embodied self. As Anaïs Nin said, “We do not see the world as it is, but as we are.” Thus, only a divided person can see a world that is defined by division (wanting and withholding) and not unity (mutual reciprocity).

The consequences of this delusion of separation, both for herself and the democracy in which she is meant to participate—a delusion, which is rooted in her perception of herself, and further nurtured and directed outwards by whatever ideologies she adopts—all stem from the state of total atomization it fosters, in which she is isolated both from herself and from the world. Fearing the otherness within her (Weil’s “inner light”) and that of her ideological enemies, she can neither commune with herself nor with the other, nor can she truly commune with those with whom she identifies, for they are bound not by intimacy and love, but by ideology. And this bond is strictly conditional, as anyone who has ever publicly questioned an ideology they once identified with will know well, and the same for those who have silenced or suppressed their truth for fear of judgement or exile.

Another way of putting this is that the Sectarian can neither love nor be loved, whether by the other or herself, for love is the experience of communion with the other, or in the words of the French philosopher Louis Lavalle, “Love is a pure attention to the existence of the other.”⁸ Thus, the Sectarian is cut off from the relational bonds (between mind and body, self and other, man and God) that are intended to empower, sustain, and ground her, as well as enable her to think. “To feel completely alone and isolated leads to mental disintegration just as physical starvation leads to death,” Erich Fromm writes in Escape from Freedom,⁹ in which he echoes Arendt’s argument that it’s isolation, not moral corruption, that leaves men vulnerable to totalitarianism.

This total atomization also leaves her incapable of discerning reality, which is itself the product of a dialectical relationship. “The only world that any of us can know…is whatever comes into being in the never-ending encounter between us and this whatever-it-is…” writes the British psychiatrist, philosopher, and neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist, thus, “a maximally open, patient, and attentive response to whatever-it-is is better at disclosing or discerning reality than a response that is peremptory, insensitive, or—above all—shrouded in dogma.”¹⁰ Unable to discern reality as it is (and thus other beings as they are), the Sectarian is especially vulnerable to emotionality, reactivity, and incoherence in her attitudes and beliefs, and therefore highly susceptible (and even attracted) to propaganda, which inflames her fears and implicitly justifies her feelings and behavior, largely through the mythization of the other, which renders him increasingly inhuman.

Arendt: “The preparation [for totalitarianism] has succeeded when people have lost contact with their fellow men as well as the reality around them; for together with these contacts, men lose the capacity of both experience and thought.”¹¹

It’s as someone who has lost the capacity for experience and thought—and is thus an object and not a Subject—that the Sectarian sees the other, which is actually a direct projection of her own inner reality, though she lacks the self-awareness and self-responsibility necessary to recognize this. It’s for these reasons that the Sectarian is, in the words of the Brazilian philosopher and educator Paulo Freire, “arrogant, antidialogical, and thus anticommunicative,”¹² which precludes her from participating in the dialogical sociality that is essential to the democratic project. Instead of reaching toward the other and attempting to engage him through reason and persuasion, she enacts what Freire describes as “anti-dialogue,” which “lacks love and is therefore acritical.” In anti-dialogue, “the relation of empathy between the two ‘poles’ is broken. Thus, anti-dialogue does not communicate, but rather issues communiques.”¹³

In our present era, such communiques are often disseminated on social media, which is the Sectarian’s ideal medium, as it facilitates a one-way form of communication under the guise of engagement with others, as well as activism (or “slacktivism”) that requires no real vision or commitment and “generally remains at the level of myth and half-truths and attributes absolute value to the purely relative.”¹⁴ Through social media, the Sectarian can act, or rather react, within an egoic, atomized reality (“the echo chamber”) that exists apart from the living world. Here, the ego’s desires—in which all persons are reducible to unfeeling objects (avatars) and dialogue is replaced with antagonism (trolling) and self-aggrandizement (virtue signaling)—are actualized. The Sectarian no longer must contend with the complexities of the living world, but only with the algorithm, which serves to affirm and reinforce her atomized position in the continuous manner of a morphine drip, and is therefore the most effective propaganda tool ever invented. To be sure, the “world” created through social media seems to have been plucked straight from a Sectarian consciousness.

Sectarianism ultimately breeds totalitarianism because in her atomization, the Sectarian is left fundamentally disempowered. She is highly ineffective at advancing any particular cause because she is less agentic, which is to be both responsible to oneself and responsive to the world and others who inhabit it. The Sectarian doesn’t understand herself as one endowed with the freedom to act in and upon the world; instead, the world acts upon her, in the way of an Object, and she reacts to it, which is why she’s inevitably more voluble and articulate about what and who she stands against (what exists outside of her) and less so as to what she stands for (what exists within her). The Sectarian cannot work to realize her vision because she lacks the wellspring of imagination, creative energy, and hope—all fruits born on the branches of Weil’s inner light—necessary to nurture a vision and commit to it. Overtime, this arrested capacity for creativity, through which human beings enact their very humanness, festers into despair and sometimes even violence.

As Fromm writes, describing modern man, who is largely freed from external constraints but remains bound by internal ones: “He would be free to act according to his own will if he knew what he wanted, thought, and felt. But he does not know. He conforms to anonymous authorities and adopts a self that is not his. The more he does this, the more powerless he feels, the more is he forced to conform. In spite of a veneer of optimism and initiative, modern man is overcome by a profound feeling of powerlessness which makes him gaze toward approaching catastrophes as though he were paralyzed.”¹⁵

Freire called this phenomenon “massification,” in which a democracy’s would-be citizens are reduced to a domesticated mass deprived of its critical and creative capacities, leading to fatalism (the absence of hope) and victimization (the absence of responsibility), both of which function as self-fulfilling forms of consciousness, as they foster a dependency on external authorities and keep one’s attention trained on an enemy other one cannot control and away from the singular place through which both hope and power can actually be acquired: the Subjective Self. Once again, we see that the Sectarian’s energies are perpetually funneled in directions that ensure she remains dominated by fear, unfulfilled, and in flight from her own liberty.

The Radical: Defined by Wholeness and Sustained by Love

It wasn’t until I had my second child that I understood the extent to which I had conceived of my first as a threat to my own flourishing, and that it was this conception, and not my child, that undermined my sense of agency and freedom at the time. For each time I conceded to a reality in which my child and I existed in tension with one another, I was conceding to a profoundly limited version of myself, whose wholeness and security was dependent upon various external entities, as well as a limited version of reality, in which the flourishing of one being can only be conversely related to the flourishing of another.

As I told my sister in a phone call, with my first, I sometimes felt as if I was treading water in a desperate need to reach a particular shore, even as waves crashed over me and rip-currents kept sucking me back out toward the sea. But with my second, who was actually significantly more challenging than my first, I felt like I was standing with my feet firmly planted on the shore, even as the waves of life repeatedly crashed into me. The difference was that I was finally secure in myself and deeply rooted in my own internal sense of power. I was no longer defined by lack, but wholeness, and could therefore contend with reality as it was, instead of seeking to control or resist it. As such, I didn’t fear my child or her needs but instead could approach them with love, humility, and curiosity, and the same for my own needs, whenever they arose.

It’s this deep sense of rootedness that defines the Radical, which is in fact the origin of the word. Firmly grounded in herself as a sensing, feeling Subject, endowed with the twin capacities of personal responsibility and self-reflection, the Radical experiences herself as whole, and is thus able to think and act independent of any external ideology. Requiring neither superficial forms of belonging nor external validation, the Radical retains her capacity for choice. She lives from the inside out, regarding as sacred the inner light of her own consciousness, and it’s precisely through her intimacy with her own inner light that she experiences her connectedness to everyone else. Thus, the Radical no longer regards the other as a threat, but as a partner with whom she must engage in their shared pursuit of the truth.

Her orientation toward the world is one of openness and receptivity, rather than the Sectarian’s posture of closure and rigidity. She has no need to fragment reality for the sake of her own security, and thus, is open to experiencing it as it is. She reaches toward, leans into. She is like a small child in this way, who, upon encountering the otherness of an insect or wild animal, wants to touch it, to know it, and to connect with it, instead of turning away from it in fear or disgust. She is, in a word, attentive, and therefore loving, and it’s precisely her freedom from existential need and expectation that fosters this attentiveness. “It is when we desire truth with an empty soul and without attempting to guess its content that we receive light,” Weil writes. “Therein resides the entire mechanism of attention.”¹⁶ The Radical understands that discernment requires detachment, and it’s only through her internal sense of security that such detachment is made possible. She understands that when it comes to truth, her views matter less than the way she holds them, which must be dispassionately, and in accordance with her inner light, “which affords whoever seeks it an evident answer,” and “is always susceptible to revision, yet no correction can be affected unless it’s through an increase of inner light.”¹⁷

The Radical holds herself accountable to truth alone and thus possesses a consistently critical attitude, which she trains upon herself, as much as others. She possesses both the humility necessary to be receptive to criticism and the confidence necessary to wield it because her desire for truth is not only for herself but for all. She understands that her own flourishing is undermined in so far as the other remains loyal to something else, thus she refuses to abandon him because to do so would be to abandon herself. All hope and redemption rests in the encounter between herself and the other, which may threaten her ego but will ultimately nourish her soul, as long as she can keep her heart open and resist her ego’s attempts to close it off. As Freire writes:

“Dialogue is the only way, not only in the vital questions of the political order, but in all the expressions of our being. Only by virtue of faith, however, does dialogue have power and meaning; by faith in man and his possibilities, by the faith that I can only become truly myself when other men also become themselves.”¹⁸

In other words, it’s faith that distinguishes dialogue from anti-dialogue, faith in one’s own inner light and in the inner light of others, even in those instances where the other falls short of his potential. In fact, the Radical’s decision to regard him lovingly anyway is actually the truest expression of her freedom. As John Berger so beautifully said in his indispensable conversation with Michael Silverblatt (rest in peace, my friend), “One of the essential elements in tenderness is that it is a free act, a gratuitous act. It has an enormous amount to do with liberty, with freedom. Because one chooses to be tender, and in a sense, in the face of what is surrounding us, it’s almost a defiant act of freedom.” And it’s precisely this tenderness that nurtures in the other their receptivity to truth (and thus their own freedom), while the Sectarian’s impulse to dominate and impose her views renders the other defensive, and therefore less receptive and less free.

It’s not that the Radical shuns all forms of collective action. She may join up with particular movements that espouse her causes and share her vision; however, her loyalty to any movement is entirely conditional upon whether or not it lives up to her mission. After all, her commitment is not to a movement but to her cause, and unlike the Sectarian who engages almost exclusively in protest instead of positive action, the Radical is deeply committed to enacting her vision, not just by what she says, but by what she does. Endowed with a rich sense of herself as a responsible Subject, her commitment to her cause begins at the root, in her own life, thus she is free of the attitudinal incoherence and hypocrisy that generally characterizes the Sectarian. (See recent essays by Helen Roy and Ivana Greco regarding incoherence and hypocrisy as it appears on both the left and the right. )

Importantly, the Radical always acts out of love, and never fear, and it’s through her wholeness—or her embodied sense of connection to the inherent fullness of herself, others, the world, and God—that she is able to do so. She knows that it’s only through love that her vision has any chance of being realized, as love is an inexhaustible and energizing resource, and thus permits her to sustain and deepen her commitment over time, while fear inevitably corrodes, depletes, and ultimately defeats us. And it’s this love that permits her to stay in relationship to the other and continue to critically engage him, even when the world is determined to make her fear him, and him fear her. She knows that it’s ultimately only through him that her vision has any chance of being maintained in perpetuity, for the extent to which a vision is imposed on others instead of nurtured within them (or as Plato writes, “kindled in one soul by a flame that leaps to it from another”¹⁹) is the extent to which it’s inevitably reacted against and destroyed.

In this sense, the Radical is as much a pragmatist as an idealist. Her insistence on operating from the love that dwells within her—which is in fact the very substance of her wholeness—is not grounded in naïve optimism, but rather, in her more accurate discernment of reality, which is again a direct consequence of her openness to it. She knows, in the words of McGilchrist, that “the world is always a matter of responsiveness” and a process of “creative collaboration, of co-creation,”²⁰ thus, how she thinks and acts quite literally creates the world in which she and others live. As James Baldwin reflected in a 1960 essay about both black and white college students who were becoming increasingly active in the Civil Rights Movement: “…these young people are determined to make [freedom] happen and make it happen now. They cannot be diverted. It seems to me that they are the only people in this country now who really believe in freedom. Insofar as they can make it real for themselves, they will make it real for all of us.”

A More Perfect Union

“Goodness alone is an end,” Simone Weil writes,²¹ and while there is no ideology that is equivalent to it, goodness is a capacity that lies within the individual human heart, and it’s from this inner capacity that the Radical acts, while the Sectarian can only act from outside of herself, and therefore, contrary to goodness. Thus, if we’re really invested in the flourishing of our democracy for all people, or in any particular cause, then the battle between these two potentials within ourselves is the primary battle worth attending to—for that is what they are—two potentials continually vying for dominance.

McGilchrist’s work on hemisphere differences and the distinct worldviews put forth by the left and right hemispheres renders the existence of these two potentials quite literal. As he writes in summary, the left hemisphere is “self-directed, enclosed, self-validating, enthrall to its theory, less tolerant of ambiguity, tends toward either/or thinking, and therefore sees less,” while the right “inclusive, inclined to both/and, open to new information, the bigger picture, what is actually the case, regardless of what the theory might suggest.”²² Furthermore, per my argument about the relationship between these worldviews and our degree of somatic security, the left hemisphere tends to regard the body as an object made of various parts, while the right experiences it as a whole from within. And this is no coincidence, for it’s precisely this rootedness that allows us to drop the ego’s natural defensiveness and narrowmindedness, and open ourselves up to both others and the world.

But if these potentials exist within us simultaneously at all times, the question then becomes: how we can we do better? How we nurture our inner-Radical and keep our inner-Sectarian in check, so as to enable our own flourishing and that of our democracy? In closing, I’ll offer a by no means exhaustive list of ideas, many of which I’ve also found helpful in my early years of motherhood, when otherness came barreling into my life in more ways than one.

A more perfect union begins with the union between mind and body.

The first, and most foundational of these is to nurture your capacity to be embodied—that is—to dwell from within the fullness of your sensing, feeling body, instead of only your head, which is where the delusions of lack, fear, and separation reside. Earlier in the year I shared some simple, very low-effort practices you can use to begin developing and strengthening this capacity, and I promise that your increased sense of groundedness and equanimity will be almost immediately noticeable. I often find that the less time I spend living from within my body (because I’m ruminating, scrolling my phone, or mindlessly plowing through my day), the more prone I am to anxiety and irrationality, and the less generous I am with the people around me.

Learn what it feels like to inhabit your inner-Radical.

This is one of the practices in the aforementioned link (“Inhabit Your Highest Self,”) but I’m singling it out here because I think it’s particularly relevant. Sit down in a quiet place for a few minutes each day and begin to notice what it feels like when you are the most loving, most hopeful, most generous version of yourself. You can think of an event or person that might arouse such feelings, but the important part is to tune into the physical sensations inside your body that occur when these feelings arise. I call this a “somatic snapshot.” See if you can really feel into the accompanying sensations and allow them to expand. Remind yourself that this is the real you. The idea is to become very familiar with this energetic posture, so that you can return to it more easily, especially in moments when you’re tempted to concede to your inner-Sectarian.

Limit your time on the Internet, and stop the scroll.

As I previously implied, the digital media ecosystem (especially social media) is quite literally designed to cultivate a sectarian attitude. I personally find it impossible to spend excessive amounts of time online and not concede to sectarian impulses because the algorithm repeatedly presents a distorted and highly fragmented version of reality and our fellow human beings, while also sucking up the time and energy we might otherwise put toward acting in the world, according to our capacities. And as Mary Harrington’s recent work has been highlighting, the dominance of short-form media and scrolling in particular has negatively impacted our capacity to think, which renders us “more tribal, less rational, largely uninterested in facts or even matters of historical record, moved more by vibes than cogent argument and open to fantastical ideas and bizarre conspiracy theories,” or in other words, more sectarian.

And as she writes elsewhere, scrolling quite literally rewires the brain, dismantling our capacity for sustained attention and precluding “cognitive sovereignty,” a term borrowed from the philosopher Anna Riedl, in which we exhibit the kind of rootedness, stillness, and receptivity necessary to properly behold reality and discern truth. “To the extent that we allow [algorithms] to colonise our attention, we’ll also permit our loves to be so shaped, and downstream of this our entire culture and even its institutions. Nothing good can come of this,” Harrington writes, before going on to recommend prayer or the deliberate contemplation of the divine as an antidote to the anti-prayer of doomscrolling—a solution I wholly endorse. Inviting more silence and stillness into your life inevitably increases your rootedness in a reality that transcends our petty, oversimplified perceptions.

Learn how to integrate and metabolize your emotions.

It’s impossible to maintain the sense of groundedness and openness that distinguishes the Radical without having practices in place for managing emotionality when it arises. This doesn’t mean dismissing your feelings or stuffing them down. To the contrary: it means learning how to integrate them, so that you can make use of them, before they make use of you. As I’ve written in regard to other emotions such as anxiety and self-doubt, the best way to integrate a particular feeling is simply to feel it as it unfolds in your physical body, which is the only manner in which its particular energy can be released. If we don’t feel our feelings, we tend to repress them, harming ourselves, or release them in irresponsible ways that harm others, neither of which is going to be very helpful if we’re trying to advance a particular cause. When we integrate our feelings, however, we can convert them into passion, which motivates us to act, while still maintaining a calm disposition and a clear head.

Get curious!

This was a huge shift for me personally. Instead of getting disgusted, offended, or dismissive of views you disagree with, see if you can approach them with curiosity instead. Any confrontation with views you don’t agree with is a genuine opportunity to try to understand where the other is coming from, and if you can understand where they’re coming from, you have a much better chance of engaging in productive critical dialogue. And while people don’t typically change their views after a single conversation, each conversation has the potential to open a door that might otherwise have been closed, even if just a crack. It’s also worth noting that your ability to be curious about and engage with others who think differently from you is a good indicator of how secure you are in your own beliefs.

Form relationships with people who think and vote differently from you.

One of the best antidotes to the dehumanization of the other all political ideologies inevitably promote—precisely because such views empower the ideology at your own expense—is to actually have close, real life relationships with people who think and vote differently from you. In fact, if you don’t have such relationships, you can safely assume that a large portion, if not all, of your perceptions of them are based on delusions. Understand that any resistance to such relationships is just your ego trying to protect itself, but that if you can break past that and discover that it’s possible to not only engage with the other, but even to laugh with and take pleasure in him, you will experience a sense of joy I struggle to put words to. As I said at the outset, our bodies really do long for one another, and it’s only by conceding to this longing and learning to engage the other, in and through his differences, that all we hope for has any chance of becoming real.

A few weeks ago I received an email about a new interactive theater piece called Memory Generation, which is about dementia, caregiving, and the communities we build around loss.

I would have been excited about this in any form, but one thing I really love about it is that the show is created in a way that both people experiencing dementia and the people who care for them are welcome to come see it. This is such a profound expansion of what building a family-friendly world could look and feel like, and exactly the kind of culture change I hope to see more of in the world. Both people experiencing dementia and their caregivers often feel like they don’t belong in public, and this outsider status leads to social isolation which only exacerbates dementia symptoms and caregiver burnout.

I spoke to Sara Zatz and Sherrine Azab, co-creators of Memory Generation, about how their personal stories inspired the show, and how they are using experimental theater techniques to help all of us collectively process and understand dementia through storytelling and sharing.

The show runs now through May 10 in New York City. More info and tickets here.

P.S. I just so happen to be heading to New York this week, and am so thrilled to get to see it!

Elissa: This show is exactly the kind of work I want to see more of in the world. It isn’t just about caregiving, but also creates a space for people on both sides of the dementia caregiving relationship to experience art and make meaning together, each according to her ability. Can you both start by telling me a bit about yourselves and how this project came to be?

Sara: I’m the Artistic Director of Engagement at Pink Fang, a theater company based here in New York. The work I do is specifically interview-based and community-engaged theater-making: inviting people who are typically not performers to tell their own stories on stage. The themes have ranged from culture and immigration to living with disability and chronic illness.

What brought me to this particular project was my own experience caregiving for my dad, who had a multi-year journey living with dementia. My family has a deep history of Alzheimer’s on my mom’s side, but his was unexpected. Between 2018 and 2019 we started noticing memory loss. He passed this January, which was also unexpected, happening right in the middle of making this show.

Before he moved into memory care, my dad was living with his partner, and the two of them were in this intertwined caregiving relationship. She had a chronic illness, he was her physical caregiver, and she was his cognitive caregiver. When we were in the process of moving him, she said to me, “This is really hard and I don’t know who to talk to. No one I know is going through this. You should make a show about it.” And then shortly after my dad moved into memory care, she passed away. I felt a real calling to fulfill that wish from her.

I reached out to my dear friend and colleague Sherrine because we’d worked together before, and she was going through something similar in her own family. I’m very much a member of the sandwich generation. I have a thirteen-year-old daughter and was trying to support my dad in his early 80s, all while trying to be a working mom.

Sherrine: A close family member got her dementia diagnosis about four or five years ago. It’s been a particularly challenging experience because my family structure has gotten pretty fragmented through it.

When Sara approached me, I was really nervous about doing anything more to complicate the situation I was already living in. But the theater company I co-run in Detroit, A Host of People, makes multimedia work for social change, and representation is really important to us. This experience, caregiving for a family member with dementia, is something so many people are going through, and if you’re not going through it, you’re often not talking about it. In the spaces where we’ve gathered people around this subject, the community that forms instantly is so affirming.

Elissa: And it is such a multi-faceted experience that impacts so many parts of our lives, from time, to money, to identity, to our relationships with others and our relationships with ourselves. We have lots of big questions to answer through caregiving! Then on top of all that, is the grief we often feel over our parents’ diagnoses. And yet because of how unnecessarily hard caregiving is in the United States, many of us leave little time for processing all the feelings, the identity shift, and the grief.

Sara: With dementia in particular, you’re grieving in advance for years, and then the actual loss still arrives like something new. But for me, and this is something I want to be careful to say, because not every dementia journey looks like this, the last two years with my dad were, while still really hard, actually really beautiful. He retained his essential personality and his sense of humor even as the memory faded. His world zoomed in, but there was something peaceful about that. I never had to talk to him about Trump. He didn’t know who the president was. I was fine with that.

Part of what Sherrine and I are trying to do in this show is reframe dementia a bit — to push back against the idea that once the diagnosis is in place, the person is basically already gone. They’re not gone. They’re there, they’re different. And being artists and storytellers has been really important in that work. Sherrine already had training in a modality called TimeSlips, developed by Anne Basting, and I became trained in it too. The whole approach is about entering into the present moment. You don’t go in focusing on what your loved one doesn’t remember. Instead you think, what can we talk about today? What’s beautiful right now?

Elissa: I’m not a Buddhist, but as far as I understand it, this captures so much of the wisdom of Buddhism. The thing people try to achieve through meditation for years on end.

Sara: We’ve literally been talking about that in rehearsal. It’s about letting go of control, letting go of expectations. You can’t win an argument with someone with dementia. And even if you do, you’ll lose it the next time. My dad reached this kind of guru-like state toward the end. He would have laughed at that description — he always wanted to be a sage — but he really had arrived at a different kind of acceptance.

Elissa: Tell me about the show itself. What’s it like?

Sherrine: Sara and our collaborator Andrew Morton, who’s very experienced in interview-based theater, interviewed twenty-four people, including the four performers, who are either living with memory loss themselves or caregivers to someone who is. From those interviews, we built a script that weaves all these stories together. The four actors move fluidly between roles; no one holds a single identity throughout. You don’t always know who is the caregiver and who has memory loss, and that’s intentional.

The show is framed as a Memory Cafe—a creative social space designed specifically for people living with dementia, and their friends and families, that focus on creative experiences, not diagnosis. Audiences arrive half an hour early and take part in pre-show activities around the show’s themes. There’s a motif about a ginkgo biloba tree and what trees represent in relation to memory, time, and resilience. The pre-show asks the same questions that will come up during the performance: What does receiving care feel like? What do you think of when you hear the word caregiver?

The performance itself is about an hour, and it’s non-linear. It mirrors the experience of living with memory loss. There are moments of clarity, then looping back, resetting. Characters literally say, “What were we talking about?” and start again. It might be confusing, and we want it to be, in the same way it might be confusing to someone with memory loss. The heart of it, for me, is this question: How do we all make care? Not just be caregivers, but be care makers, for each other, in these concentric circles that ripple out from the person who needs the most support. We make care through acts of care, big and small, for ourselves and each other. There is a creativity to it, to find different ways to show and create care.

Sara: And one of the most personal elements of the show is that we integrated recordings I made with my dad in the last six months of his life. One of the last coherent conversations I had with him was asking for his permission to record him and use those recordings. You hear his voice. You hear me talking to him. That felt like the only ethical way to make sure the firsthand experience of someone living with memory loss was actually present in the room.

Elissa: You’ve also designed this to be a space where someone with dementia can actually come to the show, which I think is extraordinary. Can you say more about that?

Sherrine: This is for someone with dementia who is still going on outings. Not in full-time memory care, but maybe with an at-home caregiver, and still able to go to a theater. My loved one would be a perfect person to bring. We still go see theater together. She may not remember it the next day, but I believe that the accumulation of positive feelings and experiences matters, whether or not the memory sticks.

Our accessibility coordinator, Ariel Reich, has helped us think about it this way: your diagnosis is welcome here, but it’s also not the focus. You don’t have to be a person with dementia in this space. But you also can be, openly, and all of that is welcome.

Sara: We also thought carefully about the Memory Cafe framing for this reason. Memory Cafes are really not about diagnosis, and they’re for both caregivers and care partners to have a moment of creativity, a reprieve, and something to enjoy together. We want there to be a resource table in the lobby, with information from organizations like the CaringKind (formerly Alzheimer’s Association, New York City Chapter) and arts organizations doing dementia-friendly work, like Arts & Minds. But we specifically don’t want it in the room with us, because we don’t want it to feel like a clinical support table. This is first and foremost a piece of art and a gathering. Resources are there for people who want them, but we’re not trying to make it a PSA.

Elissa: How has making this show personally affected both of you, given that you’re both going through versions of this in real time?

Sherrine: It’s been a particularly different challenge to be directing this show and getting texts from my family during rehearsal that relate exactly to what we’re working on in the room. There’s a guilt of split focus. And at the same time, it’s beautiful and satisfying, but it is a very different experience of art-making when it’s happening to you in real time while you’re making it. Challenging, and beautiful, and hard, and satisfying, and sad. All the things.

Sara: I was not expecting to be grieving my dad while we were in rehearsal. But now I’m able to show up as a care friend to people in a way I couldn’t before, because I didn’t have the capacity. I’ve never put myself in an artistic project before, or been this personal and vulnerable. But I think that also goes back to why we’re making the show: to talk about dementia and caregiving openly, not as something that just happens in the background. I feel really grateful to be able to show up for Sherrine as a friend in the way that she showed up for me six months ago, when I was in a very different place.

Elissa: It’s a real gift, to build a collaborative space where you don’t have to silo the care self off before you show up at work.

Sara: Yes. And I think that’s exactly what we’re hoping audiences feel too — that they can bring their whole selves into this room. That’s what we’re trying to make space for.

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Welcome to MADE WITH CARE Sunday School

The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, has recently been promoting a new book by one of its senior policy analysts, Emma Waters. In it, Waters “aims to teach college students and young adults how to recover biblical womanhood, which is bitterly scorned in our feminist dispensation.”

The book has, predictably for anything related to gender and the Heritage Foundation, generated some controversy. However, nowhere in the discussion do I see anyone questioning Water’s frame on “biblical womanhood.”

“What does the Bible actually say about marriage, motherhood, children, ambition, calling, and meaningful work?” she writes in the intro, implying that the Bible has a clear and consistent message about such things.

It definitely does not.

How frustrating it is to find publications like The New Yorker take Water’s claims wholesale. Their review of the book was titled “Will Biblical Womanhood Box You In Or Set You Free?,” and it contains no poking or prodding as to what biblical womanhood might mean.

But the Bible as Waters presents it is not the Bible that I, a feminist, know. And, honestly, love. As I see it, the women of the Bible are neither role models nor beacons of moral clarity. They’re also not always keen to play second fiddle to the men in their lives. The Bible is far messier, and therefore better, than that.

Biblical literacy is low. Particularly among secular progressives, who tend to view the Bible more as a problematic inheritance than a text worthy of curiosity. That said, I am also surprised by how many observant Jews and Christians I meet who have relatively little familiarity with the goings on of Abraham, Sarah and the rest of them.

I’ve read the Bible. Every word. In addition to writing about the intersection of feminism, care and culture, I have spent the last 17 years working as an artistic director of a Jewish culture laboratory which involves reading ancient Jewish texts in a completely open-minded setting—no theological or political agenda.

I should clarify that the Bible I read is what I call the Hebrew Bible, and Christians call the Old Testament (a title Jews don’t love for what it is worth, as it assumes that the Jewish part of the story is “old”). This text is also sometimes called the five books of Moses, and includes: Genesis (the story of creation plus many iconic stories like Noah’s Ark, the Tower of Babel, Cain and Abel), Exodus (the story of the Israelites fleeing from slavery in Egypt), Leviticus (the creation of a Jewish community in the desert plus some attempt of laws, ritual and order), Numbers (wandering and searching for the promised land, mixed with some deaths, rebellions and a census), and Deuteronomy (Moses reviews his life, begs to enter the promised land, and eventually dies without getting to do so plus some battles and more laws and rituals). If you have ever opened a hotel drawer and seen Gideon’s Bible there, it will include all the stories I read, plus others including later, Christian texts. If you have ever seen a Torah scroll, this is what is written in it.

This is all to say that the rest of what’s written below will only apply to the parts of the Bible that Jews and Christians share. I invite those well-versed in Christian texts to share with me their interpretations of biblical womanhood. Also, another caveat. I have not read Waters whole book, so please don’t take this as a book review. From what I have read, I agree with some of what she writes—for example, that we can do better than the “girlboss” vs. tradwife binary—but I don’t share her hostility toward progressive feminism, and I think she paints the movement in cartoonish colors.

When you read the Bible truly open-minded, “barefoot” as one great teacher puts it, you might very well discover it is not quite what you thought. Even an iconic story like Eve eating the fruit (not an apple!) can feel strange and new, and dare I say less patriarchal than we might assume, when we enter it without the centuries of cultural baggage. (Eve has curiosity and curiosity is good for human flourishing and morality, and even God comes around to this idea by the end of the story IMO!)

When it comes to gender, there is no question that there are straight-up sexist elements of the Bible. But there are also many genuine surprises. The biggest surprise for many is that nobody in the biblical stories is perfectly behaved or neatly moral, including women, including God. This tends to be a big disappointment for those who open the book expecting models of goodness. But for me, the imperfections and flaws are why I find these stories so compelling.

All the main characters in the Hebrew Bible, Abraham, Noah and Moses, along with the women, including Eve, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, Leah and Miriam, are messy humans. Personally, I believe the reason these stories are still with us is precisely because of the messy humanity reflected in the text. There are no easy heroes, no clean morality tales.

When I remember my female ancestors during weekly Shabbat prayers at synagogue (“Blessed are You, Lord our God and God of our ancestors God of Abraham, God of Isaac and God of Jacob, God of Sarah, God of Rebecca, God of Rachel, and God of Leah” goes the Amidah), I am not recalling saints, or people whose lives presented a clear and tidy roadmap for my own. Instead, I am recalling figures in the psychologically complex story that led to a relationship with oneness, love, mystery and justice that slowly became the Jewish faith. (Often imperfectly so, particularly right now, but that is a conversation for another time.)

For the sake of broader biblical literacy and to counter one particular political point-of-view having ownership over the definition of biblical womanhood, below is a summary of some of the messy women of the Bible.

What I hope these mini-teachings make clear is that these stories contain ideas about womanhood that are far more in line with what I might broadly conceive of as feminism, than the cultural scripts being promoted by the Heritage Foundation. In the Bible, we find an acknowledgment that women desire agency and power, and hold ambitions, in the domestic, care and relational realm as well as the public and economic realm. They prove themselves worthy of such ambitions and desires, too.

Also, I think so much of what harms women, moms in particular, is the pressure to be idealized versions of ourselves. Personally, I find relief in the fact that the biblical matriarchs weren’t perfect, either.

Again, there is lots of ugly patriarchy in the Bible. I don’t want to ignore that. But there is so much more than that when it comes to who biblical woman are, what made them tick, and how they interacted with those around them. Keep in mind, these are the stories that stood the test of thousands of years of oral culture, the ones that eventually got canonized and written down, sealed in place for future audiences. And the women in these stories are not submissive.

(Note: the book by Waters tells women to live like יָעֵל Yael— Waters spells it “Jael,” but a Y sound is closer to the original Hebrew. Her story appears not in the Hebrew Bible, but in a later text called Book of Judges. That text is part of the larger official Jewish and Christian canon alongside other types of texts you might have heard of including Psalms and Prophets.)

Here are a few examples of messy biblical women who you probably don’t want to live like, but very well might see your messy self in:

SARAH

In Exodus, the first person God reaches out is a man named Abraham. God basically tells Abraham that if Abraham leaves home and goes to the promised land and is faithful to God—one God—then God will make Abraham and his descendants great.

One rub: Abraham’s wife Sarah is infertile.

Yes, Sarah’s worth measured in some way on whether or not she has kids. But in her infertile state Sarah is hardly passive or deferential to men. For one, she tells Abraham to have a child with her handmaiden Hagar, because she can’t conceive. Later, when Sarah finally has a child, she tells Abraham to get rid of Hagar. Sarah believed she saw Hagar’s son Ishmael taunt or laugh at Isaac. Sarah is cruel to Hagar, and demands that Abraham do what she says and he does.

This has very “unlikeable female character” vibes, Sarah being someone who we can kinda relate to, but not in a way that necessarily makes us proud.

Though perhaps Sarah’s more notable act of defiance was when she laughed at God. Here’s what happened: Sarah is sitting on the edge of her tent when she hears three visitors/ divine messengers tell Abraham that she will conceive a child within the year. Sarah is nearing 90 at the time, and the Bible tells us she is in menopause. So Sarah laughs—with a ring of suspicion, as I read the text.

She has spent her whole life running alongside her husband, trying to fulfill the plan laid out by this semi-abstract God figure and when God finally comes and tells her that she will get the child and fulfill the destiny she and her husband have been working towards for almost 100 years she doesn’t sob with gratitude, relieved to finally be the mother she was always destined to be. Instead she is a little cynical and finds it all absurd. I very much relate.

Later when Sarah finally has Isaac, she comes back to the theme of laughter, saying: “God has brought me laughter; everyone who hears will laugh with me.” And, mind you, Isaac’s name means “laughter” representing both that moment of doubt and the later joy.

Israel means “God wrestlers” and Sarah, with her laughter, is a wrestler. With her husband, Hagar and, yes, even God.

REBECCA

Abraham (Sarah’s husband) is looking for a wife for their son Isaac and sends a servant to find one. The servant meets Rebecca at a well, and takes a liking to her because she draws water not just for him, but also his ten camels. This is a task that demands energy, and great physical strength. Also, note that Rebecca is out in public, doing hard physical work and contributing to her household economy.

We then hear how she is a virgin and therefore suitable (which is not cool in modern times, but perhaps more understandable in an age when blood lines upheld the entire economic system) to be a bride for Isaac.

Now Rebecca has what we might call chutzpah (Yiddish for “nerve” or “moxie”). First, her family asks that she wait ten days before going to meet her new husband. But Rebecca says otherwise, and off they go. She meets Isaac, and he falls in love with her.

Like Sarah, it takes Rebecca awhile to get pregnant and when she does she has twins and a truly traumatic childbirth scene. She is in pain, the kids are, we are told, fighting inside of her. She takes this up with God, directly, and is told by God: “Two nations are in your womb... the older shall serve the younger.”

Note: Rebecca doesn’t need a man to mediate her relationship with God; God speaks to her directly. And then God gives her inside information about the plan for her boys, Esau, born first, and Jacob, born second. Isaac is left out.

Now I’m going to fast forward through one of the most psychologically rich stories in the Bible, but basically Rebecca gets this message from God and begins working behind her husband’s back to make it happen. Jacob, now older, and Rebecca conspire on a plan to trick old, blind Isaac into thinking he is giving hairy Esau the blessing of the first born, when it is really unhairy Jacob who wrapped himself in some goatskin fur. Firstborn blessings are essentially binding contracts, determining the fate of the children. They succeed and cause great pain and rupture in their family.

Once again, we have a woman who is a far cry from a traditional wife, or someone content on staying in her lane and tending to her family while her husband navigates their destinies. Nope, these women see themselves as capable of controlling the reins of destiny as well. In not always pretty ways.

MIRIAM

Miriam is Moses’s sister, who, as a young girl, watches over her baby brother. One day, Moses’s mom sends him down the Nile to avoid having to kill him (as per a decree to kill all Israelite boys from Pharaoh), and Miriam watches the basket travel to Pharaoh’s house. Once it arrives, Miriam quickly comes up with the idea of suggesting to the Egyptians that her mom serve as Moses’s nurse, thus keeping the family together.

Much later, after the Israelites pass through the Red Sea and successfully escape Egypt and slavery, Miriam brings together everyone in worship. She grabs her tambourine and leads them in a song—it’s called the “Song of the Sea” and is some of the oldest language in the Bible—and then Miriam is named as a prophet as a result. Miriam didn’t ask for permission, here. She sees herself as fit for leadership. And her authority was welcomed.

Overall, Miriam very much has a mind of her own and it isn’t always a kind one. She and her brother Aaron challenge Moses on his choice of wife, judging Zipporah (the wife) on a basis of race, or her dark skin. Also, Miriam and her brother challenge Moses on his authority, claiming: ““Has GOD spoken only through Moses—and not through us as well?” After they ask this question, God takes all three of siblings (Moses, Aaron and Miriam) into a tent for a meeting.

First, we are told by the narrator that Moses is the most humble man ever, and then God gives Aaron and Miriam a talking to. Miriam’s punishment is that her skin turns “white as snow.” (Aaron doesn’t get a punishment, which might be because of the patriarchy, but also some other reason. It isn’t explained. Also, note that Miriam’s skin turns white after mocking her sister-in-law’s dark skin.)

Moses then begs God to heal his sister, “O God, please heal her”—and with time she is healed. (I really relate to this loving and yet chaotic sibling dynamic.)

Later on in the Bible, Miriam is listed alongside Moses and Aaron as one of the three leaders God sent to lead the Israelites out of Egypt.

There is never any mention of Miriam being married or having children.

So in this story, we have a single, childfree woman who didn’t ask for permission, and was racist and lacked compassion towards her sister-in-law. We also have a vision of leadership which is less about one great man being in charge, and more about a group of scrappy siblings who took on the bad guy (Pharaoh) and won.

YAEL

I am not going to go too deep here as she is a minor character and we don’t know too much about her. I will only say that she straight murders an enemy man by pushing a tent peg through his temple in her tent/ home. As such, I am fairly surprised that this is the one chosen to include in the title of the book.

Here’s how they frame it (a summary that, by the way, suggests feminist influence even if they proclaim to despise such a thing):

Waters makes the biblical case for what I call the side-hustle tradwife, a woman who works, as Waters writes, “either out of necessity or desire,” yet puts her “home and relationships first.” She recognizes, as Waters notes, that “family life and the well-being of…children must take precedence over the relentless demands of careerism.”

Waters teaches young women that relationships with “husbands and children refine and strengthen them for successful work in political, social, religious, and personal realms—either directly, or through their husband and children.” And she’s got the biblical stories to prove it.

There are many other biblical women worthy of digging into, but we’ll stop here for now.

I’ll wrap this up by saying that I firmly believe that the notion that we should live like any of these people is simply not what the authors (be it God or humans, you do you!) of the Bible had in mind. Flattening them into simplistic heroes ruins the power and potency of these texts, and actually distracts us from broader messages on what it means to stumble towards love, care, justice and unity replete with all the vanities, pettiness, fear, competition, rage and longing that make us human.

These women and the stories they inhabit are wisely free of so much of the certainty we find ourselves obsessively grasping for in contemporary life, or easy dictates on how to be, with or without the feminist context.

I much prefer them that way.

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While this column is generally focused on things I love and want to raise up, this one is an exception.

Here are three care-related things that made me angry.

ONE: THIS NEW YORKER CARTOON

While this is clearly the least offensive of the three, it nevertheless represents a worldview that feeds into a deep ignorance of care and appreciation of those who do it.

If you have read me before, and certainly if you have read my book, you will know that I think parenting and other forms of caregiving are anything but banal. And while I know this cartoon isn’t claiming that a heart-to-heart conversation with a distressed teenager is banal, or some other more emotionally charged parenting moment, it is still just way off.

Let’s meet this where it is at. We have an ostensibly working parent who has to drive to his kid’s school to deliver the kid’s presumably forgotten lunch. I am a working parent who has had to drive to school to deliver a forgotten lunch and let me tell you why this isn’t banal. (And let’s operate under this definition of banal: something so boring, unoriginal, and predictable that it is irritating or tiresome.)

For one, an unanticipated trip back to school in the middle of the day often requires intense scheduling logistics which tends to include a not-terribly-pleasant conversation with my husband about who should do it. When I manage to deliver the lunch without affecting my work day or anyone else who was relying on me I feel like I am a champion! A superhero! Not someone who used to be interesting before my life got tangled up with lunchboxes. In other words, there is nothing banal about managing the logistics of working parenthood.

And then to go a layer deeper here: the decision to bring the lunch is its own psychological and philosophical journey. On some days it may feel as though you are enabling a forgetful child who needs to deal with natural consequences and deal with being hungry one day so he doesn’t forget his lunch the next day. On other days it may feel like delivering that lunch is the right thing to do you , considering the circumstances. Guess what isn’t always easy? And definitely not banal? Figuring this out.

Also, the famous speech about women from the Barbie movie just resurfaced on social media and I once again heard this line: “You’re supposed to love being a mother, but don’t talk about your kids all the damn time.” In other words: ours is a culture that believes there is nothing more basic than a parent who talks about parenting.

Bottom line: STOP USING THE WORD BANAL TO DESCRIBE ANY ACT OF CARE. OKAY?

TWO: THIS PHOTO ON THE WALL OF A HYATT IN TEXAS

I had a great time teaching at Capita’s Care & the Common Good seminar last month. (I’m a writer-in-residence at this think tank which works towards building a country where all families and communities can flourish. They are awesome! Follow them!)

Pretty much the one thing I didn’t like about the seminar was this photo on the wall of the hotel’s hallway, pointed out to me by Ashley, one of the participants.

This Hyatt is on a property of an old family ranch and the design team did an altogether nice job of incorporating family photos and artifacts to give the corporate hotel a sense of history and place. But this image and its caption were a real fail.

The nanny doesn’t get a name. Her recognition is categorized as additional background information about a white toddler girl. She is placed in a parenthesis. Her humanity isn’t recognized. Nor is there any recognition of the history of Black women, and women-of-color more broadly, doing the majority of paid caregiving work throughout U.S. history, and rarely received the compensation or credit they deserve. Also, this photo was taken in roughly 1906 when Jim Crow laws were rapidly expanding in Texas. Measures were taken to make Black votes not count, or stop Blacks from voting in the first place.

This is all to say there is nothing neutral about the nanny in this photo. I wished the caption writer acknowledged as such.Take the acknowledgment of her out of parentheses. Tell me you tried to find her name and couldn’t. Acknowledge how racialized care was, how Black women were heavily concentrated in domestic labor, and how that fed into a systemic diminishment of care and Black women that still hurts us all today.

THREE: TRUMP’S LATEST THOUGHTS ON CARE POLICY

FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES:

“The United States can’t take care of day care,” Mr. Trump said at the White House on Wednesday. “It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all of these individual things, they can do it on a state basis.”

Adding that the United States is a big country that is “fighting wars,” Mr. Trump said, “We have to take care of one thing: military protection.”

The president said that states should raise taxes to pay for day care and that the federal government could, in turn, potentially reduce the taxes that it collects from states.

Okay, so while the actual implementation of any large-scale care system on a federal level is, without a doubt, tricky, it’s really hard to swallow the casual deprioritization of care policy for seemingly optional wars. We are constantly told care solutions are too expensive, and yet when it comes to war, there is always money. We are constantly told care is too complicated and we need to figure out the logistics, but then we go to war with very little context or a clear agenda.

Did I expect more? No. But am I still angry? Yes.

Lastly, I can’t help but think the casual degradation of care and caregivers we see in the first two items on this list contribute to a culture and worldview that has shaped the ideology and priorities we see coming from our President.

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One of my favorite parts of being alive today is all the brilliant writing and thinking being done about care. I truly believe there is a quiet revolution happening, an honest reckoning with vulnerability, dependency, and intimate caregiving unlike anything that humanity has ever seen before.

For this reason, once a month I share a Substack essay written by someone else whose work on care has deepened my understanding of the experience—be it viscerally, intellectually, psychologically, spiritually, or otherwise.

This month I am sharing an essay by who refuses the fairy tale/ nightmare binary that marks so much of the motherhood discourse and dives into the rich and fertile messy middle. Her Substack is called Ampersand Motherhood (see what I’m saying), and I deeply appreciate how she brings her whole story and being into her reflections on motherhood. Because nobody comes to motherhood without a story, and that story never ends once we have kids.

In the essay below she reflects on how she spent much of her life projecting a polished, put-together image, an instinct motivated in part by growing up with a mom who experienced drug addiction. All this took a toll on her inner life and internal sense of mattering and belonging, which she didn’t really see until she became a mom. Only then did she begin to reject the inherited scripts of appearance and ambition and seek out a more rooted and meaningful life.

Read on. Follow and subscribe: . And share your motherhood-related revelations (“fuck-it moments”) in the comments below.

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I grew up as a member of the RM Johnson Sunbeam Choir. If you’ve never heard of it, it’s because it was a two-person choir, and the other member was my sister. Every Sunday at church, the two of us would stand at the front of the small, 10-pew sanctuary and belt our little hearts out. My sister was the actual singer; I was just along for the ride.

Growing up in a small, close-knit family church was my first introduction to some of life’s anchors: faith, community, love, connection. It was also the place where I learned the art of performance, of how to command a room confidently and believe in to the gift of one’s own voice. While my sister was the singer, I was more of a poet and speaker, writing and delivering mini-sermons on Children’s Day, reciting Maya Angelou’s “And Still I Rise” during our Black History Month program.

I think of this time with a bittersweet fondness because it was also the time in my life where I learned and internalized performance not just as a matter of stage and presence, but also as a matter of keeping up appearances. Of never letting them see you sweat. Of not airing one’s dirty laundry. This materialized in the form of two parallel lives: a seemingly happy and normal childhood on the outside and a much more dysfunctional childhood behind the closed doors of our home.

While she is now fully recovered, for most of my childhood, my mother struggled with drug addiction. I typically don’t write about this extensively or in great detail because it is a delicate, interconnected story of many people’s lives, and I don’t believe it is singularly my story to tell. The part of it, however, that is mine to tell, revolves around the messages I received about how to perform one’s life in such a way that there aren’t ever any questions about what is going on behind the scenes. As a child, that meant good grades and near perfect attendance. As a young adult, that meant a “good” job and my own apartment. As a more fully fledged adult, that meant promotions and upward trajectory. In each of these life stages, I never valued my private life as highly as the public one. Whatever was happening in private—my mom’s addiction as a child, my crippling credit card debt as an adult—didn’t matter so long as I looked like I had it together on the outside. So long as I performed according to the script I’d inherited.

We inherit scripts long before we understand the implications of them, before we have read through the entire thing and actually agreed to the part. Good student. Ambitious professional. Strong woman. Cool girl. These narratives become our measure for what a good life ought to look like. They give our lives direction and scaffolding so that we have what it takes to be a person in the world. But, like any script, the scripts we inherit in life are meant to be performed, and thus they are chiefly concerned with having an audience. They are concerned with what others think of us, how they perceive us. They leave very little room for what we think of ourselves or how we feel inside.

It’s ironic that throughout my twenties, I authored a blog called Twenties Unscripted because—while a catchy name—my life was anything but unscripted back then. I spent my days performing, both literally and figuratively. I frequented Busboys and Poets where I performed spoken word poetry. I curated an annual artist showcase. Beyond my creative pursuits, I knew how to perform at work. By my second job out of college, I had gone from merely cutting my teeth to actually reading the room, and I picked up on the corporate scripts enough to understand that a certain combination of hard work, eloquence and agreeableness would help get me ahead in most places (if that sounds gross, that’s because it is). I also knew how to perform in my personal life, how to seem cool and interesting enough to be dateable but aloof enough not to seem clingy.

All of this, in retrospect, was exhausting. But, more damagingly, these ways of being didn’t allow me to truly explore the importance of my interior world, to cultivate a life that felt good behind closed doors. A life that meant something to me when no one else was watching. Naturally, social media only exacerbated the problem, providing a 24/7 stage upon which each of us could perform a version of our most interesting and compelling selves.

It is only now as a mother that I am actively working to unlearn these scripts and live a more unperformed life. Because suddenly, the way my life unfolds behind closed doors feels a lot more important and impactful than what it looks like from the outside. And I owe it to my children to grow up knowing something that I didn’t: life is less about appearances and more about the substance underneath. If I’m being honest, I owe also it to my husband. Because these scripted, looks-good-on-the-outside-but-rings-hollow-on-the-inside ways of being have sometimes even haunted our marriage and my lack of contribution in it. Most importantly, I owe it to myself as a woman whose ambition has shifted but not surrendered, a woman with a voice that has grown hoarse from narrating a life that looks impressive instead of inhabiting a life that feels true.

So, I am summoning the courage these days to live an unscripted life, a life that is more concerned with the hidden roots that are planted rather than the visible blooms that sprout. This means holding steady to what is real over what is impressive, what is personally meaningful over what is publicly praised. This means saying no when I’ve been taught to say yes and yes when I’ve been taught to say no. This means caring about the family inside my home more than the audience beyond it. This means nurturing the parts of my life that are the most unseen and unnoticed, but also the most rich and important. This means more time with my children and husband, more presence and devotion, more attunement to their needs and my own, and more savoring of the gifts that family life provides. A kiss on the forehead. A warm hug. A smile from across the room. A loud belly laugh first thing in the morning.

As the expression goes, what got you here won’t get you there. And I feel that acutely now in this stage of life as someone whose existence is so uniquely and inextricably tied to two precious little beings, as someone whose actions don’t start and end with me. Motherhood has a way of exposing what is most real and genuine about our lives and what is fabrication. Hot air. Lip service. It is the ultimate black light that shines on the places where we’ve confused performance for identity and applause for meaning.

So, I am doing the quiet work of looking more closely at my life and assessing my choices, the work of asking myself if I’m doing or saying something because it feels good in my gut or simply because it’s the well-rehearsed script I’ve memorized. This kind of work takes bravery, nerve and even a little bit of well-intentioned irreverence. I can’t say I’m all the way there yet. Perhaps none of us are. The scripts we inherit are thick and tattered, passed down from so many women before us. It is, in fact, a privilege to rewrite them, to have a different set of choices available to us about how to inhabit the world that maybe our mothers and their mothers didn’t have.

I don’t blame my mother for the choices she made; I don’t hold them against her. I don’t fault her for the scripts she passed along. Because something else she taught me was compassion and forgiveness, the ability to let even the most painful things go knowing that release paves the path for a deeper sort of love. Years later, I have watched with pride as my mom has emerged as a doting and loving grandmother, the kind who will never, ever let you leave her house empty-handed.

It is a gift to choose a different sort of life. So, with each moment, I’m doing just that. I’m tending toward a life that feels deeper, richer, and more true.

Xoxo,
Tyece

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I am so excited to announce the next MADE WITH CARE workshop: The Eldest Daughter Club. (Eldest Daughters in spirit, if not birth order, are absolutely welcome.)

I will be joined by writer and speaker who is one of my favorite care writers and thinkers of all time, and whose writing about motherhood and caring for her dad is bursting with humanity, tenderness, and heartbreak—all the hope and uncertainty of a bright light traversing the cosmos.

This will be a more emotions-focused experience than my previous workshops and seminars, and will combine a dive into the history and research about eldest daughters, as well as an active wrestling with the blessings and burdens of this role.

There will also be space and time to be our broken, messy eldest daughter selves, and connect with others like us. As I know all too well, eldest daughters rarely allow themselves moments of not-knowing. And not-knowing is essential to discovery, whether personal or otherwise.

In it, we will consider:

• The historical roots of the Eldest Daughter Club (even if nobody called it that).

• What the sociological and psychological research tells us about being an eldest daughter, including the benefits and risks.

• How to simultaneously value care, but also understand when you are doing too much care. Because care is a precious resource, and none of us can go on caring forever.

• Why the gas tank and oxygen mask metaphors are the worst, and how we should think about eldest daughtering instead.

• How to navigate maintaining a sense of self and submitting yourself to the sacred wildness and unpredictability of interdependence.

APRIL 30, 10:30 PST/ 1:30 EST. 90 MINUTES.

REGISTER HERE.

As always, workshops are free for paid subscribers of MADE WITH CARE, whether monthly or annual. All annual paid subscribers will receive a print copy of my critically acclaimed book, “When You Care.”

In honor of this workshop, I am offering a 15% off sale. CLICK HERE.

One of the reasons care isn’t valued, supported and treated with the curiosity it deserves is because it’s something women do. Particularly since the Victorian era, our broader culture has perceived care as an altruistic pastime of women, rather than a fundamental aspect of a functioning society.

In recent decades, men have begun doing more and more care for a variety of complicated reasons. This change is taking place in both the informal and family care realm, as well as among professional caregivers. As I argue in chapter 3 of my book, this shift is good for men and everyone else.

I recently spoke with Simeon Lehmann, an early childhood educator and advocate, who is working to get more men in the care field. We talked about his story, what it will take to make caregiving attractive to men, and why it matters. Simeon is based in Washington D.C. where he works as a director of an early childhood education center and fights for fair pay for childcare workers in the area.

ELISSA: How did you end up in this field?

SIMEON: My grandfather was a teacher, a principal, and a superintendent in Trinidad for 50-plus years. When I was a kid, I spent about three months a year there — I’d leave in June, come back before Labor Day — and one of my biggest memories is holding his hand while walking down dirt roads. Everybody would say “good morning, teach,” “good morning, principal.” People would hand him the newspaper, a loaf of bread. It felt like everybody knew him. I didn’t understand until I was about 10 or 11 that it came from the fact that he’d been everybody’s teacher at some point, then their principal, then their superintendent. In a small town in a developing country, this was everything. I thought, how cool to effect so many lives in such an endearing and kind way. I want to do that.

I didn’t even realize it was uncommon for men to be in elementary education. I lucked out. I had male teachers in 5th and 6th grade, and in high school too. I just thought they were cool teachers. It wasn’t until I got to college and found out my best friend and I were the only two males in the entire education program that year that I started to understand how unusual our path was.

ELISSA: Why aren’t more men going into this field?

SIMEON: There are a few things happening. One is financial. The adage that we don’t get into this for money hasn’t changed since the ‘60s and ‘70s, and we’re still fighting that battle while the economy is in turmoil. It’s hard to convince a man who’s interested in finance, business, or tech to walk away from those salaries and follow a passion for teaching kids.

The other piece is cultural. I grew up in a Jewish household and there was no realm in which a male was going to be a teacher outside of the rabbi in Hebrew school. Even in Trinidad on my mom’s side, teaching was seen as a woman’s job. My grandfather was an anomaly. That attitude shows up across a lot of communities.

And then there are the stigmas specific to men working with young children. Parents will come for a tour and pull the director aside to ask: Does that male teacher change diapers? Is he allowed to do that? Our response is always: Would you not want your partner to do that? We also can’t ignore the systemic abuse from the Larry Nassars of the world. It’s made men in the field defensive, and it’s scared others away from entering it at all.

ELISSA: Big picture, why does it matter if men are in this field?

SIMEON: We strive to have our teachers reflect our students [who are male], so they feel seen and see all pathways as achievable.

ELISSA: Can we talk a little about the perceived gap between intimate caregiving and masculinity? What do you see as the roots of that gap?

SIMEON: I believe cross-culturally we often think of healthcare, social work, and childcare as a “female” role. The reality is that this is far outdated with the growth of women in the workforce, the evolution of the job market, and population growth, just to name a few broad instances. Part of this antiquatedness deals with men in the perception of “blue-collar” and “white-collar” jobs.

But now the concept of a male role model is beginning to change.

ELISSA: So you are seeing any movement in the right direction?

SIMEON: The African American community is probably leading the most significant change right now. Black male educators are entering the field and framing it explicitly around role modeling, asking, how do I help keep kids out of incarceration? How do I increase graduation rates? What did I need to see when I was little that I didn’t see? Groups in Colorado, DC, and Philadelphia are growing fast, and they’re connecting with each other so no one feels isolated. About 3% of elementary and early childhood workers are male right now, and less than 1% are men of color. But that’s starting to shift.

The other factor is wages. DC has a Pay Equity Fund that I’ve been part of for nearly three years. We pay early childhood educators the highest in the nation based on credentials, over $40,000 with a Child Development Associate credential, and up to $71,000 with a bachelor’s degree. That’s life-changing, and it’s the kind of infrastructure that makes the field sustainable for men who might otherwise do something else. Vermont, New Mexico, California, and Minnesota are all developing similar models. We know it can work. The problem is it’s constantly under threat. I was testifying before DC’s city council just this morning about proposed cuts to the very program.

By comparison, over the past 10 years, the number of male nurses has risen by nearly 60%. This growth is fueled by a desire for career stability, the profession’s versatility, and increasing diversity in critical care and advanced practice roles.

ELISSA: What do you think good care actually looks like in the early childhood setting?

SIMEON: It oozes from the people who do it. It shows up in how genuinely they want to get to know a family. I’ll give you an example: we had a new infant come into our center who wouldn’t take a bottle. The lead teacher had been there 20 years and was beside herself. We reached out to the mom, and after some back-and-forth, she realized her daughter only drank bottles at room temperature, and not warmed up. Fifteen minutes after we tried it, the baby was in the teacher’s arms, inhaling the bottle. That small moment of care — the willingness to ask the right question, to treat that child as part of our family — is everything. Without it, you have two frustrated parents who don’t want to come back.

Real care is also reciprocal. It means understanding the emotional and physical well-being of the teachers themselves. People think this job is simple. Can you do focused, sustained work while someone is crying, throwing up on the floor, or needs a diaper change? It’s a learned skill, and it’s constantly taken for granted.

I think the deepest recognition of genuine, good care that I’ve seen is people coming back to visit 20 or 30 years later, and the teacher calling those who they long ago cared for as small children by name.

ELISSA: What would you say to a young man thinking about entering this field?

SIMEON: You’re important. You’re valid. You’re seen. And we want you to have the best existence possible in this work. What we try to do through our DC men’s programs is mentorship, which involves connecting people to someone who specifically understands their life and their path. Overall we want them to know that it is going to be okay. They just have to stay the course.

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I grew up in Calabasas, California. It’s a suburb in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley and if you have heard of it there is a high chance it is because of my hometown’s most famous residents: the Kardashians. I often think of Calabasas as a suburban equivalent of Us Weekly’s “Just Like Us” section. It has all the trappings of normal life, but everything is shinier, bigger, richer.

One thing Calabasas isn’t known for being is—and I can confirm this based on my time there—a bastion of good values. While there are of course exceptions, the dominant culture is one of unchecked materialism and all the attendant insecurities and pettiness. While growing up, I witnessed very little concern about righting injustices, helping the poor, protecting the environment and so on.

Now, I was one of those kids, equal parts irritating and inspiring I imagine, who always had a desire to do good. When adulthood arrived I left Calabasas forever (as did my family) and began actively trying to make the world better. Among the many roles I found myself in my 20s was working for a large labor union, on the communications team for a campaign to improve wages and conditions for security guards.

At last, I thought, I had made it to the realm of the good. Of people who noticed economic disparities and took the time to think if they were fair and just. Of people who treated everyone with the dignity and respect they deserved. People who cared.

You probably see where this is heading. I was wrong.

I met many people who spent their days fighting for economic justice for the working class and were also routinely rude to working class people. A taxi driver. A Starbucks barista. Once at a social justice journalism awards ceremony I witnessed a well-known progressive, labor-friendly writer be incredibly rude to the security guard because he couldn’t find his name on the list.

I don’t regret my naiveté. What is one’s 20s without some? And anyway, this gap between caring for people in general terms, and caring for a single person right in front of you, has become a satisfying lifelong fixation that I am still working through—including right here in this newsletter.

Ours is a culture that lauds people who dedicate their lives to caring for people, and offers little visibility, respect, curiosity or support for those who care for a person or two. (Yes, parents and caregivers.) This imbalance makes it so individuals can view their commitment to the greater good as a substitute for small acts of kindness and care. The logic: Who cares if you are rude to a few security guards if you are fighting for a massive wage increase for tens of thousands of them?

This brings us to Cesar Chavez and the recent revelations in the New York Times about his sexual abuse of girls and women throughout his career. Now I am not so foolish as to think that any set of politics prevents one from becoming this kind of predator (especially because patriarchy knows no political affiliation), nor do I fail to acknowledge that people are complicated and sometimes complications have very ugly, contradictory dimensions.

Still, I am interested in the moral and relational gaps that make such contradictory behavior possible. I’m not saying that the union advocate who was rude to a security guard is on the same ethical plane as Chavez, but I do think there is a connection there that is worth exploring.

“The fight is never about grapes or lettuce. It is always about people,” Cesar Chavez famously said.

About people.

One of the reasons I am so drawn to care ethics—subject of my favorite chapter of my last book “When You Care” and the book proposal I am currently working on—is because it is a theory of morality that takes caring for that one and only person as seriously as caring for people in general. Care ethics focuses on things like trying to really see the other in front of you and responding to their ever-changing needs. This is the big idea, the big ideal, the thing to aspire to. Just trying to truly be in relationship with another. It’s hard!

Of course care ethicists also believe we need to fight for big systems of justice too. It isn’t that big picture visions of justice are a problem, it’s that we’ve long focused on them at the expense of person-to-person relationships. As I write this, I am thinking of Mahatma Gandhi, who “in his 70s and close to leading India to independence…encouraged his 17-year-old great-niece, Manu, to be naked during her ‘nightly cuddles’ with him.”

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There are so many more Gandhis and Chavezes, folks who fought for the greater good but didn’t really see the humanity of the people, and so often the women, right in front of them.

One of the big debates in care ethics is if the sense of care we feel for our loved ones scales up to a sense of care for the greater good. Does the love I feel for my children increase my empathy for children in Iran? Does my care for this one person transmute into care for people in general? My answer for myself is yes, I believe it does, but we will leave that very big and complicated question for another day.

Today I want to point out that while parents and caregivers are often seen as caring too much for what’s right in front of them at the expense of the greater good, those big, charismatic leaders are rarely pressed to talk about how their love of the greater good translates into small intimate moments.

I often witness a knee-jerk assumption to perceive, for example, mothers and mothering as selfish; I hear from moms all the time that they feel they are not doing enough for others because they are too focused on trying to be good to their kids. And yet we so easily give a pass to someone who is doing big picture good, but rude to everyone in their lives.

For so long our moral imagination has been bound up in big structural changes, and ignored the power of intimate, seemingly small, person-to-person encounters. And I get it. An ethic of care is not a flashy, change the world at once idea. It is a slow, quiet, person-by-person-by-person way of making change.

But as the Chavez revelations make abundantly clear, the relational is just as important as the structural. A moral imagination that doesn’t acknowledge these small, relational moments is bankrupt. Because all that person-by-person-by-person care adds up to a people, a community, a nation, a world in which dignity and respect are granted to all.

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While scrolling around the internet recently, I came across these lovely and inspiring care-themed conversations, and I thought you would all appreciate them.

But before we jump in, I wanted to share this conversation I had with CNN’s Sanjay Gupta. I went on his podcast to talk about, you guessed it, parenting and caregiving and he was a total mensch and apparently he loved my book and I helped him raise his kids which was just like WOW to hear. Overall, it was a great conversation and lovely time.

Now, onto The Round-Up.

ONE: Kate Hudson on Fresh Air

HUDSON: You know, I think Hugh, it wasn’t about my voice as much as it is about what I was talking about. And what I was saying was talking about why I had to make an album. And Hugh - to speak for Hugh, you know, he would reiterate, when he saw it, I was talking about my kids. I was talking about COVID and what happened when I was sort of reflecting on if I was going to die, am I happy with my creative output? I’m very happy with myself as a mother. Like, I feel like I’ve hit - I’ve made all the right mistakes and all the wrong mistakes. I feel like I’ve been really great when it comes to parenting.

MOSLEY: I’ma tell you, Kate.

HUDSON: But...

MOSLEY: It’s so refreshing to meet a woman who says that because don’t we so often - like, we’re always stopping for a moment to say, I’m not sure if I was a great mom.

HUDSON: Yeah.

MOSLEY: Yeah.

HUDSON: But I like who my kids are. And so as I get to know them, I got one, an adult, I get to know him as his own man and as an adult. I’m really proud of myself for the work I put in for him. And I am in it with my teenager right now in the best possible way. And my young girl, 7. Like, momming is everything to me, and I’m proud of that output. Like, I put a lot into that. And so I could say, you know, during COVID, if this was it, I felt confident in what I’ve given my kids so far. But I couldn’t say that about my art. And that would be my own personal sadness and regret, is that I didn’t share my writings as a musician. I - whether people like them or not, I just really was not happy with the fact that I wasn’t brave enough to put it out there.

My two cents: I just love how she assesses her fitness as a mom based on the pleasure she gets from knowing her kids and liking who they are. This isn’t about her kids’ achievements, but her connection with them. I also love how she can be honest about creative disappointments, but she doesn’t pit motherhood and creativity against one another.

Lastly, I often hear people saying: “Liberals never have anything nice to say about motherhood.” Folks, we are here! Just pay attention. It’s totally possible to appreciate feminism and motherhood.

TWO: Alysa Liu talking to a reporter at a news conference

I think the most important part of my story is human connection. Really that’s all I want in my life is human connection.

My two cents: What I love about this quote is that it doesn’t just represent her ideals—the direction her moral compass is pointing in. This is also an aesthetic orientation for Liu, and the reason we all fell in love with her on the ice.

The openness and looseness of her skating style made space for us, her viewers, her fans, to feel as though we were part of the experience. She was skating alone out there, but the vibe was relational, and her vulnerability didn’t feel like a weakness. One had a sense that she knew that when she prioritized joy, we would feel joy too. And if she felt stressed out in pursuit of perfection, we would feel that, too.

To an aesthetic fueled by care! To an aesthetic in pursuit of connection! (And to me worrying less about typos and more about connecting with you, dear readers.)

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THREE: Rebecca Solnit in the New York Times

One of the great weaknesses of our era is that we get lone superhero movies that suggest that our big problems are solved by muscly guys in spandex, when actually the world mostly gets changed through collective effort. Thich Nhat Hanh said before he died a few years ago that the next Buddha will be the Sangha. The Sangha, in Buddhist terminology, is the community of practitioners. It’s this idea that we don’t have to look for an individual, for a savior, for an Übermensch. I think the counter to Trump always has been and always will be civil society. A lot of the left wants social change to look like the French Revolution or Che Guevara. Maybe changing the world is more like caregiving than it is like war. Too many people still expect it to look like war. I denigrate politicians I don’t respect as windsocks. I just want us to understand that most of the important change is collective.

My two cents: Now, I am partial to anyone who positions hopefulness as an act of defiance. She is preaching to the choir with that one, and this member of the choir appreciates being preached to!

Though there is more to this interview than calling on our better natures and reminding us of the power of the collective.

By describing change as an act of caregiving, she takes us out of the fairy tale, overly sentimental vision of care that I don’t like, and into the pull-up-your-sleeves-this-is-some-hard-and-yet-important-stuff vision of care that I want to see more of in the world.

When people ask what I write about, I tell them care “but not the kumbaya kind.” The closing-circle-at-camp type of care is lovely, but it is not going to change the world. The real, day-to-day work of attempting to see others and respond accordingly, person by person, heavy brick by heavy brick, is where the magic happens.

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I just loooove today’s RESTACK essay for a few reasons.

To begin, I read Deborah Copaken’s book, Shutterbabe: Adventures in Love and War, right when it came out in 2001. It was a book that opened up the world for me at age 21 and convinced me that women’s stories rock.

This is all to say, I have been reading Deborah’s work for over two decades, and just love that she brings the same feisty, whip-smart, feminist, free-thinking energy to Alzheimer’s care (the subject of the essay below) that she has long brought to writing about work, aging, and living in a female body.

On top of all this, I had just finished Ian McEwan’s new novel What We Can Know when I came across this essay. The novel, which is really lovely and smart in many ways, completely lacks imagination when it comes to Alzheimer’s care. I’m talking big time WTF territory. (DM me if you want a spoiler.) I wish McEwan had read Deborah’s essay before finalizing his manuscript.

Okay, enough from me! Read the essay and share it widely. (I just read it again and oh the feelings, oh the lightbulbs.) And subscribe to her Substack here.

A love letter to Bridget, my partner’s wife

Every day after lunch, we dance. Sometimes she tries to eat my fingers. Other times she walks away, shouting word salad and ignoring me. My favorite thing is to make her laugh.

by

NOTE: I’m writing this hours after having undergone surgery to remove my back mice, meaning I’m too high on Percocet right now to be composing this. But I wanted to publish it on Valentine’s Day, which also happens to be my partner’s wife Bridget Elias’s birthday, so I’m giving it a go. Love is like that: when you feel it and want to express it, you try to push through almost anything to express it. Whether or not this letter will make any sense is another story. I’m rooting for me to find the words.

02/13/2026

Dear Bridget,

You have been living with early-onset Alzheimer’s for more than a decade now. I know you can’t read this or even understand what I’m about to write, but I wanted to express to you what you mean to me and have meant to me over our past year of cohabitation. Part of me hopes that, by writing this, these sentences will somehow osmose into your brain. That you will feel my love on a cognitive level. The rest of me knows that’s ridiculous.

Whelp! Opium brain + letter writing did not pan out as I’d hoped. I fell asleep right after the word ridiculous, which seemed apt, and then the post-surgical pain really set in, and then the next two weeks passed by in a semi-agonizing blur. I apologize for my absence from this publication. I’m still not out of the woods, but I’m doing better, so let’s try this again.

02/25/2026

Dear Bridget,

On Valentine’s Day, your birthday, one of your caregivers had dressed you in the red sweater your mom got you for Hanukkah. Your hair was in a high ponytail. You were clutching, as usual, the life-sized stuffed dog your husband and I bought for you at Ikea, the one you hug daily and continually as you pace the floor, back and forth, back and forth, all day long. You must walk at least 20,000 steps every day, and that’s not counting the daily walks you go on with your caregivers. Your stamina amazes me. Amazes all of us. Your caregivers tell me their former patients were not like this. Most of them with end stage dementia eventually sat, immobile, staring out into space or toward a TV. But you? You used to be the CFO of the Whitney Museum. Before that, MoMA. And now, after over a decade into living with Alzheimer’s, that strong life force and will to succeed remains. I see it, Bridget, every day: your will to keep going, walking, singing, shouting, and even running when the spirit moves you.

At barely five feet tall, you could easily pass for a child from the back, as you walk toward your kitchen, the one we renovated for you, along with making your bathroom accessible, when we decided all seven of us would be best served by living under one roof: you, your caregiver, your two sons, my youngest child, your husband, and me.

But then, when you turn toward me—your eyes downturned, either shouting word salad or silent—you are unmistakably not a child but also not an adult either, except in the accumulation of years. I think of you as being on your own special planet, Planet Bridget, and it’s up to us to push our way through your atmosphere to land on the un-solid ground on which you exist, shrouded by fog, plaques, and tangles. In fact, I now view it as my personal mission to break through that fog as often as possible, so nearly every day, after lunch, I open the door in our kitchen, head downstairs to you and your caregiver, and shout your name on my way down: “Bridget! Bridgey-Bridge? Where are you?”

Sometimes you recognize, well, not me, exactly, but a familiar benign presence, and you react accordingly. “Oh, I love you, honey,” you’ll say, or “Yes!” or, or “Let’s go!” or just, “My friend!” as you continue to pace the length of the hallway, ignoring me. If your caregiver has closed the pocket door in the living room, to keep your meanderings more contained, you become a human Roomba, pivoting here and there whenever you reach a wall, the couch, a table. A few times you’ve called me Debbie, a nickname by which I have not been known since my childhood, but it amazes me that you actually learned it, a decade into your diagnosis, and use it from time to time when I appear for my post-lunch visit. I’m pretty sure you think I’m your best friend from childhood, Debby Waldman, which is fine with me, as Debby herself told me how much you two loved one another. Other times you’ve called me Teddy, your younger son’s name, which is close enough to Debbie that this makes sense. I’m happy to represent whichever Debbie, Debby, or Teddy you want me to be.

If I can break through to your conscious brain via eye contact between us—a feat that has become more difficult these days—you will approach me for a hug or a dance. You are two years older than me, so albums like Free To Be You and Me, Carole King’s Tapestry, Billy Joel’s The Stranger, and anything by ABBA all hit the same liminal space in your brain as they do mine, because while Alzheimer’s has destroyed your memory, your functioning, and your ability to communicate, it has not touched the part of your brain that loves music and can recite lyrics from decades ago verbatim. One time, just after Taylor Swift’s “Life of a Showgirl” came out, I ran downstairs to play it for you, thinking you might enjoy some of its more upbeat songs, but you did not react to them at all. You just kept pacing, ignoring the music. You will only respond and stop your pacing, I realized, for songs that were released in that sweet spot between 1965 and 1980: the years of our early childhood and adolescence. So I made a Spotify playlist for you, which allows us both to travel back in time and dance together.

Sometimes when we dance, you will grab my hand, tenderly, and bring it to your mouth as if you are a prince in a fairy tale, and I am your princess. Instead of kissing my knuckles, however, you often gnaw on them, and who am I to say no to this? “Sure, go ahead, eat my hand,” I’ll say laughing, and sometimes this will make you laugh, too. One time you tried to stick your hand down the back of my pants, and I said, “Well, nice to meet you, too!” and this made you laugh uproariously. Other times, you might shout, “You’re stupid!” and I’ll dig deep into my two years of post-divorce improv training to keep the bit going. “Yes, I am stupid! And so is our president! Let’s go talk to the air conditioner!” These are the moments I cherish: the “yes, and”ing, the shared laughter, the Ionesco-esque dialogue.

Our moments of connection, however, are rare and getting rarer, never lasting for more than a few seconds before you’re back to your pacing the hallway, eyes downturned, but I know we both felt the joy of them. I head back upstairs to finish my work day feeling enlivened by that connection and hoping I’ve contributed, in some small way, to your feelings of wellbeing as well. It’s harder for those who loved the pre-Alzheimer’s Bridget to witness this Bridget. But you’re the only Bridget I’ve ever known.

I will admit I was wary of moving into the home you’d shared with your husband and children, for all the obvious symbolic reasons. I mean, who wouldn’t be? It’s not like it’s a normal or even socially acceptable thing to do. I was even wary of meeting your husband at all when Christina Baker Kline, our mutual friend, set us up on a surf date years ago. I think I said something like, “His wife has Alzheimer’s? No. No way. Sorry. Way too complicated. I don’t think that will work for me.” But Christina understood something about triangles and their potential for healing that we didn’t or couldn’t. Not yet.

She knew each of us had something to give to the others by joining forces. He and I were both lonely and aching for love. You needed 24/7 care. I was about to send my last child off to college and therefore would soon have extra reserves for caregiving. He longed for the normalcy of family life, of “How was your day, honey?”, of shared meals and shared lives. Christina believed, correctly, that taking care of someone with Alzheimer’s by oneself was extremely taxing and isolating on your husband. She also believed he and I both had the capacity to love you unconditionally while simultaneously loving each other, and that this would only improve his role as caregiver, not worsen it.

In other words, what I thought would be the two most difficult parts of combining our families—living with you and being the romantic partner of someone who was already married—have turned out to be two of the more meaningful, delightful, and moving aspects of our blended family, ones that I wish more families dealing with an Alzheimer’s diagnosis might consider if only society would stop constantly judging us¹.

Recently, Eleanora Tornatore-Mikesh, CEO of CaringKind—an Alzheimer’s caregiving non-profit organization that has been a critical partner in your care—told me about the many desperate calls she fields on Sunday nights from the partners and spouses of those living with Alzheimer’s. They are exhausted from a weekend of caregiving and wondering how they will continue to survive this way. They want to know if it’s okay to meet someone else, to love someone else, to create a new life with someone else, now that their spouses no longer know who they are. She said she’s grateful that she can now point to us as an example of what is possible when people let go of society’s rules and preconceived notions about what makes a family, a marriage, love, a life.

Last Thanksgiving, your mother Marcia came for dinner. She pulled me aside and said, “I tell all my friends you’re like Mary Poppins, swooping down to help this family move forward.” It was such a touching, generous, unexpected thing for your mom to say. To me, of all people. But Marcia clearly doesn’t see me as having usurped your spot in the family: she sees me as an expansion of your care and love rather than a contraction of it, and that grace, from her, has given me permission to see myself that way, too. Because together—as cliché as it might sound to say this—the whole of our family is greater than the sum of our parts. And if that’s not love, I don’t know what love is.

So thank you, Bridget, for eating my knuckles and calling me Debbie and laughing when I laugh and dancing with me on occasion. I love you. I love your whole family. I love the atypical family we’ve created together, and I’m just sorry that it was a neurodegenerative disease—your neurodegenerative disease—that led us all to this love. It’s not fair. It’s not just. And I will never take for granted how horrific it is not only for you but for those who knew you before this disease invaded your brain. The last time you knew your sons they were still children. With high-pitched voices. They’re both men now, making their marks on the world, so I try to tell you, every day, how well they’re doing—your eldest just graduated college! the younger one is making films and friends galore!—hoping that some of it might sink in.

Meanwhile, your husband’s many years of caregiving were on full display on your birthday, Valentine’s Day, and during the two days prior, when he came with me to the hospital, stayed with me through my back surgery, helped me home, and brought me all of my meds and meals and coffee in bed over the next several days while also running downstairs to celebrate your special day, too. I’ve never had that kind of love in my life. Now we all do.

I’ve promised him that, should he go before you, I will continue to make sure you are safe, fed, and cared for. He says I don’t have to do that. That he would not expect this of me. But I know, from everything everyone who also loves you has told me, that if it were me in your position, and you in mine, you would do the same.

Love,

Deb (aka Debbie, aka Teddy, aka Friend, aka Stupid)

I first heard about Mitul Desai and his work helping mental health caregivers in this excellent article written by my friend and journalist Kat McGowan.

I’ve been on the care beat for a while now, and have long noticed that there was so little said about mental health caregiving, and so little support available for the people who give it. I’ve also experienced this firsthand as a mental health caregiver.

I truly believe mental health caregivers are the most invisible caregivers—and caregiving is already invisible enough as it is! As such, mental health caregivers experience even more burnout than other types.

Mitul is trying to change this. He is a startup founder and former patent attorney, Wall Street analyst, diplomat, and product manager who, because of a personal experience he vulnerably explains below, has recently moved into the care space.

His newest venture, The Care Hack, supports family caregivers with scalable, evidence-based tools and coaching. In our conversation, Mitul and I dive into his story, what makes mental health caregiving particularly hard, and how as a society we can better support all caregivers.

Elissa: Can we start with you sharing your story as a mental health caregiver?

Mitul: The story starts a couple of decades ago when my brother came home from college almost unrecognizable. He was a very sweet, highly intelligent, well-liked, and creative kid. Unfortunately—and this is not uncommon for people who develop schizophrenia—he came back from his first year in college angry and withdrawn.

In retrospect, he was also self-medicating. He’d started drinking too much and smoking cigarettes. We didn’t realize it was self-medicating at the time. After that first semester, we thought, “Okay, maybe he’s just partying too much in his freshman year, he’ll get his act together.” But when he came back in the summer, it was clear something more fundamental was happening.

Looking back, despite my family trying our hardest—and we are educated, middle-class people with resources—we made every mistake in the book. It wasn’t for lack of trying. We were just flying blind. I’m finally at a point where I can give myself and my parents grace, but for a long time, it was a heavy burden to realize that because we weren’t given proper guidance as caregivers, our mistakes had real consequences for my brother and for us.

Elissa: I think the mistake framing is a tough one for mental health caregivers. We are all doing the best we can blindfolded dealing with medical conditions that don’t have linear treatment options.

Mitul: You’re right. Perhaps it’s more precise to say the system failed us. Right from the beginning. It started with not getting the right diagnosis. We probably should have taken him to a psychiatrist sooner—we waited until the second semester of his sophomore year when we should have gone the summer after his freshman year.

But once he was in the system, we didn’t feel confident or informed enough to advocate for him. We didn’t know we could proactively give information to his doctors. Families don’t realize that HIPAA doesn’t stop them from sharing observations. We weren’t tracking his symptoms in an organized way; we didn’t realize we had been “given a job.” That’s the core of it: no one tells you that you’ve been hired as a full-time caregiver, yet you’re given no training manual.

It took us four years to get the right diagnosis. We got every diagnosis in the book except schizophrenia. Those four years were devastating. His symptoms were aggressive—paranoia and auditory and visual hallucinations. He still has them; the medications haven’t completely cleared them. He has this incredible but sad “meta-awareness” now where he’ll say, “My voices are telling me to jump out of the car, so maybe I won’t come to brunch with you guys.”

Elissa: It’s been over 25 years now. What did it take for you to be able to speak freely about it?

Mitul: It was a very long journey. There are multiple layers of stigma. There’s the societal stigma—serious mental illness is still one of the last “acceptable” forms of discrimination. You see it in the media and Hollywood, where the “bad guy” has schizophrenia.

Then there was my own self-stigma. I was in denial for years. My parents and I didn’t even talk about it among ourselves, except for the logistics. We never talked about our emotions. If you are an immediate family member of someone with a serious illness, you basically develop PTSD-like symptoms. I just compartmentalized and pushed it down as far as it could go.

Elissa: How did you compartmentalize?

Mitul: I became a workaholic. I had demanding jobs, and while I did have to work a lot, it was also a convenient escape. But what I realize now is that I denied myself genuine joy for a long time. There was constant survivor’s guilt.

My brother is very low-functioning. He’s never had a girlfriend, a job, or gone back to school. His world is just me and my parents. When you see that, you think, “How could I possibly go take a vacation?” You forget the oxygen mask analogy—that you need to take care of yourself to take care of him.

Elissa: How did you break through that?

Mitul: Therapy, for sure. Also, six years ago, I quit my corporate job to work in this space. It was extremely risky, but I knew if I didn’t make that leap, I was going to go to my grave with regret and shame. Pushing myself to start my company, The Care Hack, accelerated the process because I had to talk about it.

I started small. I told a few people at my firm—a very “hard-edged” financial services company—and five or six people came up to me privately to share their own struggles with anxiety, or their child’s ADD, or a loved one’s suicide attempt. It was a revelation. When you tell your story, you give other people permission to tell theirs.

Elissa: Tell me more about The Care Hack.

Mitul: I’m essentially creating the solution I wish my family had. We have three main pillars:

Breaking Isolation: Providing peer support within the app so people don’t feel so alone. Objective Support: Access to coaches who are licensed clinical social workers—third parties who know the system but are only incentivized to help the caregiver. Education: An evidence-based library of over 90 videos that explain things in plain English.

Our goal is to serve families and to help the healthcare system see families as an asset. We are creating a virtuous loop, where we upskill and support caregivers so they in turn can be effective allies to the care team.

Elissa: One of the hardest parts of mental health caregiving is that the recipient often doesn’t want the care. I have two personal experiences with this and it is touuuugh.

Mitul: That is a specific feature that makes this so much harder. Studies show that the burden on mental health caregivers is higher than almost any other type of caregiving because of the unpredictability, the lack of clear solutions, and the fact that the symptoms themselves get in the way of the support.

It’s why one of the things we talk about at The Care Hack is the “caregiver mindset.” It’s about viewing it as a job where you need skills, but also the right headspace. It’s about believing in a better future, adjusting how you communicate, and remembering your loved one has dignity and agency, even when their choices seem illogical.

I was reminded of the importance of the caregiver mindset recently. We were trying to move my brother to supportive housing closer to my parents. It’s a nightmare to find a spot. After a few years, we finally found one, and at the last minute, he said no. He didn’t want to move. I was on vacation in Europe, and I had to sit in my room and cycle through the emotions. Then it hit me: we hadn’t included him in the decision. We just told him, “This is where you’re moving.” I told my dad, “Let’s just ask him to look at it, and then he can decide.” We did that, he liked it, and he moved two weeks later.

Elissa: That “agency dance,” the moving in between acting on our care recipient’s behalf and trying to listen to what they say they want, is the deepest, realest challenge of caregiving and it is so hard. What I like about care ethicists is that many say just dancing that dance is caring well. It isn’t about outcomes. It is about constantly moving between being an advocate and having a vision, and stopping and trying to make sure that vision aligns with what the other person wants and needs.

Mitul: Exactly. You’re constantly checking yourself as a caregiver. We are at an inflection point for mental health and caregiver awareness, but we have to expand the definition of both. If you don’t support the families, there is a massive negative spillover into employers, insurance plans, and the criminal justice system. The family caregiver is the most underutilized asset in healthcare. They are sitting right there, waiting to help.

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I will be joined by legendary activist Vicki Shabo, the magic behind many successful paid leave campaigns, and Jen Bradwell, a brilliant documentary filmmaker who worked with Eve Rodsky and Jennifer Siebel Newsom on the “Fair Play” documentary, and made last year’s nonfiction masterpiece “Make a Circle.”

We will host a 90-minute exploration of how narratives can impact culture and policy in the care space. Register here.

A couple of weeks ago I was on a Zoom and the person I was meeting with kept taking breaks to answer calls.

This was a strictly professional meeting. I had never met her before. After some very basic niceties—Where are you based? How’s the weather?, etc.—we jumped straight to the task at hand. She works for the fiscal sponsor of the arts organization I help run. We were firmly in the terrain of invoice codes, the ideal way to input ACH numbers for bank-to-bank transfers, and so on.

But she kept getting calls. She kept saying sorry. Her facial features kept stiffening. After each call she spoke a little faster.

My care antenna is so tall, so sensitive that I had my suspicions as to what was going on. I held back and said nothing.

Until she said, as quickly as possible, “Sorry, stuff with my mom.”

“I get it. When I am not running this arts fellowship, I spend my days writing about care,” I responded.

An immediate change. Her face softened. Her speaking slowed. Her eye contact steadied. She offered a quick summary of her care situation and I did my best to give her the attention and confirmation she and all harried caregivers deserve. Then we got back to invoicing business.

Like so many of us, she had a caregiving secret.

I have a caregiving secret right now. Back in 2024, when I was out and about heavily promoting my book about care, I also had a caregiving secret, a different one than the one I have now. My caregiving secrets involve caring for loved ones dealing with mental health and dementia. They are secrets because they are ultimately not my story to tell.

Today, on National Caregiver’s Day, I want to honor all the caregivers who are actively caring for another but can’t share that information widely. We do this because those we care for want to keep their diagnoses private, or because they don’t accept their condition. Often, those diagnoses kept hushed by caregivers or denied by the person experiencing symptoms are the ones most taboo in our culture: dementia, depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, etc., almost always matters of the mind. We are all cursed by the stubborn belief that the mind, unlike our bodies, is something we can freely control.

We caregivers guard secrets out of respect, but it comes with a cost.

First off, the conditions we are most likely to conceal are the ones that are the most complicated to navigate within the healthcare and private insurance system. It’s so friggin’ hard to deal with the red tape of it all and continue to pretend you are a normal person without a secret job that is, by design, nearly impossible.

Also, and probably more damaging, when we protect our loved ones we are denying ourselves the ability to wear our vulnerability, exhaustion, grief and confusion on our faces and weave them into our life stories. Of course, there is a time and place for depersonalized, emotion-free, professionalism. I’m not saying a dentist should cry over his daughter’s eating disorder during a dental filling, or a lawyer should sob about his dad with dementia during court proceedings.

But there are so many other categories of interactions, smaller, more casual ones, during which an acknowledgement of our caregiving experiences would create a sense of honesty, ease, and ultimately authentic connection for the caregiver. Some secret caregivers even hold back among close family and friends out of fear of betraying the person they care for.

Researchers have found that one of the most important ways to buffer stress from caregiving is to make meaning from it. Making meaning isn’t the same as wrapping it up in a tidy bow and finding a sweet, easy, Disney-style lesson. Instead, the act of making meaning involves wrestling with the topsy turvy Mt. Everest climb that is care, and finding one’s place in it. We make meaning in the mess by finding our place and role, and how we can grow from it—not from cleaning up the mess on our own.

On National Caregiver’s Day, my wish is for all you secret caregivers out there to find more ways to talk about your caregiving role with others. You may not share the whole story. You may only share it with a few trusted friends or family members. Or maybe someone unexpected who you barely know and therefore won’t spoil your secret. There is no one way to share that applies to all people, or all situations. Like care itself, revealing our care secrets is context-dependent, personal, relational, and therefore as likely to happen spontaneously as it is in a premeditated fashion.

Whenever, however, in whatever dose feels right, tell your secrets. The more we do this, the more we will find clarity and individual support in our caregiving, and push for the meaningful structural and cultural changes we need so that fewer caregivers are expected to go at it alone.

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For this month’s round-up, I am sharing three recent parenting-related studies that I want to put on your radar. I added my two cents underneath each one.

ONE: Denmark’s generous child care and parental leave policies erase 80% of the ‘motherhood penalty’ for working moms

From the Conversation:

In an article to be published in an upcoming issue of European Sociological Review, Christensen and I showed that mothers’ increased income from the state – such as from child benefits and paid parental leave – offset about 80% of Danish moms’ average earnings losses.

Using administrative data from Statistics Denmark, a government agency that collects and compiles national statistics, we studied the long-term effects of motherhood on income for 104,361 Danish women. They were born in the early 1960s and became mothers for the first time when they were 20-35 years old.

…

Because most countries provide less generous parental benefits, Denmark is not a representative case. It is instead a test case that shows what’s possible when governments make financially supporting parents a high priority.

That is, strong financial support for mothers from the government can make motherhood more affordable and promote gender equality in economic resources.

My two cents: I think conversations about moms and income are often framed as a feminist issue and yes, absolutely, that matters. Men still have outsize political power and wealth and we should talk about that and fix it (but without denying the importance of parenting and caregiving and other forms of ambition and mattering…life is complicated).

But first and foremost the topic of moms and income is about economic stability, and not girlbossery. Both my grandmas were put into a position of deep economic precarity because they devoted their lives to caregiving. I will be writing about this soon.

On a separate note, I think it is important to pay attention to how these researchers saw mothers’ careers as a long game. Personally, remembering that helped me feel more comfortable leaning out during moments that required it.

TWO: Are Parents Happier, Healthier, and More Engaged With Society than Non-parents?

From the study summary:

We analyzed data from over 26,000 parents and non-parents from 24 European countries. We tested for differences between parents and non-parents on several indicators of happiness, health, and civic and community engagement. Results showed that there were no differences in global evaluations of happiness, life satisfaction, or subjective health. Non-parents reported being more depressed. Parents were more likely than non-parents to engage in social activities. Parents reported more health problems than non-parents; fathers had the largest BMI and were most likely to engage in risky health behaviors. Fathers and men without children reported the most political interest and were most likely to have voted. Fathers also reported being the least involved in religion and mothers the most involved. In sum, parents and non-parents did not differ greatly on happiness outcomes, but parents were worse off on health outcomes, and fathers in particular were more involved in civic engagement than non-parents.

My two cents: I am on team “meaning” and not happiness when it comes to thinking about parenting’s broader effects on our sense of well-being, purpose and mattering.

Also, I dug through so many studies on this subject for my book and discovered that the results are mixed; and that the largest factors contributing to parenting well-being are economic stability and social and governmental support. I think that explains some of why parents’ physical health takes more of a hit than their psychological health according to this research.

THREE: America’s child-care gender gap is narrowing rapidly

From the Economist:

Since the pandemic the amount of time fathers spend with children has risen further. According to newer time-use data, men who lived with their partners spent 11% more time caring for children in 2024 than in 2019, and 30% more time doing household chores. For mothers, who typically shoulder the bulk of domestic tasks, changes were more modest. Time-use surveys are imperfect measures of parental effort—they rely on self-reporting and record the quantity of time spent rather than its quality—but the trend towards more fatherly facetime is clear.

Thanks to increasingly involved dads, America’s gender gaps in child care and housework are narrowing fast. Before the pandemic, mothers spent nearly twice as much time on domestic chores as fathers did. In 2024 they spent 65% more time than dads on child care and 60% more on housework. The gap is smaller for parents with degrees and those with jobs: in both cases mothers spend “only” around 40% more time on housework than fathers do. American women still take on far more domestic duties, but if the trend of the past few years continues, parity between the sexes could be just a decade away.

(This one is paywalled, but you can sign-up for a free trial if you want to read the whole thing.)

My two cents: I do really believe the arc of history is bending towards dads being more involved parents—and not just to help moms, but because dads have an increasing sense of obligation to be active members of their family and are discovering that there is a lot of value in caring for others.

That said, history can take a long time and some moms are feeling the gender gap in domestic work and care right now and need some relief. So this is one of those times we have to hold two things in our hands at once: dads are doing more and more and things are moving in the right direction and many moms are still experiencing too many of the burdens of care, which clouds their ability to experience the pleasures and expansive possibilities in care.

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This month’s Restack comes from the brilliant Anya Kamenetz who writes The Golden Hour, a newsletter about thriving and caring for others on a rapidly changing planet. She comes to the subject with decades of reporting experience which she combines with vulnerability and soulful contemplation.

The reason I am sharing this post this week should be obvious. A country that rounds up children and/or separates them from their parents is a morally and spiritually impoverished one. (Of course there are many other examples on our ever-growing moral impoverishment list, but we will stick with this for today.)

Anya’s post is a reminder that we all live in a big web of connectivity and interdependency. As such, what’s happening to our immigrant neighbors will impact nearly everyone in the long run. There is so much research showing how trauma in childhood can have long-term effects, shaping the way that person engages with the world as an adult. A stable and secure childhood makes it far more likely that children will grow up to be law-abiding adults who positively contribute to their family and community, and have the necessary practical and emotional skills to work in the labor force.

This is all to say, even if you could care less about human rights, dignity, and an ethically and legally sound immigration policy…but you do care about crime and the GDP…this will hurt you, too.

A big thanks to Anya for letting me share this with you.

by

When I think about the victims of our current reign of terror I think about children.

Six children teargassed inside a van in Minneapolis after the family was caught between federal agents and protesters on the way home from their son’s basketball game. Destiny Jackson, 26, told CNN that she had to administer CPR to her six-month-old baby.

Five-year-old Liam Ramos, in his blue bunny hat, taken with his father 1300 miles from home to Dilley, Texas, to a family prison run for profit, in likely violation of a longstanding court order, where there are allegations of spoiled food and inadequate access to medical care. You can see drone footage of detained families, including children, protesting ICE, at great personal risk, there last week. Ramos, reportedly, has become very ill in detention.

Six-year-old Yuanxin Zheng, deported with his father from New York City.

Six-year-old Annabella Rodríguez, found wandering the streets, crying, asking “Where’s Papi?” after her dad was grabbed by ICE in Morristown, New Jersey.

The six-year-old son of Renee Good, who had just been dropped off at his new school, whose stuffed animals were peeking out of the glove compartment, when federal agents shot his mother dead. His charter school has had to switch to remote learning for students’ safety after becoming the focus of right wing hate and death threats.

But these children, whose names we know, are not the only child victims of what the Trump administration is calling immigration enforcement. Nor are the reported 3,800 children taken into immigration detention between January and October 2025, including children as young as one or two years old.

What’s happening is hurting a startling percentage of the nation’s school children in ways that will be measurably felt for decades.

Kids Can't Wait

It Is Unconscionable That Our Government Is Choosing to Harm Children Like Liam

There are lines a decent society should never cross — and among them is this: we do not harm children to make a political point…

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5 months ago · 14 likes · Bruce Lesley

As of 2022, one in four children in the United States had at least one foreign-born parent. That’s about 18 million children who could plausibly worry about they or their families being targeted by ICE / CBP.

Many are staying home from school because of that worry. Which is rational, because federal agents are making schools a target of their operations, after decades in which public schools were considered sanctuaries.

L. is a high school senior in the Minneapolis suburbs and the child of immigrants from West Africa. “One of my friends is Hispanic and her parents aren’t letting her go to school,” she told me. “She has to carry her birth certificate and passport when she leaves the house. My little brother is scared to go out with his friends. He’s only 12. We got a message last week about ICE coming to another school in our district. I wasn’t surprised. It gets to a point where you’re disgusted, but you’re not shocked anymore.”

In November, Education Week surveyed principals who work with immigrant families. One in four reported reduced student attendance, and 15% said they had seen reduced enrollment. In a second national survey of high school principals, nearly two-thirds reported lower attendance from immigrant families. A research paper found that after crackdowns in the Central Valley of California, where a high percentage of students are Hispanic, missed days went up 22% compared to previous years. Los Angeles, the second-largest district in the country, counted an 8 percent enrollment drop this school year among English language learners who have been here less than three years. In the most-targeted neighborhoods in Minneapolis, school attendance has been off an estimated 20 to 40 percent.

Even more school leaders are saying their students are showing fear, anxiety, distraction, disengagement. Trauma.

But let’s focus just on students’ physical presence in school, for a moment, because that happens to be a civil right.

The United States broadly lacks a social safety net compared to other rich countries. Our public school system is the one exception. It steps into the breach for millions of children who otherwise could miss out on regular meals, access to basic health care like eye exams and immunization, and connections to nonprofit social services.

This access is particularly notable for undocumented immigrants, who are denied many other services and protections of the law. In the 1982 case Plyler vs. Doe, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the children of undocumented people have the right to attend K-12 public schools. The state of Texas had attempted to bar them. The opinion authored by Justice William J. Brennan was that this violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

The Trump regime is thus, arguably, betraying millions of children’s rights under the Constitution by making them reasonably afraid to go to school or even to enroll in the first place.

And lest you imagine that the occasional missed day is a minor inconvenience, we have evidence that that’s not so. When students miss more than 10 percent of the school year, just 18 days throughout the year, it hurts. It’s highly correlated with children not learning to read by third grade, and not graduating high school. Chronic absenteeism, as it’s called, is on the rise generally, a lingering problem from the pandemic that is dragging down students’ achievement and connection to community.

The Minneapolis and St. Paul public school districts outright canceled school for a few days around Renee Good’s killing, which coincided with an ICE raid on a high school. Then they announced a shift to “hybrid learning”. Hybrid learning, as anyone who was a parent or teacher during COVID will recall, means that the same teachers and staff are having to offer classroom-based and virtual instruction in parallel.

While this is a laudable attempt to offer some stopgap to the many children who are too terrified to attend in person, we all learned during the pandemic that remote learning is a “force multiplier for inequality,” in the words of MIT researcher Justin Reich. Students in crowded homes, those with spotty wifi, too few or older devices, with parents who are not native English speakers, will be less likely to be able to benefit meaningfully from Zoom school. And these are some of the exact students who will be staying home. They will be socially and emotionally isolated as well, with mental health impacts we all witnessed.

“It’s one of the many tragedies of this moment,” says Kenzie O’Keefe, who works with high school student journalists in Minneapolis and St. Paul and is also a mother of two young children. “We have some of the worst educational disparities in the country already and there’s no doubt in my mind that this is not the same quality education.

“We’re missing out on so much, at at time when we’re just starting to see students break free of the real struggles that were created from COVID isolation.”

This is a tragedy, yes, but it’s arguably also a violation of law. And I would again invoke the words of Justice Brennan in Plyler vs. Doe, who pointed out that it’s incredibly shortsighted to deny children an education. It doesn’t just hurt the children, it harms the society of which they are a part, he argued:

“Children who do not receive a public education … will result in a net burden on society because they cannot contribute to civic institutions, which would be a greater loss to the state than the cost of educating them now.”

These losses will linger for a generation, even if MAGA goes away tomorrow. And any reckoning our country goes through should include justice for all the children affected in this way.

PAY PEOPLE’S RENT IN MINNEAPOLIS: Following Garrett Bucks and Erin Boyle, I’m matching donations up to $500! Just reply to this email with a screenshot of your receipt.

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I’m so excited to announce another MADE WITH CARE workshop.

This time I am partnering with whip-smart culture-change experts Vicki Shabo and Jen Bradwell to look at how to use storytelling to yield tangible change.

STORIES MATTER.

These days we are regularly bombarded by narratives that paint extreme and inaccurate pictures of the nature of care in the United States. From tradwives to cat ladies to daycare fraud, we are awash in stories that divide and distract us, and ultimately serve no one.

Then there are the many care stories that aren’t given much attention at all, from the experience of those giving multi-generational care (often called sandwich caregivers), to those caring for loved ones with a disability or dementia.

We need more stories that are poignant, true to life, and connect the dots between our individual struggles as parents and caregivers and the broader context in which these struggles exist.

This interactive workshop is for activists, brand-builders, writers, filmmakers, influencers and anyone else interested in diving into the power of narratives when it comes to pursuing change.

We will consider how narratives can impact social and policy change, and offer concrete historical examples. We’ll break down what kinds of stories capture our attention, create connection and spark action. We will also offer you a framework to consider when approaching your own narrative change work.

THE WORKSHOP WILL TAKE PLACE ON FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 10:00-11:30 PST/ 1:00-2:30 EST.

REGISTER HERE.

NOTE: YOU MUST BE A PAID (ANNUAL OR MONTHLY) SUBSCRIBER OF MADE WITH CARE TO ATTEND

Vicki Shabo is a gender equity expert, policy advocate and coalition builder, who has helped to win paid leave, paid sick time, equal pay and pregnancy fairness policies affecting tens of millions of people. For well over a decade, she has been at the forefront of the campaign to win a national paid family and medical leave program.

Jen Bradwell is the co-director of the award-winning PBS documentary about Early Childhood Educators, MAKE A CIRCLE, and the upcoming spinoff series, RAISE. She frequently speaks about narrative change as a lever for cultural and policy change around pressing social issues. Jen has edited more than 15 feature documentaries for directors including Jennifer Siebel Newsom, James Redford and Jesse Moss. Two seminal projects she wrote and edited (RESILIENCE and PAPER TIGERS) have had more than 60,000 community screenings to date, helping ignite a national conversation about childhood trauma. Jen has taught filmmaking master classes at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism and UC Santa Cruz’s Social Documentation program.

Elissa Strauss is a journalist, essayist and cultural critic who has been writing about the politics and culture of parenting and caregiving for more than eighteen years. Her work appears in publications like the Atlantic, the New York Times, Glamour, ELLE, and elsewhere, and she was a former contributing writer at CNN.com and Slate. Her book, “When You Care: The Unexpected Magic of Caring for Others,” is out now from Gallery Books.

BELOW YOU WILL FIND AN INTERVIEW WITH TWO AMAZING WOMEN WHO HAVE DEDICATED THEIR LIVES TO HELPING FAMILIES NAVIGATE TRAUMA, AND BELIEVE PARENTS’ WELL-BEING MATTERS AS MUCH AS CHILDREN’S WELL-BEING.

THEY ARE WORKING HARD TO HELP TRAUMATIZED UNDOCUMENTED FAMILIES GET THE MENTAL HEALTH SUPPORT THEY NEED RIGHT NOW TO TRY TO PREVENT INTERGENERATIONAL TRAUMA. IF YOU DON’T HAVE TIME TO READ ON, BUT TRUST ME ON THIS ONE, AND WANT TO FINANCIALLY SUPPORT THEIR WORK, SCROLL DOWN TO THE QUICK DONATION LINKS BELOW.

Last month, I organized an in-person fundraiser for the Child Trauma Research Program at UCSF to help get better mental health support for immigrant families.

This program is on the frontlines of such work, offering a type of therapeutic intervention called Child-Parent Psychotherapy (CPP) which is aimed at families with young children who experience trauma. Right now, they are doing incredible, essential work making sure immigrant families are receiving the mental health support they need to minimize intergenerational harm.

Developed by Alicia Lieberman and Patricia Van Horn in the late 1990s in San Francisco, CPP is rooted in attachment theory, but unlike a lot of attachment practitioners that come before them (hat tip, ), they see both the child and the parent as in need of help, care, empathy and understanding.

In their own words:

CPP is a relationship-focused treatment because traumatized young children often live in families that experienced severe adversity and hardship across multiple generations. The CPP model holds that protecting children begins with helping parents repair the impact of trauma on themselves. When parents grow in their self-compassion, they can move from fear and anger to a more protective loving stance towards their children.

How beautiful is that!

CPP is now backed up by 5 randomized controlled trials (RTCs) and several community-based clinical studies, and is disseminated by 2000+ clinicians in 40+ states and several countries.

For the fundraiser, I interviewed Alicia Lieberman, director, and Vilma Reyes, training director, of the Child Trauma Research Program. It was a moving and nourishing afternoon of conversation, the most excellent tamales in the Bay, and art on immigration from Emily Cohen Ibañez and Hila Amram. We raised nearly $10,000, which covers the cost of training and supporting the work of a social worker who won’t just deliver CPP-informed care to patients, but also bring the model to social service providers around the Bay Area.(Few undocumented families are up for seeking therapeutic help right now from someone new, no matter how much they need it. So social workers have to find ways to offer this care through other trusted providers, or institutions these families have a pre-existing relationship with.)

Below, I transcribed some of the highlights from my conversation with Alicia and Vilma. You can watch/listen the whole recording here. (Passcode: bkt0!&Cj)

But before you begin reading, I am going to pass the hat and ask that you contribute to this wonderful organization giving our immigrant family neighbors the support they deserve. If 1000 of you donate $10 we would collectively raise $10,000. Together, we could support the training and supporting the work of another social worker in the Bay Area. Also, CPP is training practitioners in other cities, so your donation will help them expand their scope and keep up with the demand during this horrific moment.

You can donate directly here. Or, a time-saving option for busy caregivers, you can Venmo me and I will make a big donation on behalf of all of us.

FROM OUR CONVERSATION LAST MONTH

ELISSA: Like everyone else, I’ve been reading the news and feeling devastated by how much harm is happening and wanted to do something about it. I met Alicia through my work for the Van Leer Foundation, and learned all about her excellent work with immigrant families, so I reached out and here we are. Thank you everyone for coming.

Alicia and Vilma, I want to start by hearing how you both got into this.

ALICIA: Serendipity.

I always wanted to be an adult therapist. When I immigrated to the U.S., I was living in Baltimore and couldn’t drive. I was told, “Go to Johns Hopkins because Mary Ainsworth is there.” She co-created attachment theory with John Bowlby, and people said if you studied with her, you could do anything.

I interviewed with her, she accepted me, and I became deeply interested in attachment. Still, when I finished my PhD, I thought I would work with adults.

Then my husband went to Ann Arbor for his residency, and someone told me Selma Fraiberg was there. Selma developed the concept of “ghosts in the nursery” — the intergenerational transmission of trauma.

I resisted at first. I still wanted to work with adults. But I realized babies have parents. Once I started the work, I fell in love with it. Selma taught me how the pain of parents becomes the pain of children. Those babies went straight to my heart, and that became my life’s work.

When Selma moved to UCSF, she needed a Spanish-speaking clinician to work with the growing Latino immigrant community. This was in the early 1980s, during the wars in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. So I came to San Francisco with her.

We began working with immigrant families and conducted the first randomized studies showing that treating parents and babies together reduced maternal depression, PTSD, and anxiety — and that those improvements translated into secure attachment for children. This was compared to families receiving individual treatment.

That’s how the two-generation approach began: focusing on relationships and how family climate creates either a trajectory toward health or toward pain.

We began working with immigrant families and conducted the first randomized studies showing that treating parents and babies together reduced maternal depression, PTSD, and anxiety — and that those improvements translated into secure attachment for children. This was compared to families receiving individual treatment.

VILMA: My story begins in Peru. My family lived through significant political violence and terrorism in the 1990s. When I was 12, we immigrated to the U.S., carrying our hopes, dreams, and resilience with us.

That experience shaped my commitment to working with immigrant communities. Like Alicia, I found my way to this work through exceptional mentors. Early in my career, I found this model, found Alicia, and never turned back.

ELISSA: Tell us more about Child-Parent Psychotherapy.

ALICIA: Child–Parent Psychotherapy involves meeting with the parent and child together, but we begin by meeting with the parent alone. We call this the foundational phase.

Children — from birth to age five — are often referred to us because of behavioral concerns: tantrums, aggression, or preschool expulsion. Too often, the implicit assumption is that the parent is doing something wrong.

What’s missing is attention to the parent’s history and pain.

So we create space for the parent to tell their story, and not just as a parent, but as a person. We meet individually for four to six sessions, then co-create a family narrative that helps answer: What happened? How might this be connected to your child’s struggles? What do you want for your family?

We develop a shared formulation, helping parents see that their reactions and their child’s behaviors are understandable responses to trauma. This often brings profound relief: I’m not broken. My child isn’t broken.

From there, we meet with parent and child together, using play and conversation to “speak the unspeakable.” We help children understand their experiences in a safe, relational context, supported by parents who want to help and heal.

We see significant reductions in PTSD, depression, and anxiety for both parents and children. Recent research even shows decreased cellular aging in children who receive CPP.

ELISSA: What makes it so effective?

VILMA: All wounding, and all healing, happens in relationships.

Many models focus on behavior alone. CPP focuses on story, meaning, and connection. We partner with parents to help children understand not just what they feel, but why, and to know they’re not alone with their memories.

Trauma impacts both generations. Parents often feel deep pain over not being able to protect their child, especially in immigrant families where separation is forced. CPP helps restore parents’ confidence and children’s trust.

That’s why the outcomes last. We’re not extinguishing behavior. We’re shifting understanding. Our goal is to work ourselves out of a job by strengthening the parent–child relationship so healing continues without us.

ELISSA: You’ve spoken about how our trauma and healing happens in the context of our families. But of course it also happens in the context of the political and economic circumstances in which we live.

ALICIA: Yes. There’s no such thing as “just” a child or “just” a parent. Families live within political, social, and economic contexts.

Right now, immigrant communities are terrified. Families are afraid to leave their homes. Trust in institutions has been shattered.

Our response has been to return to community-based care. This means that we partner with trusted organizations and bring services to families where they already feel safe. We’re rebuilding long-standing partnerships and training providers to work directly in community settings.

We’re also rediscovering home visiting, and overall adapting how and where we provide care to meet families’ realities.

ELISSA: I’m just thinking about how absolutely hard it is to parent during traumatic moments, to be there for your kids while you yourself are feeling unsafe. How can, or should, parents get through it?

ALICIA: There’s no perfect answer. Humility matters.

What we’ve learned is that children know far more than we assume. They sense what’s happening, even when adults try to hide it. What helps most is honest, developmentally appropriate truth, held within a relationship where the parent remains emotionally present and protective.

Healing happens when parents and children can make meaning together.

LAST WEEK I EMAILED VILMA TWO MORE QUESTIONS, IN LIGHT OF WHAT IS HAPPENING IN MINNESOTA.

ELISSA: Can you tell us the potential (and likely) long term impact this trauma is having on the parents and children living through this brutal anti-immigrant moment? How can we as a broader community help alleviate that trauma, today and further down the road?

VILMA: Sadly, we know that when children and families are exposed to targeted violence (including hate-based threats, raids, family separation, or chronic fear of being targeted), the effects are longstanding and pervasive. We know it affects brain development, emotional regulation, sleep, immune functioning, development, and learning, and it disrupts healthy attachment. We know it impacts parental mental health, worsens the family’s economic and housing instability, and social isolation, all factors that predict child outcomes.

Families are buffered by protective relationships and systems. We can alleviate the trauma by creating safe spaces that affirm immigrant families, investing in mental health supports for parents, supporting families in maintaining predictable routines (when safe to do so), honoring cultural strengths and wisdom, and partnering with local community organizations to learn how to help. We can all help. The antidote of targeted violence is safety, stability, and solidarity.

ELISSA: How can folks in other cities bring CPP to their hometowns? If a practitioner or community group wants to learn more, how might they go about that?

VILMA: Absolutely. We have trained CPP clinicians in almost every state. People can refer to the CPP website and seek providers in their city. There is also information there on how to request CPP training for their organization. If they are interested in more information about the CPP informed groups, they can reach out to me (vilma.reyes@ucsf.edu) or Brooke Kimbro (brooke.kimbro@ucsf.edu).