November 29, 2022 • 31 mins
Bestselling author Angela Garbes (Essential Labor: Mothering As Social Change, Like a Mother) and Brooke discuss how the pandemic created a once-in-a-generation opportunity for us to rethink the ways in which we value domestic work. The two share why they’ve embraced leaning on others to help raise their own children, the ways their own mothers influenced their parenting styles, and why changing how we care for ourselves and our loved ones could actually change the world (no, really!).
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
What do you do in life doesn't go according to plan?
That moment you lose a job, or a loved one,
or even a piece of yourself. I'm Brookshields and this
is now What, a podcast about pivotal moments as told
by people who lived them. Each week I sit down
with a guest to talk about the times they were
knocked off course and what they did to move forward.
(00:27):
Some stories are funny, others are cut wrenching, but all
are unapologetically human and remind us that every success and
every setback is accompanied by a choice, and that choice
answers one question. Now, what did you ever see that
(00:49):
on job search? There was a person interviewing these potential
prospects and they go through a list of what the
job entails, and it's three and sixty five days work
a year, no paid leave, no time off, no vacations.
You have to clean up everything, fluids and your fluids,
(01:13):
bodily fluids, etcetera. And and then you watch these people say, well, wait, wait, wait, wait, no,
what what is the job? And then the person says motherhood?
Oh god, yeah, yeah. My guest today is Angela Garbis.
Angela is a writer, a thought leader, and the author
of two books, including her bestseller Essential Labor, Mothering is
(01:37):
Social Change. Reading it made me think more clearly about
my own labor and the importance of care work, both
inside and outside of the home. But that's not the
only reason I wanted to talk to Angela. Her book
also sets up what I feel is a very clear
now what moment for our society. How do we shift
(01:57):
our collective view of care work to mess dick work
and parenting given all that we learned during the COVID pandemic.
It's a fascinating conversation, and I'm so excited to bring
Angela's voice and her important ideas to this show. So
without further ado, here is Angela Garbash. First of all,
(02:19):
thank you so much for taking the time to do this.
I've really enjoyed your book. I both listened to it
and then did my little highlighting and underlining things. It
really taught me a lot. I feel that also taught
me how much more I have to learn. But in
Essential Labor, you really challenge the reader to re examine
(02:40):
how they look at their own labor, not just their
own labor, but the work of those around them, and
how to define it and how we value it. Can
you talk a little bit about that, because I think
that has gone through a lot of changes. But I'm
interested in what you really think it's the most important
(03:01):
about that concept. So I think that taking care of
ourselves care work, domestic work. I'm thinking about all those
things like getting up and taking a shower, changing the bedsheets,
cooking some food, listening to your body, all of these
things like that we really take for granted. And I
was I grew up. You know, both of my parents
(03:23):
worked full time. I had a pretty comfortable upbringing. I
didn't consider how much work went into maintaining our family
and raising us and keeping us loved and fed and
clothed right. And when I became a parent, I found
it really humbling. I started thinking, like, gosh, how did
my mom do this right? Like, she worked full time,
(03:45):
she had three children, she was a new person in
this country, she was separated from her family and support system.
I think in a lot of ways, I've been catching up,
but I think I've been thinking about care work for
most of my life. My mother also worked as a nurse.
She was a hospice nurse who took care of people
in their last stages of life, you know, intended to
their families, and that sort of perspective that I gained
(04:08):
becoming a mother and growing older, was beginning to see
my mother as a person and all of the work
she did, both professionally and personally caring for people well.
And what you started off with is self care, which
is the interpretation of self care not being an act
of selfishness or ego, but actually preparing you to even
(04:30):
be more essential and helpful to those around you. Did
your mom see that differently? I grew up in a
household where I think that love was demonstrated, and especially
motherhood and mothering was sacrifice. You know. I think that
my mother often um put her own needs last. You know,
she still got herself at the door and was you know,
put herself together. But that's what I mean. I think that, like,
(04:53):
I'm not thinking about self care like you know, lighting
a candle and taking a bath. I'm talking about just
basic care that so many of us take for granted.
But is the thing that makes all other work possible? Right,
If we don't have food in our pantry, you know,
if we don't have running water, if we don't have
(05:13):
someone you know, waking us up, in the morning and
getting us out the door. We can't do anything else,
and so I want to kind of expand this idea
of caring and mothering to call a lot of people
in and to show that we do this work for ourselves,
and we do this work for our children, We do
this work for our elders and people who are sick,
and people who just needed a little extra love. And
(05:33):
part of the way that this book came about was
that at the beginning of the pandemic, you know, I
have two daughters, they are seven and four now, and
our preschool shut down. So I was with my children
twenty four seven for four straight months, and that was
very intense. And as much as I knew that that
was the most important work I could be doing, you know,
keeping them safe, keeping my community safe and healthy, I
(05:56):
felt really like, oh God, this is this is a
lot of work. And this was a time in the
pandemic when we were talking about essential workers, right, we
were talking about health care workers, we were talking about
sanitation workers and teachers, and I believe all of those
people are essential workers. But I couldn't get around the idea.
I just kept feeling like, what about me? What about parents,
(06:17):
what about mothers, Like we are all working twenty four seven,
We were working around the clock professionally taking care of
our kids, and it feels pretty damn essential what we're doing,
and why aren't we talking about us this way? You know,
I had a single mom. I always thought that i'd
be a single mom for some reason. And what's so
(06:38):
strange is what I discovered during the pandemic was that
I really thought that it was going to instantly be
shared and equal. And the number of times that my
husband would say to me, yeah, but you're the mom,
and I feel like, what can we can we pause here?
(07:01):
Can we unpack this? Like? Yeah? And it wasn't just
the idea of things that I had to attend to
or you know, I I we started trying to divide
it and I said, okay, look, I'll do all the
sheets and all the towels, but you each have to
be responsible for your own laundry. And they didn't balk
at it. It was sort of seamless. The one person
(07:23):
who didn't do any of the laundry was my husband,
which I didn't hold against him because he's a really
good cook. Right, So it was all these different ways
we navigated, but there was a sense of uselessness and
depression that I felt because the work that was done
never got finished, and there didn't seem like there was
a lot of thanks. Yeah, but I think most people
(07:47):
who are mothers and who go into it with eyes
open in any way, no, Like you don't go into
parenting to be celebrated every day like it's it's in
some ways a thankless job. I wanted unconditional love. The
things that are most rewarding about it are very private, right,
like the like the way a child like holds your hand,
(08:08):
or the way that you know that you comfort them
like that only you can do. It's very satisfying, but
it's extremely difficult to quantify. It has no monetary value,
and if you try to describe it to anyone, it's weird.
It's very ephemeral. But yeah, I definitely felt like in
my household, like my husband and I have more conversations
than I would like about logistics, like how do we
(08:28):
divide things as equitably as possible? And I just know,
like I think ahead about things in a way that
he does not, Like if I know I'm making dinner,
I'm thinking about it like the day ahead or like
in the morning, like what's in our fridge And he's
like opening the refrigerator at five thirty being like what
do we got? And I I don't understand that at all, Right,
but so I think, you know, it's partly the way
(08:49):
we are conditioned and the way we are brought up.
And even like great men, right, um, feminist men are
they have massive blind spots that they're not often aware of.
You know, it's like you're the CEO of a company.
You know, you're running a production company. You know, it
happens to have these different characters, these different actors that
are playing different roles in their lives, and you know
when they're very needy, as many actors can be. But
(09:12):
you talk about raising children as a social responsibility, yeah,
one that requires robust community support. But in America that
is not necessarily the way we're taught or the way
we are organized as a society. Can you talk a
little bit about that. Yeah, So the primary way that
(09:33):
we organize family and can in America is the nuclear family.
We hear about this, right, it's like a mom and
a dad and like two point four kids or something, right, like,
based on the data and it's a very distinct American
modern way, Like the nuclear family has not been around
really for that long. It's been maybe around for like
a century, maybe less than that. And if you were
(09:56):
to sort of like zoom out, the way people have
lived all around the world for centuries is more communally.
I mean, even the the original nuclear family in America
was like a man goes out to work and a
wife stays home, which is why school gets out at
two thirty. But modern America now women both want to
work out of the home, and also life is so
(10:16):
expensive that most households need to parents working. And because
in the United States, we don't guarantee basic human rights
right healthcare is tied to working. We don't guarantee housing,
we don't guarantee family leave, um, we don't guarantee education.
So we all have to work and we're all left
(10:38):
feeling like these are my individual problems to solve. Where
I believe that you know, you and I are here
not because one person raised us. We're here because a
group of people raised us, right, Like there were babysitters,
there were nanny's, there were teachers, there were mentors. Right
the future of our existence as people and the continuation
(11:00):
of America relies on on having a next generation of
both you know, consumers and workers and just people. I'm
really curious because if this why is why is this
the right time for our society to start rethinking the
definitinition of labor as essential and how do we kind
(11:25):
of how do we go about attaining that and redefining it.
So the care crisis as UM, we've all seen it.
So when when schools and daycares and preschools shut down,
we were lost, right, Like, there are two million less
women in the professional workforce right now than there were
(11:46):
at the start of the pandemic. What do we lose?
Do you think when women disappear? I mean, I think
every parent is a working parent, whether they work outside
of the home or not. But women's participation in the
professional workforce outside of the home directly impacts our involvement
in public life. It makes me sad to think about
what we've lost. We've lost their art, we've lost their
(12:09):
policy ideas, we've lost UM their research contributions. Right, we've
lost just women engaging um in discourse about what we
need to be doing. And and those are the things
that we're missing. The reason why we don't have you know,
childcare and family leave is because the majority of people
who represent us in government are old white men. Right,
(12:30):
And so I think about how we've never had a
president who knows why it's important to have like a
maternity leave policy or a family leave policy. Well, it
used to be frowned upon. It was like, oh, are
you going to be able to do your job if
you have a baby, if you become a mother, It's
that going to ruin everything that you are as a
(12:50):
business person. Yeah, and we've seen now that it doesn't
mean that some women are able to have both of
those things, or I mean, I don't think it's possible
to have it all. If you're I mean at all,
it means you're you're figuring out how to do it all.
And this is one thing that was exposed in the pandemic. Right,
So even people and I am luckily enough to count
myself among them, I can outsource some of my childcare
right to preschool teachers or to a babysitter. Right. The
(13:14):
care crisis existed before the pandemic. It's just that some
of us felt it more than others in the pandemic. When,
as I said, all of these mothers were dropping out
of the workforce because they could not do professional work
and domestic work and also you know, manage online school.
We saw like there was a wave of articles where
people are like, women are not okay. You know, America
(13:35):
doesn't have a social safety net. It has mothers, and
even mothers who like you know, say are like the
CEO of a company when they're like nannies could't show up,
but their babysitters couldn't show with their house cleaners couldn't
show up. They were all like, wait a second, I've
done everything, I've leaned in and yet it all comes
down to me. And I think this is the opportunity
to see that we need we hide this work, this
(13:57):
domestic labor, right, and we don't pay people very well.
People who do domestic labor are three times as likely
to live in poverty as people who do any other job.
But now is the time to say I saw this
like this was exposed the sort of um, the way
we've struck your American life is not actually sustainable. Well,
(14:18):
and like you said before, I mean this show is
about pivotal moments, and are now what moments? And I
think that this is a very very strong moment. But
I also think that there's something that you touch upon,
but I'd love to hear a little bit more about
it is the guilt around not being a stay at
home mom. I remember getting really depressed right after I
(14:39):
had my first child, and part of it was because
why I wanted to have a child so so terribly
and it was difficult for me. But then I felt
flattened because was I only supposed to be a mother
at that point and that was never I I wasn't
prepared for that, because I wasn't all of who I
(15:03):
am in that moment, and it took it really took
a long time to find a version of balance, which
I don't ever really think it feels balanced. I think
of it more as like you're juggling right and on
a good day you've you've got three or four balls
in the air, but inevitably something gets dropped right. It's
(15:23):
just like it's just the way it is, and you
kind of have to be like, well, that's what happened today,
and I'm just gonna keep going. But I also think
it's our social responsibility to as we are being re
educated and how we look at this really having those
conversations with your children too, because we're raising this next
generation of hopefully conscious of the different levels of what
(15:45):
it means and how it's never just one thing. Yeah,
I'm glad you brought that up, because the sort of
piggyback off that idea of you know, we both felt flattened,
like we were losing our minds a little bit doing
all of this care work. Part of the reason why
I wrote this book is to remind im myself that yes,
like parenting oftentimes is drudgery, it's repetitive work, and um,
(16:06):
it's hard, it's a real slog day in and day out,
but it does have tremendous power and meaning. You know,
this is where we get to impart the values that
are important to us, like to our children. This is
where we get to speak to our children and say yes,
like I love you so much and I'm never gonna
stop taking care of you, but you should say thank
you because getting dinner on the table is work, right,
(16:28):
and like, yes, I love you and I want to
spend time with you. But if if Mama doesn't have
time to go work, like to perform to you know,
like be on set or for me like to sit
in front of my computer and think and write. Then
I don't feel like my whole self and I can't
show up for you. And those are conversations that my
parents didn't have with me, right, And I think women
of previous generations we're not able to be their whole
(16:51):
selves in the way that we are, And it's still
work to do it. Like I sort of fight to
take up space and say that I'm allowed to have
all of these things. But this is a real opportunity
so that our daughters and our children it's a little
less hard for them. Maybe it won't be less hard,
but but they'll have an understanding, and they're that understanding
will give them a certain power because they will they
will have seen it, they will have seen it in action,
(17:12):
you know. And I think that's important. But say, for
people who do struggle financially, right, what can we do
to sort of compensate, Because you talk about compensating domestic workers.
If we don't have a lot of money ourselves, the
standard for the industry is low for what we pay people.
That is not our individual problem to solve, like this
is a societal and structural one, right, I think we
(17:34):
should pay people as much as we can, and to
see this work is just as valuable as as the
work we are going to go do, Like we hire
someone to take care of our kids so we can
do something like they're equal. All work is good work.
You know, childcare is not less skilled than anything else.
Like we're really kind of fooling ourselves if we think that.
And I think the way we begin to value that,
well want it's to You know, a lot of these
(17:55):
workers are mothers themselves, so I always wonder, like, who's
taking care of their children? And you know, we had
a nanny share my husband and I an two families
that we're still friends with. Um when are little ones.
This is almost ten years ago. She was always allowed
to bring her son, Bruce was his name, and he
was three, and I was like, this is great because
the children have another child to interact with, she doesn't
(18:15):
have to worry, she doesn't have to pay for childcare.
So I think there's there's we can just be creative, right,
we can find out the people who we hired to
do this work, what's going on in their life. Bruce
sounds like a year old, by the way, That's why
I mentioned his name. He was Bruce you're Angela, Yeah, totally,
he was. He was three and he had a wonderful
bowl cut, and it would just be like, hey, he
(18:36):
came into came to your house in a little suit. Um.
You've talked a lot about the phrase of skilled versus unskilled. Yeah,
why do you think care work isn't seen as skilled
labor though? Because we don't define it as that because
women do it, because we expect women to do it,
and because it's in the home, because it's not like
outside in professional world. I think it's very sexist and
it's racist too, because we have in America work that
(19:00):
happens in the home, which is domestic labor and care work.
It's because of slavery. The home has always been a
site of work for black women in America, and we're
comfortable paying people lower wages because in America we've come
of age with this idea that people of color work
in the home, right, and we're okay paying liber wages.
(19:21):
That's a legacy of slavery. You and I just talked
about how doing just care work for several months made
us want to like die, right, like because it's hard work,
Like it is not easy. Well, you call it highly
skilled labor. It's highly skilled, like you said, CEO, management
of a household, right, multitasking, keeping tracked, to keep a
human being alive. Yes, yes, all of it, and to
(19:43):
tend to their emotional and psychological needs, which is some
of the hardest stuff and some of the most exhausting.
You talk about it women as being characterized as in servitude. Yeah,
this is what you're talking about, right, I'm thinking about it. Yes,
doing care work and like mothers are expected to do
this for free. Let's go back to the CEO, the
female CEO that I was talking about, who has had
(20:05):
a housekeeper and a nanny and you know, a lot
of support, and then the pandemic, they all went away
because she couldn't have someone coming to her home and
do those things. And then she felt like what am
I doing? Like I'm still somehow in charge of everything
here in my home. Because no matter how successful you
are in relationship to the male world in America, which
(20:25):
is you know, patriarchy, all women are in a condition
of servitude. And this is I think what's hard for
a lot of people is that we are not so
different from the people we hire to do this work.
And I really believe like we need to see ourselves
as being in solidarity with that, because if we can
win workers rights and a living wage for the people
(20:47):
who we hire to do this work, actually parents, you know,
we're one step closer to being able to say this
work is valuable and and parents should be paid for
this work, and parents should be compensated. H Do you
see some changes happening where there's paid leave that's longer,
(21:07):
or paid leave for the not just the father or
the mother. Yeah, I mean I think now we don't
think of it as just maternity leave. We talk about
it as family right and that father should take that,
and we also talk about it in terms of it's
not just about someone giving birth to a child. It's
like if you're adopting, if you're welcoming a foster child
into your home, if your mother gets sick and you
(21:28):
need to take care of them as elder care. I mean,
at some point in your life, everyone you know, including yourself,
is going to need care and time to do that.
And so I see those changes happening in policies. Yes,
I also see you know, the pandemic, it's terrible and
it's still going on and it's terrible. But there's something
(21:49):
that gives me hope, which is that, you know, I
formed a pod with another family. We heard about mutual aid,
We heard about community kitchens and community of refrigerators and
little free libraries. And to me, all of that was
people saying I can't do this by myself. I need help,
and people stepping in and saying I can't do this
(22:09):
by myself either, and I want to help you. How
can we help each other? And so what I see
all around me or people have been doing that for
the last two years, and I don't want that to
go away. As you said, like, this is a pivotal moment.
It's a once in a generation moment, if you If
I absolutely believe that, yes, and it's time to invest
in the people who mother, not who are mothers of children,
(22:31):
but who mother, who caretake And my mom, you know,
she used to say to me, she'd say, don't kid yourself.
She said blood is not thicker than water. And I
used to think, like, well, that's terrible, and how do
you And yet we relied so much on her friends.
(22:52):
And we have that a lot in our family with
our girls, and I watch their different relationships with these
people in our lives. I watched the different relationships with
other friends mothers, and instead of getting jealous and said, well,
why don't you talk to me about that stuff? I'm
your mother, I realized that there are some of their
children that come to me and confide in me, and
(23:14):
I it's not a problem, like I don't run back
to the mom and you know, but I watch myself
be a different voice in their life, a non judgmental
voice that wants to help them. And doesn't that feel great?
Doesn't that feel great to do that for other people? Well?
It is. It's interesting, is because I used to be
really hung up on the fact that I was sort
(23:36):
of bohemian and you know, I don't have a meal
on the table, and you know, and then when I
thought I couldn't have children, I thought, what am I?
Who am I? That's all I ever wanted to be
in this sort of identity that was tied into being
able to provide a child to the world appropriation, you know.
And I realized, after having two children and seeing other
(24:00):
people's children, that there were so many other ways that
I could contribute that I didn't have a little apron
on and have a perfect meal or a big gorgeous
cookies or whatever, because those were all the things I
grew up thinking we're valuable when I couldn't have been farther.
It's just not reality, and especially now, like we look different,
our lives look different, society has changed, right, and we
need like I love this. I want my daughters to
(24:23):
have someone like you, like who I can't be everything
to them, And that again goes back to that social responsibility,
you know, like one parent is not enough, two parents
is not enough, right, Like I need we need like
in laws, aunties, like I said that chosen family, Like
you don't have to have a desire for children. You
(24:43):
don't have to particularly like children. I think it's great
if you know you don't. I don't. I don't like
a lot of other people's children because I don't always
like mine. But it's so nice to be able to
you can still have meaningful relationships right with younger people,
with older people, right with your peers. Like that's just
being human and that's just the that care. I'm curious
(25:04):
to see what your mother thinks of these sort of
new new ideas, just because that was an interesting piece
in the way your mother grew up and the rules
that she had with regards to being the mother in
the household. Yeah, I mean my mother grew up in
the Philippines and it's a very different culture. You know,
she felt, um, women are expected to you know, really
(25:28):
run the household and to I mean, it's almost like
you serve at the pleasure of your husband kind of
a thing. Um. And a lot of what she was
taught was about sacrifice and being making herself small and
her own desires like took a back seat to everyone else's. UM.
And there's a huge obligation to family in Filipino culture.
I think like that sort of wide family of like
(25:51):
being close to lots of people, having extended family is
something that I want more of in my life. And
when my mother moved here to America, she just didn't
have that kind of community, and my parents kind of
really doubled down into um, you know, like an isolated life.
But also my mother grew up with maids. You know,
in the Philippines, having domestic help is normal. You don't
(26:13):
have to be rich to have a made It's just
kind of you know, in a country that is poor
and that still has a developing economy, it is really
like there's somebody always poorer than you, and so domestic
work is very, very common, and I have mixed feelings
about that, and so does my mother. You know. I
think when we would go back to the Philippines, I
could tell she was uncomfortable with having people, um, you know,
(26:35):
like weight on us, do our laundry, clear the table.
I grew up being told my mother used to say,
I'm not your maid, so like you need to do
the dishes and do all of these things. But um,
over time, I've seen her really she she just respects
the domestic workers and the maids authority and lets them
do their job. And she has like I've seen this
over like the last few decades where she says to me,
(26:56):
who am I to say that I can do their
job better than them? I can't. I loved that, Yeah,
And I think it's really when I go to the Philippines,
it is like, I know people are not making a
lot of money, but like a job is a job
and work is work, and I see them as occupying
a place that's it's they're very integral to the families
and it's it's complicated and I don't have like a
(27:17):
one answer like, oh, it's it's good or it's bad, right,
But one thing that I've been struck by is how
it feels very honest. You know, the maids are not hidden,
the people who do the laundry, They're part of the household.
Everyone knows them. And I think about how in America
we hide that work away. So you're wanting to bring
it more to the forefront in opening the discussion about empowering. Yeah,
(27:42):
domestic workers are important and there's no shame, Like if
you are fortunate enough to be able to afford, you know,
someone in your home to help, I don't want to
take that away from you. I think that's great. I
think that's fantastic because people can't do it all right.
But I think the more of that domestic workers feel valued,
I think there would be less shame, resentment, a division,
(28:05):
you know, and it's not this less than type of
of a regard, but really trying to uphold that. And
I think that that message comes through very clearly in
your book. And I think it's important because you grew
up with two very different distinct approaches to it. So
if you were to look back at your life and
just your whole journey which is continuing on. Yes, hopefully
(28:27):
we'll continue for years now. Yes, absolutely. What have you
learned and what do you think is the through line?
You know, I became a writer because growing up I
was again like, I'm a woman of color. I grew
up in a mostly white town. I saw how I
just always felt like I was on the outside of things,
(28:47):
you know, I kind of saw things for the outside.
I was like, oh, the world is not meant for me.
My food is different from whatever normal food is. And
I think this idea of normal is something that I've
always butted up against and and felt like why am
I not included in that? Like why why is my
family who is so wonderful and we're great? And I
love our food more than like pizza, I'd rather eat
(29:09):
Filipino food. And I've always been sort of wrestling with this,
like why is it that I know we are important
and we matter, but I'm I feel like to the
outside world, outside of our home, we don't. And I
think I became a writer in a lot of ways
to right myself into the story. And so a lot
of my work, like from a young age, and what
I do now is to insist that everyone's story matters, right,
(29:33):
and there's a place for everyone, and everyone is valuable
and we are equal. We have more in common than
we do not. I also think that what you sort
of you encapsulate is this idea that when you say
you're writing yourself into the story, you are making yourself visible,
and you're making yourself not necessarily loud in an angry way,
(29:55):
but heard, heard and seen, and that with books like your,
I think the dialogue and the rhetoric around it, and
the narrative itself is changing for the good. It may
take a while, but again, like we started, we're works
in progress. Yes, no, I love that, Thank you. I
feel really hopeful too, And I think about how you know,
(30:16):
change is slow, sometimes frustratingly so right, and that's growth. Yeah,
And I feel like it's ah, we're just on that journey.
And but I share that same hope and I sense
that I know it from talking to people, and I'm
so happy to be I feel really honored to be
part of moving that conversational law that was the wise
(30:42):
and wonderful Angela Garbas. If you want to hear more
from her, pick up a copy of her book, Essential
Labor Mothering as Social change. You'll be happy you did.
That is all for us today. Talk to you next
week now. What is produced by the wonderful Julie A.
Weaver with help from Darby Masters. Our executive producer is
(31:03):
Christina Everett. The show is mixed by Bahid Fraser and
Christian Bowman. A special thanks to nicky Etre and Will Pearson.
If you liked this episode, please subscribe to the show
on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get your shows.
What do you do in life doesn't go according to plan?
That moment you lose a job, or a loved one,
or even a piece of yourself. I'm Brookshields and this
is now What, a podcast about pivotal moments as told
by people who lived them. Each week I sit down
with a guest to talk about the times they were
knocked off course and what they did to move forward.
(00:27):
Some stories are funny, others are cut wrenching, but all
are unapologetically human and remind us that every success and
every setback is accompanied by a choice, and that choice
answers one question. Now, what did you ever see that
(00:49):
on job search? There was a person interviewing these potential
prospects and they go through a list of what the
job entails, and it's three and sixty five days work
a year, no paid leave, no time off, no vacations.
You have to clean up everything, fluids and your fluids,
(01:13):
bodily fluids, etcetera. And and then you watch these people say, well, wait, wait, wait, wait, no,
what what is the job? And then the person says motherhood?
Oh god, yeah, yeah. My guest today is Angela Garbis.
Angela is a writer, a thought leader, and the author
of two books, including her bestseller Essential Labor, Mothering is
(01:37):
Social Change. Reading it made me think more clearly about
my own labor and the importance of care work, both
inside and outside of the home. But that's not the
only reason I wanted to talk to Angela. Her book
also sets up what I feel is a very clear
now what moment for our society. How do we shift
(01:57):
our collective view of care work to mess dick work
and parenting given all that we learned during the COVID pandemic.
It's a fascinating conversation, and I'm so excited to bring
Angela's voice and her important ideas to this show. So
without further ado, here is Angela Garbash. First of all,
(02:19):
thank you so much for taking the time to do this.
I've really enjoyed your book. I both listened to it
and then did my little highlighting and underlining things. It
really taught me a lot. I feel that also taught
me how much more I have to learn. But in
Essential Labor, you really challenge the reader to re examine
(02:40):
how they look at their own labor, not just their
own labor, but the work of those around them, and
how to define it and how we value it. Can
you talk a little bit about that, because I think
that has gone through a lot of changes. But I'm
interested in what you really think it's the most important
(03:01):
about that concept. So I think that taking care of
ourselves care work, domestic work. I'm thinking about all those
things like getting up and taking a shower, changing the bedsheets,
cooking some food, listening to your body, all of these
things like that we really take for granted. And I
was I grew up. You know, both of my parents
(03:23):
worked full time. I had a pretty comfortable upbringing. I
didn't consider how much work went into maintaining our family
and raising us and keeping us loved and fed and
clothed right. And when I became a parent, I found
it really humbling. I started thinking, like, gosh, how did
my mom do this right? Like, she worked full time,
(03:45):
she had three children, she was a new person in
this country, she was separated from her family and support system.
I think in a lot of ways, I've been catching up,
but I think I've been thinking about care work for
most of my life. My mother also worked as a nurse.
She was a hospice nurse who took care of people
in their last stages of life, you know, intended to
their families, and that sort of perspective that I gained
(04:08):
becoming a mother and growing older, was beginning to see
my mother as a person and all of the work
she did, both professionally and personally caring for people well.
And what you started off with is self care, which
is the interpretation of self care not being an act
of selfishness or ego, but actually preparing you to even
(04:30):
be more essential and helpful to those around you. Did
your mom see that differently? I grew up in a
household where I think that love was demonstrated, and especially
motherhood and mothering was sacrifice. You know. I think that
my mother often um put her own needs last. You know,
she still got herself at the door and was you know,
put herself together. But that's what I mean. I think that, like,
(04:53):
I'm not thinking about self care like you know, lighting
a candle and taking a bath. I'm talking about just
basic care that so many of us take for granted.
But is the thing that makes all other work possible? Right,
If we don't have food in our pantry, you know,
if we don't have running water, if we don't have
(05:13):
someone you know, waking us up, in the morning and
getting us out the door. We can't do anything else,
and so I want to kind of expand this idea
of caring and mothering to call a lot of people
in and to show that we do this work for ourselves,
and we do this work for our children, We do
this work for our elders and people who are sick,
and people who just needed a little extra love. And
(05:33):
part of the way that this book came about was
that at the beginning of the pandemic, you know, I
have two daughters, they are seven and four now, and
our preschool shut down. So I was with my children
twenty four seven for four straight months, and that was
very intense. And as much as I knew that that
was the most important work I could be doing, you know,
keeping them safe, keeping my community safe and healthy, I
(05:56):
felt really like, oh God, this is this is a
lot of work. And this was a time in the
pandemic when we were talking about essential workers, right, we
were talking about health care workers, we were talking about
sanitation workers and teachers, and I believe all of those
people are essential workers. But I couldn't get around the idea.
I just kept feeling like, what about me? What about parents,
(06:17):
what about mothers, Like we are all working twenty four seven,
We were working around the clock professionally taking care of
our kids, and it feels pretty damn essential what we're doing,
and why aren't we talking about us this way? You know,
I had a single mom. I always thought that i'd
be a single mom for some reason. And what's so
(06:38):
strange is what I discovered during the pandemic was that
I really thought that it was going to instantly be
shared and equal. And the number of times that my
husband would say to me, yeah, but you're the mom,
and I feel like, what can we can we pause here?
(07:01):
Can we unpack this? Like? Yeah? And it wasn't just
the idea of things that I had to attend to
or you know, I I we started trying to divide
it and I said, okay, look, I'll do all the
sheets and all the towels, but you each have to
be responsible for your own laundry. And they didn't balk
at it. It was sort of seamless. The one person
(07:23):
who didn't do any of the laundry was my husband,
which I didn't hold against him because he's a really
good cook. Right, So it was all these different ways
we navigated, but there was a sense of uselessness and
depression that I felt because the work that was done
never got finished, and there didn't seem like there was
a lot of thanks. Yeah, but I think most people
(07:47):
who are mothers and who go into it with eyes
open in any way, no, Like you don't go into
parenting to be celebrated every day like it's it's in
some ways a thankless job. I wanted unconditional love. The
things that are most rewarding about it are very private, right,
like the like the way a child like holds your hand,
(08:08):
or the way that you know that you comfort them
like that only you can do. It's very satisfying, but
it's extremely difficult to quantify. It has no monetary value,
and if you try to describe it to anyone, it's weird.
It's very ephemeral. But yeah, I definitely felt like in
my household, like my husband and I have more conversations
than I would like about logistics, like how do we
(08:28):
divide things as equitably as possible? And I just know,
like I think ahead about things in a way that
he does not, Like if I know I'm making dinner,
I'm thinking about it like the day ahead or like
in the morning, like what's in our fridge And he's
like opening the refrigerator at five thirty being like what
do we got? And I I don't understand that at all, Right,
but so I think, you know, it's partly the way
(08:49):
we are conditioned and the way we are brought up.
And even like great men, right, um, feminist men are
they have massive blind spots that they're not often aware of.
You know, it's like you're the CEO of a company.
You know, you're running a production company. You know, it
happens to have these different characters, these different actors that
are playing different roles in their lives, and you know
when they're very needy, as many actors can be. But
(09:12):
you talk about raising children as a social responsibility, yeah,
one that requires robust community support. But in America that
is not necessarily the way we're taught or the way
we are organized as a society. Can you talk a
little bit about that. Yeah, So the primary way that
(09:33):
we organize family and can in America is the nuclear family.
We hear about this, right, it's like a mom and
a dad and like two point four kids or something, right, like,
based on the data and it's a very distinct American
modern way, Like the nuclear family has not been around
really for that long. It's been maybe around for like
a century, maybe less than that. And if you were
(09:56):
to sort of like zoom out, the way people have
lived all around the world for centuries is more communally.
I mean, even the the original nuclear family in America
was like a man goes out to work and a
wife stays home, which is why school gets out at
two thirty. But modern America now women both want to
work out of the home, and also life is so
(10:16):
expensive that most households need to parents working. And because
in the United States, we don't guarantee basic human rights
right healthcare is tied to working. We don't guarantee housing,
we don't guarantee family leave, um, we don't guarantee education.
So we all have to work and we're all left
(10:38):
feeling like these are my individual problems to solve. Where
I believe that you know, you and I are here
not because one person raised us. We're here because a
group of people raised us, right, Like there were babysitters,
there were nanny's, there were teachers, there were mentors. Right
the future of our existence as people and the continuation
(11:00):
of America relies on on having a next generation of
both you know, consumers and workers and just people. I'm
really curious because if this why is why is this
the right time for our society to start rethinking the
definitinition of labor as essential and how do we kind
(11:25):
of how do we go about attaining that and redefining it.
So the care crisis as UM, we've all seen it.
So when when schools and daycares and preschools shut down,
we were lost, right, Like, there are two million less
women in the professional workforce right now than there were
(11:46):
at the start of the pandemic. What do we lose?
Do you think when women disappear? I mean, I think
every parent is a working parent, whether they work outside
of the home or not. But women's participation in the
professional workforce outside of the home directly impacts our involvement
in public life. It makes me sad to think about
what we've lost. We've lost their art, we've lost their
(12:09):
policy ideas, we've lost UM their research contributions. Right, we've
lost just women engaging um in discourse about what we
need to be doing. And and those are the things
that we're missing. The reason why we don't have you know,
childcare and family leave is because the majority of people
who represent us in government are old white men. Right,
(12:30):
And so I think about how we've never had a
president who knows why it's important to have like a
maternity leave policy or a family leave policy. Well, it
used to be frowned upon. It was like, oh, are
you going to be able to do your job if
you have a baby, if you become a mother, It's
that going to ruin everything that you are as a
(12:50):
business person. Yeah, and we've seen now that it doesn't
mean that some women are able to have both of
those things, or I mean, I don't think it's possible
to have it all. If you're I mean at all,
it means you're you're figuring out how to do it all.
And this is one thing that was exposed in the pandemic. Right,
So even people and I am luckily enough to count
myself among them, I can outsource some of my childcare
right to preschool teachers or to a babysitter. Right. The
(13:14):
care crisis existed before the pandemic. It's just that some
of us felt it more than others in the pandemic. When,
as I said, all of these mothers were dropping out
of the workforce because they could not do professional work
and domestic work and also you know, manage online school.
We saw like there was a wave of articles where
people are like, women are not okay. You know, America
(13:35):
doesn't have a social safety net. It has mothers, and
even mothers who like you know, say are like the
CEO of a company when they're like nannies could't show up,
but their babysitters couldn't show with their house cleaners couldn't
show up. They were all like, wait a second, I've
done everything, I've leaned in and yet it all comes
down to me. And I think this is the opportunity
to see that we need we hide this work, this
(13:57):
domestic labor, right, and we don't pay people very well.
People who do domestic labor are three times as likely
to live in poverty as people who do any other job.
But now is the time to say I saw this
like this was exposed the sort of um, the way
we've struck your American life is not actually sustainable. Well,
(14:18):
and like you said before, I mean this show is
about pivotal moments, and are now what moments? And I
think that this is a very very strong moment. But
I also think that there's something that you touch upon,
but I'd love to hear a little bit more about
it is the guilt around not being a stay at
home mom. I remember getting really depressed right after I
(14:39):
had my first child, and part of it was because
why I wanted to have a child so so terribly
and it was difficult for me. But then I felt
flattened because was I only supposed to be a mother
at that point and that was never I I wasn't
prepared for that, because I wasn't all of who I
(15:03):
am in that moment, and it took it really took
a long time to find a version of balance, which
I don't ever really think it feels balanced. I think
of it more as like you're juggling right and on
a good day you've you've got three or four balls
in the air, but inevitably something gets dropped right. It's
(15:23):
just like it's just the way it is, and you
kind of have to be like, well, that's what happened today,
and I'm just gonna keep going. But I also think
it's our social responsibility to as we are being re
educated and how we look at this really having those
conversations with your children too, because we're raising this next
generation of hopefully conscious of the different levels of what
(15:45):
it means and how it's never just one thing. Yeah,
I'm glad you brought that up, because the sort of
piggyback off that idea of you know, we both felt flattened,
like we were losing our minds a little bit doing
all of this care work. Part of the reason why
I wrote this book is to remind im myself that yes,
like parenting oftentimes is drudgery, it's repetitive work, and um,
(16:06):
it's hard, it's a real slog day in and day out,
but it does have tremendous power and meaning. You know,
this is where we get to impart the values that
are important to us, like to our children. This is
where we get to speak to our children and say yes,
like I love you so much and I'm never gonna
stop taking care of you, but you should say thank
you because getting dinner on the table is work, right,
(16:28):
and like, yes, I love you and I want to
spend time with you. But if if Mama doesn't have
time to go work, like to perform to you know,
like be on set or for me like to sit
in front of my computer and think and write. Then
I don't feel like my whole self and I can't
show up for you. And those are conversations that my
parents didn't have with me, right, And I think women
of previous generations we're not able to be their whole
(16:51):
selves in the way that we are, And it's still
work to do it. Like I sort of fight to
take up space and say that I'm allowed to have
all of these things. But this is a real opportunity
so that our daughters and our children it's a little
less hard for them. Maybe it won't be less hard,
but but they'll have an understanding, and they're that understanding
will give them a certain power because they will they
will have seen it, they will have seen it in action,
(17:12):
you know. And I think that's important. But say, for
people who do struggle financially, right, what can we do
to sort of compensate, Because you talk about compensating domestic workers.
If we don't have a lot of money ourselves, the
standard for the industry is low for what we pay people.
That is not our individual problem to solve, like this
is a societal and structural one, right, I think we
(17:34):
should pay people as much as we can, and to
see this work is just as valuable as as the
work we are going to go do, Like we hire
someone to take care of our kids so we can
do something like they're equal. All work is good work.
You know, childcare is not less skilled than anything else.
Like we're really kind of fooling ourselves if we think that.
And I think the way we begin to value that,
well want it's to You know, a lot of these
(17:55):
workers are mothers themselves, so I always wonder, like, who's
taking care of their children? And you know, we had
a nanny share my husband and I an two families
that we're still friends with. Um when are little ones.
This is almost ten years ago. She was always allowed
to bring her son, Bruce was his name, and he
was three, and I was like, this is great because
the children have another child to interact with, she doesn't
(18:15):
have to worry, she doesn't have to pay for childcare.
So I think there's there's we can just be creative, right,
we can find out the people who we hired to
do this work, what's going on in their life. Bruce
sounds like a year old, by the way, That's why
I mentioned his name. He was Bruce you're Angela, Yeah, totally,
he was. He was three and he had a wonderful
bowl cut, and it would just be like, hey, he
(18:36):
came into came to your house in a little suit. Um.
You've talked a lot about the phrase of skilled versus unskilled. Yeah,
why do you think care work isn't seen as skilled
labor though? Because we don't define it as that because
women do it, because we expect women to do it,
and because it's in the home, because it's not like
outside in professional world. I think it's very sexist and
it's racist too, because we have in America work that
(19:00):
happens in the home, which is domestic labor and care work.
It's because of slavery. The home has always been a
site of work for black women in America, and we're
comfortable paying people lower wages because in America we've come
of age with this idea that people of color work
in the home, right, and we're okay paying liber wages.
(19:21):
That's a legacy of slavery. You and I just talked
about how doing just care work for several months made
us want to like die, right, like because it's hard work,
Like it is not easy. Well, you call it highly
skilled labor. It's highly skilled, like you said, CEO, management
of a household, right, multitasking, keeping tracked, to keep a
human being alive. Yes, yes, all of it, and to
(19:43):
tend to their emotional and psychological needs, which is some
of the hardest stuff and some of the most exhausting.
You talk about it women as being characterized as in servitude. Yeah,
this is what you're talking about, right, I'm thinking about it. Yes,
doing care work and like mothers are expected to do
this for free. Let's go back to the CEO, the
female CEO that I was talking about, who has had
(20:05):
a housekeeper and a nanny and you know, a lot
of support, and then the pandemic, they all went away
because she couldn't have someone coming to her home and
do those things. And then she felt like what am
I doing? Like I'm still somehow in charge of everything
here in my home. Because no matter how successful you
are in relationship to the male world in America, which
(20:25):
is you know, patriarchy, all women are in a condition
of servitude. And this is I think what's hard for
a lot of people is that we are not so
different from the people we hire to do this work.
And I really believe like we need to see ourselves
as being in solidarity with that, because if we can
win workers rights and a living wage for the people
(20:47):
who we hire to do this work, actually parents, you know,
we're one step closer to being able to say this
work is valuable and and parents should be paid for
this work, and parents should be compensated. H Do you
see some changes happening where there's paid leave that's longer,
(21:07):
or paid leave for the not just the father or
the mother. Yeah, I mean I think now we don't
think of it as just maternity leave. We talk about
it as family right and that father should take that,
and we also talk about it in terms of it's
not just about someone giving birth to a child. It's
like if you're adopting, if you're welcoming a foster child
into your home, if your mother gets sick and you
(21:28):
need to take care of them as elder care. I mean,
at some point in your life, everyone you know, including yourself,
is going to need care and time to do that.
And so I see those changes happening in policies. Yes,
I also see you know, the pandemic, it's terrible and
it's still going on and it's terrible. But there's something
(21:49):
that gives me hope, which is that, you know, I
formed a pod with another family. We heard about mutual aid,
We heard about community kitchens and community of refrigerators and
little free libraries. And to me, all of that was
people saying I can't do this by myself. I need help,
and people stepping in and saying I can't do this
(22:09):
by myself either, and I want to help you. How
can we help each other? And so what I see
all around me or people have been doing that for
the last two years, and I don't want that to
go away. As you said, like, this is a pivotal moment.
It's a once in a generation moment, if you If
I absolutely believe that, yes, and it's time to invest
in the people who mother, not who are mothers of children,
(22:31):
but who mother, who caretake And my mom, you know,
she used to say to me, she'd say, don't kid yourself.
She said blood is not thicker than water. And I
used to think, like, well, that's terrible, and how do
you And yet we relied so much on her friends.
(22:52):
And we have that a lot in our family with
our girls, and I watch their different relationships with these
people in our lives. I watched the different relationships with
other friends mothers, and instead of getting jealous and said, well,
why don't you talk to me about that stuff? I'm
your mother, I realized that there are some of their
children that come to me and confide in me, and
(23:14):
I it's not a problem, like I don't run back
to the mom and you know, but I watch myself
be a different voice in their life, a non judgmental
voice that wants to help them. And doesn't that feel great?
Doesn't that feel great to do that for other people? Well?
It is. It's interesting, is because I used to be
really hung up on the fact that I was sort
(23:36):
of bohemian and you know, I don't have a meal
on the table, and you know, and then when I
thought I couldn't have children, I thought, what am I?
Who am I? That's all I ever wanted to be
in this sort of identity that was tied into being
able to provide a child to the world appropriation, you know.
And I realized, after having two children and seeing other
(24:00):
people's children, that there were so many other ways that
I could contribute that I didn't have a little apron
on and have a perfect meal or a big gorgeous
cookies or whatever, because those were all the things I
grew up thinking we're valuable when I couldn't have been farther.
It's just not reality, and especially now, like we look different,
our lives look different, society has changed, right, and we
need like I love this. I want my daughters to
(24:23):
have someone like you, like who I can't be everything
to them, And that again goes back to that social responsibility,
you know, like one parent is not enough, two parents
is not enough, right, Like I need we need like
in laws, aunties, like I said that chosen family, Like
you don't have to have a desire for children. You
(24:43):
don't have to particularly like children. I think it's great
if you know you don't. I don't. I don't like
a lot of other people's children because I don't always
like mine. But it's so nice to be able to
you can still have meaningful relationships right with younger people,
with older people, right with your peers. Like that's just
being human and that's just the that care. I'm curious
(25:04):
to see what your mother thinks of these sort of
new new ideas, just because that was an interesting piece
in the way your mother grew up and the rules
that she had with regards to being the mother in
the household. Yeah, I mean my mother grew up in
the Philippines and it's a very different culture. You know,
she felt, um, women are expected to you know, really
(25:28):
run the household and to I mean, it's almost like
you serve at the pleasure of your husband kind of
a thing. Um. And a lot of what she was
taught was about sacrifice and being making herself small and
her own desires like took a back seat to everyone else's. UM.
And there's a huge obligation to family in Filipino culture.
I think like that sort of wide family of like
(25:51):
being close to lots of people, having extended family is
something that I want more of in my life. And
when my mother moved here to America, she just didn't
have that kind of community, and my parents kind of
really doubled down into um, you know, like an isolated life.
But also my mother grew up with maids. You know,
in the Philippines, having domestic help is normal. You don't
(26:13):
have to be rich to have a made It's just
kind of you know, in a country that is poor
and that still has a developing economy, it is really
like there's somebody always poorer than you, and so domestic
work is very, very common, and I have mixed feelings
about that, and so does my mother. You know. I
think when we would go back to the Philippines, I
could tell she was uncomfortable with having people, um, you know,
(26:35):
like weight on us, do our laundry, clear the table.
I grew up being told my mother used to say,
I'm not your maid, so like you need to do
the dishes and do all of these things. But um,
over time, I've seen her really she she just respects
the domestic workers and the maids authority and lets them
do their job. And she has like I've seen this
over like the last few decades where she says to me,
(26:56):
who am I to say that I can do their
job better than them? I can't. I loved that, Yeah,
And I think it's really when I go to the Philippines,
it is like, I know people are not making a
lot of money, but like a job is a job
and work is work, and I see them as occupying
a place that's it's they're very integral to the families
and it's it's complicated and I don't have like a
(27:17):
one answer like, oh, it's it's good or it's bad, right,
But one thing that I've been struck by is how
it feels very honest. You know, the maids are not hidden,
the people who do the laundry, They're part of the household.
Everyone knows them. And I think about how in America
we hide that work away. So you're wanting to bring
it more to the forefront in opening the discussion about empowering. Yeah,
(27:42):
domestic workers are important and there's no shame, Like if
you are fortunate enough to be able to afford, you know,
someone in your home to help, I don't want to
take that away from you. I think that's great. I
think that's fantastic because people can't do it all right.
But I think the more of that domestic workers feel valued,
I think there would be less shame, resentment, a division,
(28:05):
you know, and it's not this less than type of
of a regard, but really trying to uphold that. And
I think that that message comes through very clearly in
your book. And I think it's important because you grew
up with two very different distinct approaches to it. So
if you were to look back at your life and
just your whole journey which is continuing on. Yes, hopefully
(28:27):
we'll continue for years now. Yes, absolutely. What have you
learned and what do you think is the through line?
You know, I became a writer because growing up I
was again like, I'm a woman of color. I grew
up in a mostly white town. I saw how I
just always felt like I was on the outside of things,
(28:47):
you know, I kind of saw things for the outside.
I was like, oh, the world is not meant for me.
My food is different from whatever normal food is. And
I think this idea of normal is something that I've
always butted up against and and felt like why am
I not included in that? Like why why is my
family who is so wonderful and we're great? And I
love our food more than like pizza, I'd rather eat
(29:09):
Filipino food. And I've always been sort of wrestling with this,
like why is it that I know we are important
and we matter, but I'm I feel like to the
outside world, outside of our home, we don't. And I
think I became a writer in a lot of ways
to right myself into the story. And so a lot
of my work, like from a young age, and what
I do now is to insist that everyone's story matters, right,
(29:33):
and there's a place for everyone, and everyone is valuable
and we are equal. We have more in common than
we do not. I also think that what you sort
of you encapsulate is this idea that when you say
you're writing yourself into the story, you are making yourself visible,
and you're making yourself not necessarily loud in an angry way,
(29:55):
but heard, heard and seen, and that with books like your,
I think the dialogue and the rhetoric around it, and
the narrative itself is changing for the good. It may
take a while, but again, like we started, we're works
in progress. Yes, no, I love that, Thank you. I
feel really hopeful too, And I think about how you know,
(30:16):
change is slow, sometimes frustratingly so right, and that's growth. Yeah,
And I feel like it's ah, we're just on that journey.
And but I share that same hope and I sense
that I know it from talking to people, and I'm
so happy to be I feel really honored to be
part of moving that conversational law that was the wise
(30:42):
and wonderful Angela Garbas. If you want to hear more
from her, pick up a copy of her book, Essential
Labor Mothering as Social change. You'll be happy you did.
That is all for us today. Talk to you next
week now. What is produced by the wonderful Julie A.
Weaver with help from Darby Masters. Our executive producer is
(31:03):
Christina Everett. The show is mixed by Bahid Fraser and
Christian Bowman. A special thanks to nicky Etre and Will Pearson.
If you liked this episode, please subscribe to the show
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