Summer Re-Run: BONUS EP: Why We Should Care About Care with Elissa Strauss

Hello Brave Friends! Welcome to today's BONUS episode. Our guest is care advocate and author, Elissa Strauss, who has a fantastic new book called When You Care, The Unexpected Magic of Caring for Others.

This conversation was about such an important topic that I invited author, activist and fellow caregiving mom, Kelley Coleman to co-host with me. And together we explore the powerful role caring for others plays in our individual and communal lives with Elissa Strauss who in her book weaves together research about care and stories from parents and caregivers with a feminist bent.

Elissa Strauss has been writing about the politics and culture of parenting and caregiving for more than 15 years. Her work appears in publications like The Atlantic, The New York Times, Glamour, Elle, and elsewhere. And she was a former contributing writer at CNN.com and Slate, where her cultural criticism about motherhood appeared on XX. Her book, When You Care, The Unexpected Magic of Caring for Others, is out now from Gallery Bugs. 

Please enjoy this critical and important conversation. 

Thanks so much for listening!

Find Elissa Strauss and her book, When You Care: The Unexpected Magic of Caring for Others here.

Find Kelley Coleman and her book Everything No One Tells You About Parenting a Disabled Child: Your Guide to the Essential Systems, Services, and Supports here.

Find more information about Life Coach, Susanna Peace Lovell here.

Find Susanna’s book, Your True Self is Enough here.

Find our first book from We Are Brave Together, Becoming Brave Together here.

Find our second book from We Are Brave Together, Suddenly Brave Together here. 

Find FULL episodes and clips of our podcast on Youtube here.

Brave Together is the podcast for We are Brave Together, a not-for-profit organization based in the USA. The heart of We Are Brave Together is to strengthen, encourage, inspire and validate all moms of children with disabilities and other needs in their unique journeys. 

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Feel free to contact Jessica Patay via email: jpatay@wearebravetogether.org 

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Please leave a review and rating today! We thank you in advance!

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:05

Hello, Brave friends. We are taking a short summer pause, but we've handpicked some favorite episodes from past seasons for you to enjoy while we recharge and prepare for what's ahead. We'll be back on September 1st, 2026 with season 11 of the Brave Together podcast, bringing you new stories, trusted experts, and practical resources to support your parenting journey. If these episodes have helped you, we'd love for you to share them with other parents, especially the ones that made you feel seen, comforted, or gave you helpful insight into the path of altered parenting. If you have questions, story ideas, or requests for future episodes, follow the links in our show notes. Wishing you all a very wonderful summer. And remember, Bravies, as always, we see you and we love you.

SPEAKER_02 1:06

Welcome to Brave Together Podcast, an empowering resource for the parents of children with disabilities, neurodivergence, and all unique needs.

SPEAKER_04 1:18

Please don't say you don't want to hear about this. Like a short answer, like you don't want to hear about this. No, actually, I do. I want to hear about it just like if you were the CEO of Pepsi and you were going through a hard time and it was like there was a lot of internal politics at the office place. Like that's a big fleshy experience. I want to hear about that. I want to hear about all the big experiences, and cares one of them. Don't stop yourself from talking about it in all its fullness.

SPEAKER_02 1:48

Hi, brave friends. We are giving you a bonus episode this season. And who knows, maybe we'll give you another bonus episode later on. We couldn't not interview this guest. Alyssa Strauss is an author, she's a well-established writer, and she really cares about care. And her book is fantastic, and it's called When You Care: The Unexpected Magic of Caring for Others. And this conversation is so rich and it's so important. And in fact, I invited author Kelly Coleman. She's an activist, she's a fellow caregiving mom, and she is my co-host for this episode. And I really, really hope you enjoy this conversation about this book. This is a review. This fascinating and necessary look at the powerful role caring for others plays in our individual and communal lives, weaves together research about care and stories from parents and caregivers with a feminist bent. Behind our current caregiving crisis, in which a broken system has left parents and caregivers exhausted, sits a fierce addiction to independence. But what would happen if we started to appreciate dependency and the deep meaning of one person caring for another? If we start to care about care. Drawing on research into parenting and caregiving as well as her own experiences as a mother, journalist Alyssa Strauss delves into the history and power of care in our lives and communities with a curiosity and desire to more fully understand one of humanity's most profound and essential relationships. She interrogates our societal obsession with going at it alone and poses a challenge to let ourselves be transformed by the act of caregiving. Elissa Strauss has been writing about the politics and culture of parenting and caregiving for more than 15 years. Her work appears in publications like The Atlantic, The New York Times, Glamour L, and elsewhere. And she was a former contributing writer at CNN.com and Slate, where her cultural criticism about motherhood appeared on Double X. Her book, When You Care, The Unexpected Magic of Caring for Others, is out now from Gallery Bucks. Please enjoy this critical and important conversation. Thanks for listening. Hi, friends. Well, I am so excited to welcome a guest co-host, Kelly Coleman. I know you know her. I know you know her book. And if it's their first time hearing about Kelly and about her book, it will be linked in the show notes. Kelly, welcome as my guest co-host. Thank you for having me and having this important discussion today. I'm so excited. And Alyssa Strauss, as soon as I heard about you from Kelly, I looked you up and then I found that we were both on the same podcast, like back to back, you know, one week after another. I immediately ordered your book as soon as Kelly told me. And then, you know, dove in. I listened to your episode with Dr. Dan. Yep, let's hold up the book because we love it. We love it. It's such a pretty cover. It's such a pretty cover. The name of Alyssa's book, Why Don You Care, The Unexpected Magic of Caring for Others. I I just can't say enough, just about that alone. So thank you. Welcome to Brave Together Parenting. We're so happy that you're here.

SPEAKER_04 5:21

That was like the nicest intro ever. Thank you. I'm so happy to be here.

SPEAKER_02 5:27

Good. Thank you, Alyssa. So just I'm already, like I said, I'm already getting choked up. Like, thank you so much for caring about care. Thank you so much. Your voice is so articulate and intelligent and eloquent. I just I want everyone to read your book. And I I want you to help us, as you are with your book, change the narrative around care. And I love that you put in your title, The Unexpected Magic of Caring for Others, because I even know I'm guilty of maybe talking too much about the hard or the challenges or really wanting to raise awareness about extreme caregiving as a mother to a son with a rare disease. But I love that you are elevating care and reminding us that there is magic, that we are better people because of the people that we care for. So thank you.

SPEAKER_04 6:18

You're very welcome. It's such a gift to have a book be so well received, honestly.

SPEAKER_00 6:23

Well, and I would say I'm thrilled that it's being well received, but also pushing the conversation forward. It's not just we're patting ourselves on the back because we are caregivers or because we participate in this enormous web of care. But the book digs into, and this is why everyone needs to read this it digs into the deeper realities of care, how it impacts society, and it puts into context all of our care experiences, no matter how different they are. And this moment in time, we absolutely need that.

SPEAKER_02 7:07

We do. We do. The quote on the front at the top of the book calls it urgent and necessary. And Kelly and I will say yes with 10 exclamation points for sure. Why do you think that talking about the realities of care are more urgent and necessary today than ever, Alyssa?

SPEAKER_04 7:27

I think care has been hiding in plain sight for so long, and it's really catching up on us. And the our neglect of seeing care in just every aspect of our life, from our economy to politics to the way we view being a good person and other kind of bigger philosophical ideas to our theology, just everywhere. Care was missing. And for a long time we kind of got by because the world was arranged as such as that woman, you know, post-kind of industrial revolution, like women just quietly did the care and they weren't allowed to complain and they weren't allowed to be complicated about it. They just had to be like selfless, saintly caregivers, and they stayed in the private space and men went to work and did the public stuff, and it wasn't a great solution, and thus second wave feminism was born. But that was it. And then since then, like we've not come up with any other system that actually accommodates the reality of care in our culture. We're just we're just stuck in a really broken system. And I think you know, there's some thinkers that compare care to the care crisis to the climate crisis or climate catastrophe that like we kind of just went around went along thinking that the climate would keep being this ever-renewable resource that we could just keep taking and taking from the earth without thinking of sustainability, and it turns out we couldn't. And it's the same with caregivers. Like we thought women could go to work but still shoulder most of the care without any kind of infrastructure and and without any broader conversation of what it means to care. You know, that's such a big part of my book. It's not really a policy book. It's like, where's the cultural curiosity about care? So women were expected to shoulder the care, and either they wanted to go to work, they a lot of them had to go to work. It's an economic necessity. And we we thought we could just keep taking and taking and taking from these caregivers, just like we took and took and took from the environment, without thinking about how to make this sustainable, without appreciating actually this resource and really looking at it and saying this is a deeply valuable thing. And we're actually we're just like sucking it dry. So urgent and necessary.

SPEAKER_00 9:42

And you talk about how much our society really depends on this care. And as we know and really need to talk about, it is the largely unpaid and underpaid labor. I love that you acknowledge the cognitive labor as well as the physical labor of it, of largely women, very often women of color. And how can we quantify this? How can we make people understand the financial worth and just how much capitalism, even on a whole, really hinges on resting on the backs of this unpaid and underpaid labor? How do we quantify that and or really make that something that people understand who are willfully ignoring this?

SPEAKER_04 10:30

Yeah. So, you know, numbers are always a good way to get there. They're imperfect when it comes to care. Care doesn't quite fit into our systems of measurement because it's a labor of duty, a labor of love. You know, it depends on the caregiver and the situation of how much one, how much the other. Sometimes it's paid work, sometimes it's just caring for your child that you chose to have. Um, so it doesn't fit neatly into our systems to actually ascertain value. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to do that though, because we need to. We need to have some sense of like there's this whole thing called care. It happens every day. Like humans would die without it. And if they wouldn't die, they would be feral children, you know, just like they would not be socialized in a way that made them citizens that could give back as adults and um be healthy and productive. And I don't say productive in a capitalist sense, so that's too, right? Um productive, also just good people in their communities. So it's hard to put a number on all that, right? But but economists do it because we do need numbers. We do need to speak in the language of money. Um, one of my favorite figures that economists came up with when trying to determine how much all the care that happens in the United States is worth, they found that it's worth nearly as much as the entire retail sector. Just like every single thing we buy on AM, like every all shopping, just all the shopping care is worth as much. Um, some other figures that really struck me was just in the healthcare system, like unpaid care is just a massive, massive part of what keeps our healthcare system going. And all of us in different relationships that we have with family members or friends have been part of that, right? Like we've been in the healthcare system as a caregiver. And we know that, like, I know when my husband was in the hospital last summer, he just would not have gotten the care he needed if I wasn't calling every doctor I knew every hour of the day, researching everything I could to like help the people that were supposed to be caring for him even have some sense of what they should be doing, right? To remind every single nurse, no, he can't take that drug. Who told you, you know? We've all been there, right? Um that's care, and it's the whole healthcare system relies on it. So I think these numbers are really important because they help us see the enormity of care financially and what we stand to benefit from investing in care financially.

SPEAKER_02 12:52

We are going to take a brief break. Stay with us. Before the diagnosis, before the phone call, before the doctor walked into the room. That invisible threshold that divides a life into two distinct halves. And on the other side, a version of yourself you never auditioned for. Doing things you never imagined you could do. You have been suddenly thrust into altered motherhood. Bravey, our second book is here. Suddenly Brave Together. Letters to Caregiving Mothers at a defining moment in their lives. Captures the voices of women who lived that pivotal moment written from a place of hard-won wisdom, decades in the making. Imagine 30 decent, savvy, compassionate moms reaching across the universe to share their stories, their transformation, and everything they wish someone. This is not just a book, it is an open door. A reminder that somewhere in this wide world, there is a mother who has already walked the road you are on. And she is holding up her hand for you. Written with new and newer caregiving moms at heart, suddenly Brave Together will validate and inspire every parent caregiver who picks it up. Grab your copy today. The link is in the show notes.

SPEAKER_04 14:44

Welcome back, Brave Friends. And it's a lot. I mean, the lot. Relieving caregivers allows them to do better at their jobs, to build better relationships in their lives, to build better, you know, communities. Like it's it what the overburdened caregivers have very little to give to other aspects of their life. And oh gosh, it's also broken. It is so broken. Catches up with you, right? Like in your body when you talk about it. Do you guys feel it? Like you feel it in your body when you talk about it.

SPEAKER_02 15:17

I do sorry. We do. I agree. And I heard a statistic recently, I thought it was 470 billion, but somebody quoted to me 600 billion that we're saving our country in unpaid care. That's really disgusting. That's really, really disgusting. And when I think about like what athletes get paid, and please, you know, nobody send me nasty emails or messages because I said that. But I just think there's so much money floating around that could be invested in care and a lot of things, a lot of things. But when I see those numbers of whether it's a celebrity or an athlete getting paid, and I understand what's behind all of that. But it just, I'm like, come on, can you send some our way? Can you please help us? Because today's caregivers, tomorrow's patient. If we don't change the systems, we're all gonna crash. We're all gonna crash. And you know, us as an organization, we are brave together, of course. We're teaching, imploring, giving permission to caregivers to invest in their own mental health. There's only so much we can do, and there's only so much we can do as individuals. The systems are broken and we don't have enough help. We don't have the infrastructures, we don't have we have so little, right?

SPEAKER_04 16:31

And I just so so little.

SPEAKER_00 16:36

It's painful. It is painful, and it is again back to just the urgent and necessary of it. How different things would be if we planned for our own care needs. You talk in the book about caregiving as a parent, caregiving to elderly individuals, relatives or otherwise, even friends who need care, your relationship with your spouse. Many of the listeners here, myself and Jessica included, are caregivers for our entire lives to our children who do have disabilities and high support needs. And acknowledging all of those different parts of care, you talk about how every relationship that we have is a care relationship. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because again, that gives us such a big picture of context.

SPEAKER_04 17:32

Yeah, so that's you know, that's really what working through everything I research for the book, hearing all these stories about care. And, you know, by by two and a half years later of just digging into like turning care, you know, over on every side and of its many facets and trying to see it, really see it. That's really where I ended up. And I realized that, you know, there's just care in every single human relationship. It is actually the currency, right, of human relationships. And I talk in the book how it's the currency of dignity, it's also the currency of trust. You know, it's it's care is the bricks that we build the cathedrals of our relationships with, right? And uh and it was so helpful for me in a way to realize my parents, they're not too old, they're early 70s, they're independent, they're fine, but you know, you get a little annoyed sometimes. You know, it just like, no, this is care too, Alyssa. Like it's all care. And your friends, when they're going through hard times, you know, to not just be like the friend that's there for them, but actually take the self that I've cultivated through caring for my kids and bring that to a friend. Because I feel like I've cultivated a self through caring for my kids that's really able to like receive them in the state they are in, knowing because if I don't, I'll fail, right? I mean that's the that's the thing about parenting. You know, there's no, I mean, maybe others are more successful at this, but there's only so much I could do to make them respond the way I would like them to respond to um life. And so I think a big part of my like epiphany in researching care is realizing that that care self really belongs in all of our relationships, and we all really benefit as humans and have deeper relationships when we see them through the lens of care.

SPEAKER_00 19:17

And I'm going to jump in with one of my very favorite parts of your book. You're talking about care being the building blocks upon which we were building, you know, the cathedrals of our lives. Spoiler alert, everyone who has not seen the movie Encanto, go see the movie Encanto. I've been using this metaphor for years, and I love that you used it in your book, the main character, Mirabelle, as the one who doesn't have any magical powers within the book, but yet her strength really is caregiving. And it's this caregiving metaphor of she is the one who holds and keeps the whole family together without all of this. It literally crumbles. And I have built on that metaphor that you include so beautifully, saying Bruno is the metaphor for caregivers of their disabled children, because nobody wants to talk about us. Nobody wants to talk about my kid, it is amazing and wonderful and all these things, but that's all anyone wants to hear. And when I'm stopping seizures and cleaning barf out of my hair all night, nobody wants to hear that. And Canto is such a great metaphor, and you talk about that metaphor, but also about all the things of caregiving? There is so much magic, there is unexpected magic, just like you said in your title. How can we talk about all of the things that are magical, all of the things that are not magical, but still stay away from the saintliness and the oppression and all of that that you talk about? How can caregivers be empowered to really talk about all of the realities in a way that gives us a full picture of this narrative?

SPEAKER_04 21:06

Yeah. Well, first of all, I'm gonna rewatch Encanto this weekend with and thinking of the Bruno Bruno's role obviously the care motivation. I'm excited for that. Thank you. Um I think you know, a lot of people say, why why don't we value care? And the easiest answer is gendered, right? Love women did care. So we don't value care because we don't value women, their role in society, their wisdom. Um but I think there's another big reason we don't value care, and it's gendered and not, and it it won't surprise either of you. I have no doubt about that, is we also are just terrified of dependency, vulnerability, bodies. My dad, I have a colonoscopy on Friday, and my dad was and we were talking about the new uh test that you can just test the poop, and I was like, No one offered me that. And then he was talking about how he had to bring my mom wood colon cancer's poop to the hospital, and how the nurse said, Wow, you're such a good husband. And like why? I mean, I know why in our culture, but it's just like that right there captures just like we don't know what to do with bodies. Like we all poop. Um, I was just in Barcelona and there's a store there that sells figurines of historic figures pooping. And it's supposed to be this humility building thing. And it's like in the in the Gothic quarter of Barcelona, it's a big thing in the culture that people have these little figures of just it's a little, I have one in my bathroom. Maybe I'll bring it out as a tree later, a ceramic figure of just someone pooping, and it's like, and it's just like we all poop. And but the but the nurse is like, you're a good husband because you're willing to not just accept your wife poops, but like carry it in a you know, sterile like a container and bring it to the hospital. So I think and we just we cannot deal with the realities of the body. We can't deal with the realities of fragility. We have tech billionaires putting all their money into trying to live forever. Like that's a cool hobby if you have a lot of money these days. Um, I haven't read this book and I don't want to dismiss it wholesale by any means, but there's a really popular book right now called Outlive, right? These are the pursuits of the wealthy right now and the privilege that they could maybe they could just like make their bodies last forever, make their minds last forever. This is the culture we live in. And I think, right, this fear of body, this fear of fragility, this fear of dependency really hits home when you have a disabled child and it's not that arc of like moving towards independence because we love independence. So dependency and childhood is good insofar as it leads a child to be independent, right? And dependency and child, we don't really want to hear about it if it's not gonna lead to like the Western fairy tale ending of independence. And you know, I really want to hear from you guys more about this, and I would love to learn from you, so I'll stop talking. But that's that's what I think about all the time with care. I mean, care is so bound up in our like deepest fears as a culture that bodies don't perform.

SPEAKER_02 24:00

Well, and I think mothers and women have bought into the myth that we are supposed to do it on our own, and that, you know, I signed up to be a mother, you know, specifically talking about caregiving moms. I signed up for this. I wanted to be a mom, and so this is what I just have to do, and I just have to do it on my own. And there's just so much martyr mom philosophies and good girl indoctrination that we just do and do and do, and we give and we give and give until we burn ourselves out because that's what people who love others do for their family. And, you know, we need to give permission to people. It's sad that we have to give them permission and implore them to ask for help. When I am asked, what would you tell somebody at the beginning of their journey? You know, there's lots of things. And one of the things I say is that you are not meant to do this journey alone. Please ask for help. Exponential motherhood requires exponential support. Please learn to ask for help from the beginning. But everyone is terrified. Everyone is terrified to ask for help because we think it's an admission that we can't do this. Well, we can't because we're not meant to do it alone. But we've been told that we have to and that we should. Right.

SPEAKER_04 25:13

There's just an archaeological dig of Neanderthals, and they found a Neanderthal child at age seven with Down syndrome. And the anthropologists are like, wow, you know, because I mean to them, this is just proof that even the Neanderthals understood that care was valuable and a collective endeavor because a Neanderthal child with a disability would not have probably survived to age seven if the child only had a single caregiver. So it's like the Neanderthals got it, right? You know, I mean the Neanderthals got that all different types of humans matter, that we're gonna work collectively to keep this human alive and did it. And it's amazing that we're still fighting for that to be a widely recognized truth in our culture.

SPEAKER_02 26:00

Hey everyone, it's Jessica here, and I just want to give a shout out to our big, beautiful 5K sponsors, Rai's Advocacy, GHJ Foundation, Torrance Memorial Medical Center, CMS Creative Management, the Pate Family, and MRM Education. We are so grateful to these big sponsors, and we're so excited about our 5K event, which will really be a family event. It's going to be at Palace Verdes High School October 20th, and it will be wheelchair friendly, it will be family friendly, it'll be stroller friendly. We are gonna do laps around the track, we're gonna have a food truck, a coffee cart, vendors, authors, artists. We cannot wait to see it. So please state the date and register August 15th and be a part of the big We Are Brave Together team. And if you are not local to these events, we're gonna have one in San Diego and one in Palis Verdes. You can do your 5K anywhere in the world. We thank you so much for participating and supporting We Are Brave Together in this event.

SPEAKER_00 27:10

And not only the widely recognized truth of that shared experience, but of the importance of interdependence. This is a conversation I've had extensively with Lauren Clark, who is a professor at UCLA of nursing and teaches on and speaks on issues of care and the webs of care. And looking at interdependence, everyone, please go read this book. It's so great. Boy, it makes you feel like as a caregiver to a currently child who will become an adult who is disabled. Oh, it's not just me feeling like this, it's everyone. And we need to talk about what interdependence means. And for us as parents of children with and without disabilities, those children are also part of this web of care and part of the interdependence. And I believe if we are genuinely leaning into and valuing interdependence, we are also looking at valuing what all individuals, including my 11-year-old who just wants to watch airplanes and go swimming because he's 11 and has multiple disabilities. What is he contributing to the web of care? It is not just giving and giving and giving, but oh, he does contribute within our house, within our community. And that is such an essential factor.

SPEAKER_02 28:42

But people don't realize that and people don't believe that. I think if we as a culture and society believed that kids like yours and kids like mine contributed to the culture and contributed to this world, maybe there would be more supports, maybe there would be more programs that are high quality, maybe there would be more respite caregivers that are paid a living wage. You know, so how do we change that?

SPEAKER_04 29:14

Yeah. I mean, it it's there's a philosopher named Ava Kate who has a disabled daughter, and she's she'd written so beautifully about how having that daughter just made her kind of unlearn and question everything she learned as a philosopher up until that point. That her idea of the good life was so connected to the life of a mind from a rational working through things rationally, intellectually. And she had a disabled daughter who can't speak, and it just upended everything for her in such a beautiful way. Like, oh, we have such a narrow idea of what contributing to society is, what the good life is, what being a valuable human is. And I think her story is such a beautiful one. And then she went on to create a whole uh body of work that really argues for the value of care and also the value of disabled individuals and the this notion that if you can't go on this journey towards independence, which it's fake for all of us. None of us arrive at independence anyway, right? We're all in some place on the on the dependency spectrum our entire lives. But if you don't get there, it's not according to this external ideal of becoming a like a real human, a respectful human, you still absolutely have worth. You're still absolutely part of a family. You still absolutely give to that family. And there's just, you know, she writes so beautifully of just sitting and listening to music with her daughter Sasha, and how nurturing that is for her, and how liberating, I mean, difficult. No one's pretending this was, you know, right off in the sunset on a horse, like, you know, liberation. But in many ways, liberating for her was so in these in this world of just like rigid rational thought with mostly male philosophers sitting around tables, opining about how the world works, you know, sitting around tables at universities, opining about how the world works without any real sense of like what it actually means to be in relationship, relationships with other people, what it actually means to be dependent. So, you know, she returns to this table of male philosophers, everything's abstract, everything's rational, and she's just like, wait a minute, this is not the only way to view life. And I just I really just appreciate her story so much. And I wrote about it some in the book. Because I think it illustrates how so many of these ideas that we have about what it means to be a good life, what it means to contribute, come from these meaning-making systems, whether it's religion or philosophy or economics, these all these systems that we live in, whether we think about them or not, we're all absorbing their messages all the time that tell us what kind of life matters and what kind of person matters. And we need to we need to challenge them.

SPEAKER_02 32:01

What action would you like to see people take after reading your book or listening to this podcast or reading every article about what we're talking about?

SPEAKER_04 32:10

My first big ask from the book is just to be way more curious about your own care experience or the care experience of others. You know, we talked about it a little bit already. Like care often gets flattened into the fairy tale or the nightmare. Those are like the only two things. Those are the only like two ways we know how to talk about this whole crazy thing called care in our society. There's actually a good political reason for the nightmare narrative. Like there is such a heavy burden on caregivers, and being nuanced isn't actually that effective in activist circles, right? You can't be like, well, it's also really beautiful when you're trying to fight for paid leave. You're like, no, I haven't slept in three months. Uh I like have psoriasis all over my body because of straight. You need to, you need to really emphasize the burden piece. So I get that. I really do. But what I hope for is that at least in our more like the way we talk to others in a more personal way, the way we think about our own lives, we can start getting to that place where we see care in its vastness as this big, epic, fleshy, wild, challenging, and rich experience. And I know thinking about motherhood that way for me helped me understand myself as a mom more and really appreciate the whole experience so much more. And it's kind of a quietly political act, right? It's like, no, I will not like follow these external ideas about motherhood that I'm either supposed to be like selfless and have mom guilt. I don't have mom guilt, you know? Like I like, come on. I work, I'm cool with that. Like it's I like those are the ways we're allowed to talk about it, right? We're allowed to like we have to be like, oh, we have so much mom guilds because we like couldn't go to the 18th recital of our kid who's plays an orchestra. Like it's like like every little thing is supposed to be so tragic for us. And it's like, no, it's okay. You don't you don't have to do it all. And uh right, we have to we we we have to constantly be in these kind of pigeonhole narratives, and I just let it be big from myself. It made me uh see care more fully, it made me appreciate myself as a caregiver more fully. It allowed for so much more nuance and my understanding of care more broadly. So that's my big ask. Ask people. And then also for caregivers, especially caregivers in hard situations, please don't say you don't want to hear about this. I I hear that all the time. I all the time. And and I've spoken to a lot of caregivers by now. It's like like a short answer, like, you don't want to hear about this. No, actually, I do. I want to hear about it just like if you were the CEO of, you know, Pepsi and you were going through a hard time and it was like there was a lot of internal politics at the office place. Like that's a big, fleshy experience. I want to hear about that. I want to hear about all the big experiences, and care's one of them. That's yeah, that's my other add-on. Like, don't stop yourself from talking about it in all its fullness.

SPEAKER_02 34:51

Oh, thank you so much. How do you see caregivers impacting policy?

SPEAKER_04 34:58

So I think right, we're right now, there does seem to be this like real beautiful momentum with organizations like caring across generations. So I think we all share deep love for on this call. And uh that, you know, I actually want to pause and really give them credit because I feel like they're the first ones that really just made this thing called care something. That it's not just parenting or elder care, paid care versus unpaid care. You know, I think this care the care movement and the way we thought about care was so siloed until really the last decade or so with the evolution of care activists, or like, no, there's this thing called care. And it's like when one human depends on another, and actually we all care experiences are really different. It's really different to care for a child who doesn't have any particular needs and what you know, well off economically, like that's a very different experience and a wide other range of care experiences, but still, like there's something to it, there's something to one human depending on another, and we're gonna call it care. So, in a in addition to the activist piece, they've just done amazing like theoretical work. Sometimes men interview me about my book, they're like, So what's care? What do you mean, care? And I'm like, care? What do you mean, what do you mean that you don't understand what care is? Um and I think um, yeah, and now I think there's been, I don't know, I that this is probably my echo chamber for sure, but I think we see a lot of pro care messaging around Kamala's now nomination and like seeing what it look what it really means to view a candidate through the lens of care and see how they measure up as a pro care candidate. So to me, all that feels really exciting. It's happening now. I appreciate all the paid leave activists. I mean, I I'm still shocked. I've been writing about paid leave. Oh gosh, when was Augie born? Like, I mean, over 15 years now, I feel like they're like, why do we have paid leave? Maybe we should have paid leave. Why can't maybe just, you know, every other country has it. We could give it a shot. But but the paid leave movement, we don't have universal paid leave yet, and we should, but they really have had a lot of success state by state, city by city, and getting paid leave passed. So And I'm seeing a lot of momentum. I'm seeing care being really put in the center of political conversations like I've never seen it before, while also being aware that I'm listening, like always with ears wide open, but not enough people are.

SPEAKER_00 37:15

Well, hopefully that will change. And I love the notion of viewing candidates, especially in this particular moment in time, through the lens of care, however you vote, however you lean, asking what their policies are towards things like paid leave, towards health care, towards things that support the care infrastructure, because as we've said, we all rely on that so deeply.

SPEAKER_02 37:44

We do. Let me grab. I have so many underlying things, but um, so give me one second. How do I pick the best one? Oh my gosh. Well, I don't know. We have gone over, but I I love this quote, and maybe this is kind of like too sweet of a way to end, but I wanna I wanna read this. And but if it sparks something else, Kelly that you want to ask, don't you know, feel free. But I love how you say this at the very, very beginning. I mean, so many things, like I said, I've got post-its and underlines. Caregiving was not, it turned out, an end. The parking of the car after a long and exciting journey. Instead, it's been a wild, a transcendent experience that has challenged me and enlightened me while going straight to the heart of what it means to be a human. It's some of the truest intimacy I've ever known, and intimacy that has brought me closer to others and ultimately myself. Why did nobody tell me it could be like this? I just think if if people really understood that we could elevate, or if more people would just speak about that, we could elevate care. Because yes, it's hard, and yes, it's long, and yes, it's challenging, and yes, there's there is beauty. There is beauty to be had and to be shared and expressed.

SPEAKER_04 39:10

Yeah, and you know, that's right. I'm not ultimately a policy person, so like to the degree that I feel like I hope I really have influence on policy, it is getting people to realize that this just isn't investing in practical solutions to a practical problem. This is actually investing in the core of what it means to be a human and allowing us like the right to have meaningful, enriching care relationships. And right now we don't have that right. We absolutely don't. We're absolutely burdened by it. And and I feel like that's something I'm really angry about, right? You know, I have my smaller examples of it with not ever having paid maternity leave, and um, and that's unfortunately a wildly common one in this country, right? But like you should have the right to have support as a new parent. You should have the right to be able to connect with your baby without all these external burdens, which you know can be hard enough as it is. Um, and that's and I feel like there's some, there's like a narrative piece missing, right? It's not just it's not just like we can't figure out how to make the numbers work, or you want it to be part of, you know, kind of social insurance policy, but you want it to be just a tax credit. Like, sure, yes, everyone needs to figure out that stuff, but there's something like deeper, right? There's something at the roots of this. And it's like, no, we don't actually see this as truly denying people something that is core to their humanity and the humanity of the person that they're caring for. Like we're it's it's criminal, and so we need to see it in that richer philosophical, psychological, spiritual, if that's your thing, framing as well of what we're denying people.

SPEAKER_00 40:52

Yes, and your book gives us such a big picture on that. And each of the sections, each of the chapter looking at men's roles, looking at feminism, looking at how the this previous narrative of you can be a parent or you can be a person, but you cannot be both, really giving us a framework for talking about everything and how do we remove exactly like you just said, the external burdens so that we can focus on the care experience. Um, I think that's someone something everyone is really going to get out of your book. I'm gonna keep holding it up so people get this book. It really gives us a framework for talking about this that I think most of us don't have. And for telling our stories and how they fit together and how we all fit into the interdependence of our entire society. So thank you for giving us a jumping off point that I haven't seen before in this conversation. You are so very welcome.

SPEAKER_02 42:09

Well, friends, we have to wrap up, and there's just we are scratching the surface, and there's so many, so many more things that we could talk about. But I want to honor your time and I thank you both so, so much. And yes, we'll link the book in the show notes. Where else can everybody find you, Alyssa?

SPEAKER_04 42:27

And my website is easy enough, alysastrass.com. I'm on Instagram and Twitter at Alyssa Avery. And I love emailing with readers of the book. I love hearing people's care stories. It's my favorite thing in the whole world. So definitely don't hesitate to reach out.

SPEAKER_02 42:46

We cannot thank you enough. Your book is one of a kind, and I hope that it's a catalyst for more books like this because we need it. And we need you, and we thank you. Thank you. Thanks so much for listening today. Do us a favor and leave us a review and a rating so that this podcast can get into the ears and the hearts of more and more moms. Did you know that Brave Together Podcast is an extension of our nonprofit organization? We are Brave Together. We Are Brave Together serves an international community of caregiving moms, offering support groups that are virtual and in-person educational resources and low-cost weekend retreats all over the United States. We've also published two books. Our first anthology of caregiving stories entitled Becoming Brave Together. Heroic, extraordinary caregiving stories from mothers hidden in plain sight, and our newest release, Suddenly Brave Together. Letters to caregiving moms at a defining moment in their lives. Both books offer stories of hope and transformation and encouragement and validation for every parent caregiver. To join us today, go to WeARBravetogether.org. Our support and sisterhood awaits you. Brave Together Podcast is for entertainment and education purposes only. It's not a substitute for professional care and should not be relied on for medical or mental health advice. The use of any content on our podcast, links, show notes, or on our website is to be done at your own personal risk. Please seek out a professional to assess your own medical or mental health concerns because we are all beautifully complex, and the content of this podcast is for a broad audience.