Fatherhood Showed Darwin that Care is how We Survive
A conversation with author Elissa Strauss on the magic of parenting and care.
I was on The Mel Robbin’s Podcast last week! You can listen here. I had a blast !!
Also, head’s up, today’s letter is a long one because, well, I love this topic. You may need to click "View entire message" at the bottom of your email to load the full thing.
Hi folks!
This week, I’m bringing you some insights from a recent conversation I had with journalist Elissa Strauss that made me reconsider how we talk about modern motherhood. (You can watch our entire conversation on YouTube here or read the full transcript.)
Strauss wrote the book When You Care: The Unexpected Magic of Caring for Others, which touches on parenting, feminism, politics, and culture in such an illuminating way, going deep on the history of care as well as our changing values around caregiving and parenting1. And, most refreshing for me, Strauss challenges the recent overarching cultural narrative that motherhood is all work and no joy — and how it can feel almost like a “coming out” to openly claim that you enjoy being a mom today.
In Strauss’ Slate piece, It’s Weird Times to Be a Happy Mother, she writes:
“To insist on motherhood as a path to meaning, purpose, let alone joy, can feel like I am doing the bidding of conservative forces in our culture, who don’t just advocate for embracing motherhood, but a return to a patriarchal domestic structure in which Dad is on top… This disquiet lingers even in solitude, particularly when I am reading smart writing by a smart woman in which motherhood is presented as something that limits or subtracts…
The problem isn’t that I feel unseen, so much as I often detect an unspoken assessment that intelligence and motherhood are incompatible. Or, as is the case in many fictional portraits of maternal ambivalence, a feeling that being honest about one’s desires and seeking them out can’t happen in the context of caring for one’s kids. To like motherhood makes me dumb and repressed, I temporarily conclude, cheeks on fire even though nobody is watching.”
Who can relate? (Reading this felt like Elissa was speaking directly to me!)
When You Care lays out how our current care crisis (lack of paid leave, affordable childcare, in-home elder care, and care equity being just a few issues) developed because care has been treated as a footnote in society’s history, rather than the core element of humanity that it actually is. Strauss argues that care goals should be folded into what we generally believe are essential parts of an ambitious and meaningful life, right alongside work, pleasure, and purpose.
In our conversation, Strauss said:
“For a long time, we had the fairytale version of care, and that was the idealized, sentimentalized version of care, where it's just a sweet, harmonious space where a mother or a woman is caring for children, or the old, ill, or disabled individuals that need their care, and she's totally attuned to them and has no needs herself.
So we had that forever, and then we have this other version of care that was the correction, and rightly so, of the harder parts of care. And I felt what was missing was this deeply meaningful messy middle, which was hard and challenging, but also had those joyful moments. It's not simple happiness, because care is way too real and rich and hard and crazy and big to just be a happy-go-lucky experience. That was a lie. Thank God we've started to leave that behind in the 20th century. But moving forward, I think we need to see it in its richness and breadth.”
Amen.
I asked Strauss about a part of her book that told a story about a familiar figure, Charles Darwin, that I’ve never heard before: his role as a loving, then grieving, father. Strauss explained that, in the Victorian era, it was quite common for fathers to be emotionally involved with their kids, and Darwin certainly was. He was a father of ten, and his favorite daughter, Ann, died at just 10 years old, possibly from tuberculosis. He heavily grieved her for decades and, being the man of science that he was, he wondered what evolutionary utility grieving served humans. He didn’t believe in a divine creator, yet he wondered, where did my daughter’s inherent goodness come from? Darwin ultimately concluded that our instinct to care for others was a huge part of humans’ ability to survive and thrive.
According to Strauss:
“Darwin didn't just believe in survival of the fittest; he also believes in survival of the most sympathetic. And the way he used sympathy then is something we might call care today — that humans didn't survive as a species just because they were in competition for resources and the strongest would win. They survived because they cared for each other, because we can't make it on our own.…
It's just this whole story that we're missing of our understanding of ourselves as humans that I think, if we really had it, we would understand that we need things like paid leave. It would be the most intuitive, obvious thing in the world, and not a handout for people who can't get it together to take care of their families that should be an individual responsibility.”
If only Darwin’s emphasis on care alongside competition had made it into our history books. We know how essential care is to our day-to-day lives, yet care is missing from the majority of our values and social and political policies. Plus, the social messaging around care persists in being gendered, and that’s a huge disservice to all of us — and sometimes, to men in cis-hetero partnerships in particular.
Strauss’ book devotes a lot of time to men’s experience as caregivers. She emphasizes that the solution to our care crisis cannot just be about forcing men to meet women in the middle, but also showing them how much they personally have to gain from fully embracing the role of caregiver themselves.
One of the men Strauss interviewed for her book, Eric, left his career in the Army to stay home and care for his kids while his wife continued with her military career. As a psychiatrist, I found this example to be particularly poignant, as Eric is a vet struggling with PTSD. His story is a nice reminder that, when it comes to parenting, the first step is often to re-parent yourself.
Strauss said:
“What Eric found was that he knew he had to work hard to really listen to his kids to give them the good care that they needed and deserved and would serve them to grow into good humans in the future, and he found that he couldn't really give them that listening unless he learned to listen to himself. And through that listening, he really came to terms with what PTSD looks like, what it was doing to him, what his triggers were, and how to manage it in a healthy way without relying on drugs that would impede his ability to connect with his kids, or maybe not even make him a necessarily safe parent to them.
I think his story just brings up so many threads of what happens when someone that's in hyper-masculine spaces enters into that more ‘feminine space of care,’ and also the care's potential. Was it easy for him? Was it always joyful? Not at all — but it pushed him to deal with hard stuff.”
There’s that inherent contradiction of parenthood again: It is hard and will force you to deal with hard, internal (and external!) stuff. But the joy, wonder, and satisfaction you also find there is expansive and life-changing for many parents.
I wish that we did less comparing and either/or-ing in our conversations about motherhood. I wish that we gave motherhood the textured space that it desires, as opposed to the clickbait headlines that seek to divide instead of unite.
The type of motherhood I am privileged to experience today — with a partner who does most of the cooking and cleaning plus lots of paid childcare help — is different from the vast majority of American moms. But still, as someone who was deeply ambivalent about motherhood for most of my 20s and 30s due to fears about self-sacrifice and martyrdom, this conversation spoke to the voice inside of me that worries admitting that I “like" motherhood negates my identity as a feminist. Speaking with Elissa reminded me to linger in the magic that comes from witnessing a little life blossom. I hope it does the same for you.
xo,
Pooja
Follow
:Buy her book, When You Care: The Unexpected Magic of Caring for Others
On her Substack,
On Instagram @elissaavery
On LinkedIn
What our full conversation on YouTube here.
More thoughts on caregiving:
Do You Have a Voting Plan?
Chamber of Mothers has a Vote Like a Mother tool on their website to help you get informed about candidates and to feel confident about your vote. Check it out at chamberofmothers.com. I’m so proud to be a founding mother and a board member of this incredible grassroots organization.
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Throughout this conversation, Elissa and I use the terms “care” and “parenting” to describe the work of raising kids, though we also acknowledge that caregiving is not limited to parenting. For more on the words that we use to describe the work of care, check out the panel I hosted on “Caregiving” vs. “Parenting”: Do the Words Matter?
thank you for this, Pooja! I love talking CARE with you. Truly my idea of a good time!!!