gold star junkie

performing interdependence versus actually living it

Hi! Today’s essay is about how it feels to take care of each other. PSA / quick reminder: ‘tis the season for flipping over your pillow and dropping that lil’ cheek of yours onto the cool side. Absolutely delicious.

perfect cloud taking care of Red Rocks

In the hazy weeks after I had Nova, my neighbor brought me a frozen cheesy quinoa bake. I didn’t know her especially well, save for the occasional hello on the sidewalk, and I definitely didn’t know WTF a quinoa bake was. But she knew that in those strange, timeless weeks, a foil tray of roasted broccoli, crispy quinoa, and melty cheddar, ready to eat after an hour in the oven at 375° with no effort from me, was exactly what I needed. And listen—jury’s still out for me on quinoa (are we still into superfoods or …?), but at that moment in time, she was right. 

And there were other friends, too, who seemed to know exactly how to take care of me in those days when I couldn’t take enough care of myself. The bag of treats from the fancy grocery store that I didn’t have to pick out (nothing like surprise peanut butter pretzels and kombucha). The Thai takeout, with bubble tea, that I didn’t have to order. The friends who sent pajamas and pillows, knowing I’d be in bed … a lot. The friends who brought diversions for Nova after Bo was born, aware I’d be feeling tender that my attention was newly split. That’s, like, next-level caregiving.

I badly want to be this friend. Like, embarrassingly, desperately so. I wrote last year about the fullness of life we’re all feeling lately and its accompanying overwhelm—and, like anyone who’s ever been on this side of a quinoa bake, I, too, want to offer some ease where I can to the people I love. After receiving so much TLC in my moments of fullness, it is now my time to shine when it comes to showing up for my beloveds!!! So when my friends, whose baby was due in mid-August, found themselves in the hospital with a newborn six weeks earlier than expected, I was frickin’ READY. Game day.

I sent the new parents a multiple choice list of treats I could conjure, trying to put myself in the shoes of first-time-parent-me and what I’d want most. In those early days, I was desperate for company, so I included an option to bring them sushi takeout and stay for dinner. Spicy tuna with a side of contact with the outside world. They went for it, and I was stoked—Mike and Nova were in Australia, so I, too, was craving a bit of adult conversation (and when am I not craving sushi let’s be real). I texted my pals for any must-haves, placed the order, and let them know I was on my way over. 

Cut to: me, arriving 45 minutes later than planned, hauling Bo inside while my friend who’d just given birth carried the sushi. I’d forgotten it was rush hour, and that I’d need to circle for parking near the restaurant, parallel park (while a thousand pedestrians watched/judged), lug Bo’s insanely heavy car seat in and out of the car for the thirty total seconds it took me to run inside and grab the sushi, and then then drive to their house. Mistake #1.

As I walked, sweating, into their calm, candle-lit living room, their newborn snoozed calmly in his lounger. I suddenly felt hyper-aware that I’d brought a needy 6-month-old baby with me (mistake #2). I’d intended to sweep in with dinner without asking them to lift a finger, but I’d somehow found them waiting on me: setting the table, bringing me water and wine, offering Bo a seat in their newborn’s brand-new bouncer. 

I realized immediately that every person who visited me after Nova or Bo was born did not bring their own children with them, in order to minimize any chaos and, most importantly, to give me their full attention. So obvious in retrospect, I see now what a sacrifice this was; getting time away from your kids requires not just advanced planning, but a tradeoff on how to spend your valuable solo time. Spending it helping a friend is a big deal (which is true for anyone, BTW, not just parents). 

In the end, Bo was an excellent dinner guest (that man loves a bouncer), and I’m sure my friends appreciated the sushi and the conversation. But I couldn’t help but wonder if my desire to perform the role of helpful friend got in the way of actually being one. 

caregiving is hard 

I wrote last week that I’ve been thinking a lot about interdependence, and the ways modern life is and isn’t set up to help us help each other. In her book When You Care, journalist

Elissa Strauss

writes:

“Humans used to be surrounded by more people, family and non-family. They used to be more invested in community, which curtailed loneliness and benefited care. When we are other-directed, we place more value on acts of togetherness, including care, and we also invest more time and energy into caring for the caregiver and sharing burdens of care.”

Strauss’ observation—that we’re less “surrounded by” one another—is indisputable, but her insight is what caught my attention: this isolation has led to a de-valuing of togetherness (likely, I believe, because togetherness is not easily commoditized in our market-driven culture—ie, it doesn’t make us money). As a result, care becomes an individual burden rather than a shared one, making the already-difficult task of caregiving even harder.

In response, we’ve created a market-driven “solution” to the “problem” of care. In her newsletter

Embedded

,

kate lindsay

puts it well:

“Over the past decade, tech has slowly been innovating human connection into obsolescence [...]. Anything a friend once did, apps do “better.” Instead of a friend picking you up from the airport, you summon an Uber. Instead of taking food to a sick friend stuck at home, they order Instacart.”

Innovating human connection into obsolescence. Damn, Kate Lindsay—that’s scarier than a horror movie. Perhaps this is partially what’s driving my desperation to “be the good friend” … knowing how much I benefit from these “innovations” designed to make care easier, feeling sick to my stomach about the way they isolate me from people I love, and therefore feeling determined to correct the deficit somehow?!

credit where credit is … due?

In a world where the project of caregiving, and the act of togetherness overall, doesn’t earn us any literal capital, our modern brains respond by wanting to at least receive credit for our efforts. In staying to eat sushi with my pals, my act of heroism (bringing them dinner, lol—truly superhuman) somehow felt more tangible. I got to partake in my own generosity, see it play out on their faces. But with it, I brought my own little whirlwind of needs and chaos. 

Navigating this tension can be tricky. Oftentimes, the most helpful acts of care are the least visible. Or, if not invisible, certainly not the most glamorous. When I moved back to Denver after spending ten years in New York and San Francisco, I remember feeling completely disoriented by my family’s extensive Airport Shuttle Network System™. That is: anytime a member of my extended family needed to get to the airport, a swift game of Tetris ensued to figure out who could drive over during rush hour, who could watch a kid, who could lend a car in order to get the travelers deposited at the airport and picked up when they returned—no Uber needed.

At first, I recoiled at this notion. Why burden ourselves with a long-a** drive to the airport when we could so easily outsource it? But after being a regular participant and relied-upon node in Airport Shuttle Network System™ for a while now, I’ve realized that thinking of our caregiving exclusively in terms of ROI misses the point. This truth sounds obvious now, but a focus on constant optimization—at the expense of connection—had obscured it from my view. 

Here’s Strauss again:

“Interdependence can feel suffocating, I know. Acknowledging how much we are needed by others, and how much we need others, goes against everything many of us have learned about the good life in the West. But eventually the gasping stops, the distance between the seemingly sublime and the seemingly mundane shrinks, and a slow-forming awareness settles in. We begin to see and feel the transformative power of care.”

Ya nailed it, Elissa. After getting married, I wrote about the grief of recognizing how much we need and rely on each other—the same gut-punch I felt when I received my official invitation to the Airport Shuttle Network System™. Initially an annoying “hurdle” I had to navigate, it’s now part of the wonderful, boring fabric of my days.

let’s get together 

Asking for help is hard not only because it necessitates that we drop the facade of perfection that, whether we want to admit it or not, we’re all expending some degree of effort to maintain. It also requires that we sign up for the bigger project of togetherness, and in doing so, surrender to the unglamorous, the mundane. And doing that asks us to give up the need to get credit, to earn a gold star, even to tell a good story—in favor of prioritizing basic interdependence. 

I spend a lot of time feeling bad about my participation in the capitalist project, or about the way I navigate capitalism as part of our current reality. But every time I drop off dinner at someone’s house without needing a pat on the back for it, or drive the seemingly-endless drive to the Denver airport to drop someone off, or choose to spend a Sunday afternoon hanging out with my neighbors on our driveway, watching our toddlers eat grapes, instead of going to get Shake Shack¹, I help erode the power of a market-focused, optimization-obsessed culture that’s somehow lost sight of how good it feels to be there for each other.

I’m not saying we need to drop these caregiving “innovations” entirely—I literally Postmates’d a breast pump to the table where I was having breakfast yesterday (ridiculous story for another day). But as Strauss says, I’m interested in the way these “seemingly mundane” acts of caregiving give way to moments of sublimity.

Moments we might miss if we don’t open ourselves up to the sometimes uncomfortable work of giving and taking from each other, and ones we definitely won’t experience with an AI “friend” (click for a lol). Instead, I want to pay more attention to the sometimes bland, sometimes exciting, but always meaningful work that makes it possible to actually live together.  

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Thanks for reading! Let me know how you’re navigating the messiness of giving and receiving care in these full days. This Sunday, I’m in VEGAS prioritizing togetherness with two of my college besties. Shoutout to my mom², who drove me to the airport³ 😎

hi from us!

👐, Becca

1. No shade, Shake Shack is my lil boo thang

2. CEO of Airport Shuttle Network System™

3. Also shoutout to my dad, who watched Bo while my mom drove me to the airport, and final shoutout to Mike, who took Nova to school while my dad watched Bo while my mom drove me to the airport 💕