Care is a gift.  

In a healthy society, care is the time, resources, energy, support and love you receive from your friends, family and community in your time of need, and what you easily return to them in their time of need. 

These days, our friends, family & community are working 40-80 hour weeks, parenting without a village, managing their own (or their family members') mental, emotional & physical dis-ease caused by the expectations of, and participation in, our toxic overculture—and often just don't know what we need or how to give it. 

Most people have never seen, or had, adequate support in pregnancy, birth and postpartum. Our culture doesn't know what it looks like or what is truly required. Most mothers are burned out and traumatised before they've even really begun, and as a culture we've embraced postpartum depression as something that 'just happens sometimes'—a myth so prevalent that when most people say 'postpartum' they mean postpartum depression (as in 'She had postpartum').

I can tell you from research and experience, postpartum depression DOES NOT 'just happen sometimes'. Postpartum depression, trauma, burnout, anxiety and all the other things most mothers navigate on a daily basis is DIRECTLY related to the level of care and support those mothers and families receive in pregnancy, birth and postpartum. It is directly related to the lack of a village, the lack of rites of passage, and the lack of knowledge, wisdom and truth exercised by our maternity system.

Care work (think nursing, teaching, childcare, pastoral care, birthwork, etc.) is not valued in our society for a myriad of historical, cultural, colonial and capitalist reasons...but also because at an an intuitive level we feel that care is supposed to be...kind of...free...? And how can it truly be anything else?

Care is not and cannot be transactional. The hours alone make this totally unfeasible...care workers cannot charge for every hour they are thinking about, planning for and resourcing themselves for care...let alone for every hour of care that is actually needed. Care must meet the amount of hours that are needed...not the amount of hours people (or the government) can afford.

Then there is the holistic nature of care. To care well takes your entire mind, body, heart & soul while you are present with the person—and requires an at-least-equal level of care for your own being when you are not.

This is why care is supposed to be free. Care is the gift we give our fellow humans, partly in acknowledgement of what it means and takes to be human, and partly out of love and a genuine desire to help each other.

Care is love. And as the Beatles so aptly lamented, 'Can't buy me love'. 

Careworkers must respond to need, not profit.  

In our culture, care-as-work means hours-upon-hours of not only someone's time, but often their own money, energy, and spiritual resources outside of the time they are paid for as they try to bridge the deficit our culture creates by not valuing—financially or otherwise—care work.

Care is built on relationships and those relationships require us to show up, frequently more often than we are paid for and with more resource than we have. 

In our culture, where care is not valued, care workers charge whatever we can for care work, and it's never enough to compensate (or in most cases even cover) what we put in, or the difference it makes in people's lives.

When mothers are supported, communities thrive.

This is where the feminist rubber meets the patriarchal road.

This work means everything to me. This page is just one of my efforts to change the paradigm that careworkers must be under-resourced, under-valued and burned out. 

What is clear is that ordinary families themselves can not usually financially cover what care costs careworkers, materially and otherwise. 

But when the community supports careworkers, careworkers can support the community—which I think is how it was always meant to be.

If you love women, mothers, me, or my work, I'd be so grateful if you'd consider 'buying me a coffee' or supporting me on a monthly basis.

Thank you xx