"Who Benefits From Us Being Silent": An Interview with Author Angela Garbes

Photo By Elizabeth Rudge

Angela Garbes is a writer and the author of two books, Like a Mother (a narrative nonfiction book exploring the emerging science and cultural myths of pregnancy) and Essential Labor (on care work and mothering as social change. She lives in Seattle, Washington.

This book is about the pandemic, but it’s also obviously about issues that predate and will postdate the pandemic. How was it to write a book about that period of time? How did you remember those early months? For me, it feels similar to the postpartum period in that it’s all a bit of a blur.

I would like to acknowledge how it's a lot that anyone's doing anything in the pandemic and I am really proud of myself for somehow getting this done.

That's a spot-on comparison to postpartum, where every day you're like, there's no way I could ever forget this. And then all you want to do [is] sort of mercifully forget about it. The pandemic was the catalyst for me in many ways. My mantra became, given in to urgency and imperfection. And when I started writing this book in earnest, I got up really early every morning at 5:30 am, and I would be like, okay, I'm just going to write and I'm not going to think about what part of the book this is. I'm just going to write what's in me. Those emotions and those feelings are very close to the surface and very much want to be processed on some level. I realized I spent the last few years avoiding a lot of things. This was an opportunity to be like, oh, I guess I can't run from [my thoughts and emotions], and it's better to sit and acknowledge them.

You talk a lot about the division of labor, how much domestic labor you had to shoulder, and how your job/your partner’s jobs were prioritized. What was it like to write about this? I ask because I know that as a career-minded “feminist,” this was one of the more embarrassing parts of the pandemic for me. I also liked how you were able to reframe working in the home as some of the most valuable work you could be doing for your family. But was this hard to admit out loud?

Oh yeah, for sure. I wrote this piece that was a very distilled version of some of the themes in this book, what it feels like to be dependent on my husband's salary and find myself playing a very traditional, gendered role.

It had a little viral life and I realized that this is resonating with a lot of people. So my public shame and humiliation and embarrassment is not mine alone. That was very comforting to me, even though it was sad. It's so complicated. I think about women of the Boomer generation (I'm Gen X, which is sort of an invisible generation to a lot of people). Boomer women were really sold [this idea that] you can have it all and you should have it all. And you're never going to sweat doing it. You're going to feel fulfilled. 

They were sold a bill of goods that we're all now realizing is impossible. The legacy of that, the way it runs, is so deep. And so it's very destabilizing for women working outside of the home — “successful women” — to realize that when the infrastructure that allows them to quote unquote “have it all,” when that goes away, it still all comes down to them and that women are defined by a condition of servitude. That's horrifying to realize. I appreciate you naming that. It's embarrassing.

What's so insidious about this is then, we all feel like it's our fault. People feel like they have made individual wrong choices. What's missing is this idea that it's systemic. And because we're all locked away in our homes, having these freak outs, especially in the pandemic, it's hard to feel that solidarity with other people and to push back against it. It’s one of my firm beliefs that we can't even begin to fix a problem that we don't talk about. 

So to me, when I think about who benefits from us being silent, who benefits from those feelings of embarrassment and that quiet, it's not us. It's everyone that's benefited from it all along. That's what I leaned into. It was difficult to write and it was hard to confront. I wanted to strike a tone that would gently nudge people for this sort of self-reflection. But I also didn't want to be like, wow, I can't believe you haven't woken up to this. 

One of the things I’ve noticed, and maybe you have too, is that we tend to cordon off groups in our society – like kids and the elderly – and these are the groups that need the most care. So if you are a young person who is relatively able-bodied, you may not interact with those groups of people and you might not have to think about them. And if we did have to, perhaps we’d get policies and social structures that looked a bit different. To be frank about it: How do we get people to care about these people, and the people who have to care for them?

That is the burning question. And I wish I had a clear answer. I don't know how to convince someone that they should care about other people. I don't want to say I've given up. But I think it goes beyond children and the elderly. It's about racial segregation, right? It is exactly that [sort of] isolation. And then in the pandemic, we were like, I don't need to go grocery shopping, I'll just get someone else to do that. And to not realize that that's a person and that you actually are dependent on that person. How to show people interdependency is really one of the challenges that we have. 

I'm obsessed with middle age because I am middle aged now. But I read this book by Mary Pipher, Women Rowing North, and she talks really clearly about how ageism is ultimately discriminating against your future self. Or somehow pretending that you were never a child and never benefited from care. The condition of being a human being is having needs. We can pretend that we don't have them. We can outsource them and have someone deliver our groceries, or drive us from place to place, but we still have to take care of ourselves. All of us have benefited from the care of somebody else. And at some point in our lives, someone we care about is going to need help and we are going to have to figure that out.

People my age, Gen X, we're often referred to as the sandwich generation. At the beginning of the pandemic, I was like, how am I going to protect my parents? How do I keep them safe? While I'm literally dealing with a two year old climbing on my body. 

You know, you can isolate yourself, but we're actually more dependent than ever. That's not a policy solution, but it's the way to begin to see that and to talk about it. When people go through private struggles of care, it stays private – like it’s a personal problem to fix, a thing that you individually negotiate. But once you start talking about it, you'll see that everyone you know is involved on some level with managing care for themselves, for people they're responsible for, for people within their families and their communities.

I didn't think much about the issues that affect mothers until I became one. Now there's clarity for me. I don't want my daughters, or this younger generation – I don't want it to be as hard for them. 

How did you decide to ground the book in your parents’ story and the story of Filipino nursing in the US?

All throughout my life, I've been curious about my Filipino heritage, Filipino history, and the history of Filipinos in America. And because of Covid, we were seeing news stories about how Filipino nurses were dying and were disproportionately affected by the pandemic.

When I dug a little bit more into that, I was like, well, this could have been my mother. I can tell the story of my own family, our narratives, which I've never fully contended with. The experiences of Latino women, Asian women, and Black women are vastly different, but in terms of caregiving in America, they have everything to do with colonization and capitalism. They have everything to do with white supremacy. 

It was a challenge for me to insist on the value of this story and to believe that other people would find it interesting. Once I figured that out, then I was cooking with gas, you know what I mean? Instead of spinning my wheels, I felt like it had urgency. It was really personal. Certainly there were times when I was like, why did I just do this? Because emotionally, it’s really overwhelming. But I'm glad that I did.

You mention that the pandemic made it clear even to white women who can afford paid help that those care structures are rickety and unsustainable, and that we need better solutions. Yet now, there is a push to get back to normal, including a return to the office. Where do we go from here?

I was like, once school reopens in the fall, people are going to think we solved this problem. And I want to be part of the conversation that says, hey, actually no, we didn't. This is a problem that preceded the pandemic and that is going to continue until we figure this out. 

When schools remained closed in September of 2020, 865,000 women left the workforce. And it was because they couldn't do professional work and care work and school work, which is what they were asked to do. I felt like I was on this deadline, that we had a moment where people were paying attention, and that moment is going away.

To the extent that we never stop talking about this, it's part of the extent that we don't accept it. I have that bit of hope when we hear about, you know, this great resignation that people are talking about, the labor shortage. It's not a labor shortage. It is a shortage of jobs that provide a living wage. 

You know, we're taught to see ourselves in everything and everyone. But I don't think we see enough of other people in ourselves. So what I want to push people – and women and affluent white women especially – to do is to realize that we really are not that different from the people who we hire to take care of our children. This is basic human solidarity. I think about the work that's being done by the National Domestic Workers Alliance, which is just trying to get worker protections and a living wage for people who do domestic labor. It's actually an interesting and exciting opportunity to think about being in solidarity with the people that you employ and the people you depend on, because if we can win those things for domestic workers, I think we're actually one step closer to winning those things for mothers and caregivers.

It gets a little tricky when you're like, back to business as usual and life is just going on. We all just want to move on from it in some way, but to me there's no returning to normal. Our country has been exposed to me.

This is kind of the core of the book, but one of the flips I have had mentally was going from this idea of “I made this choice to parent, it’s this thing I’m doing in the margins of my life,” to, “I'm doing a service for everyone that I'm not getting paid for. And actually, my life is being made harder for it.” In the book, you talk about how we're doing this incredibly challenging work that is going to provide for the future of our country, to create the best environment to raise a child who will be the best type of person that we can support them to be. And we don't get paid for this; in fact, it's looked down upon. 

We have made care work and domestic work so invisible. It wouldn't be that hard to find ways to value it. Other countries have figured out something, right? Other countries give, you know, a year of family leave.

I also believe we should get rid of poverty, which is a condition that we create. We can talk about wages for domestic labor, but also, if we guaranteed people a basic income in this country, that's kind of like saying it's hard work, staying alive. This is the only real work you have as a person, to keep yourself alive and to keep other people alive. And here's some money to help you do that. It doesn't make it so that other people can't be wildly successful and ambitious. It just means that everyone can have a dignified life.

I don't want us to feel like that care work is at the margin. I want us to try to reimagine things where we put care at the center of everything we do, because it actually is. It's such a dramatic reversal and it shouldn't feel so completely revolutionary. The advanced child tax credit – that really helped people. Why is that going away? 

At the very basic level, if you do nothing else but raise children to be healthy, whole people who care about other people, you have done a lot.

There is a segment of the population [for which] that this is not a conversation worth pursuing, but I think there are so many more of us who are interested in figuring out how to take care of each other. And to have our country take care of everyone.