And so the care crisis keeps deepening — and will continue to do so, so long as we continue to treat a systemic problem as private responsibility.

This line of thinking is a pretty obvious patriarchal tent pole — but it also does a lot of work upholding the American cult of the individual (family). If someone needs help, if someone’s in crisis, if someone’s struggling, the solution to their struggle should always be to turn inward, not outward.

For so many people, this lack of options — this coercion to care — breeds intense resentment of a role that, when chosen of one’s own volition, might feel incredibly satisfying.

But an infrastructure of care is also about imagining — and enacting — more robust and informal communities of care.

Most essentially, it’s about treating child and elder care as infrastructure: absolutely essential to the health of society, and deserving of holistic reforms that treat it as such.

the politics of inevitability: there’s a palpable feeling of resignation and a paucity of imagination when it comes to what care could look like.

it doesn’t have to be this way. We can create infrastructures of care — on both a societal and community level.

In her excellent book Forced to Care, Evelyn Nakano Glenn refers to this ongoing scenario as a care crisis. It’s not just that there isn’t enough care — it’s that those who end up providing it are coerced, in some form, to do so.

The experience is often so traumatic and exhausting that once they’re out of the thick of it, they don’t want anything to do with the ongoing struggle. There’s sympathy for others, but very little solidarity.