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.

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

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.

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

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.

There’s coercion through kinship ties — aka, the person in need of care is my father, or my Aunt, or my kid, and it is my responsibility to provide it for them, even if I don’t particularly want to or am even able to.

What we have, then, is a caregiving paradigm — not just for kids, but for elders and other adults — that relies heavily on proximity to family and presumed willingness. For those without those things, there are two options: 1) pay a lot of money for help, or 2) figure it out your damn self.

Within the individualist conception, there’s no such thing as a systemic issue: no eldercare crisis, no childcare crisis, just hard decisions and sacrifices that every family (read: every woman in that family) has to make on their own. If another family or individual can’t make similar decisions, t hat’s their problem, and no one else’s.

our most venerated heroes are those who (ostensibly) “did it themselves,” even if they absolutely did it, whatever it is, with the invisibilized labor of women, or exploitative and racialized labor practices, or the benefits of familial wealth.