5:00 A.M.
WE LOVE TO THINK WE CAN SOLVE ALL OUR PROBLEMS OURSELVES.
That we’re one self-help book away from becoming our true and powerful selves. We just need to learn some housekeeping life hacks, get the right clothes, Kondo our clutter, get a promotion, lose some weight and meditate—and then everything will be all right. There is no problem that can’t be solved by hard work, and a cheerful attitude! Go us! Yay!
Humans are oddly reassured by being told that all their problems are down to them—and them alone.
And it’s easy to believe this when you’re young and only responsible for yourself. Let’s be honest: if your main problems are having sex with the wrong people, being hungover, living somewhere with poorly utilized storage solutions, saying inappropriate things at parties, and twisting your ankle in a pair of wedges, quite possibly, a few of your “bad pickles” are down to you.
However, as you get older, the chances are that the problems in your life aren’t just down to you anymore. Your problems become other people. Other people’s problems. Other people who are either harming you—abusive partners, sexist employers, destructive peers—or other people who need care, and for whom the only person likely to give that care is you.
Margaret Thatcher might have said that there’s no such thing as society, but there is—there always has been. Women are society. It’s us. We are registered as disproportionately in the excess here, as we are disproportionately missing from every other arena—politics, business, banking, land ownership, the military. Society is the one realm women dominate. Middle-aged women, informally and without any official support, providing the resources and care that one would more usually expect to come from an economically successful first world state.
And there is a problem with this informal provision of care for those who are ill, or troubled, in that it only works if you are someone who is loved. If you have family and friends around you who love you, and can step in to help you, and—additionally—have the resources, space, and time that these problems need.
If you have fallen out with your family; if your family is abusive, or troubled; if there are already so many troubled or ill people in your social circle that there is simply no time or resources left for your bad fortune, then what are your options? What is your fate?
Under this current informal system, the working classes are disproportionately screwed. As you go down the socioeconomic scale, the instances of mental and physical ill-health rise. In these circumstances, those who are fit enough to be carers often find themselves caring for multiple people—by way of a life raft being swamped by those around them who are struggling.
The fatal blindness of our current system is that we can’t see these carers. We can’t see the women who support others—for there is no metric yet invented by which we can see care. Love. The comfort, ease, and relief given by those who help others is registered nowhere.
Love, we believe, is the most powerful force on earth—we are told it is what every human being craves, above everything else. It is to the massive benefit of our economies that it exists—for unpaid domestic work and care, allows paid workers to work. It’s the unseen third element of our economy.
And it is never talked about with the seriousness it deserves. Care, love, and help are the only words we have—tiny, basic, childlike words that go nowhere near describing the reality of spending a decade with a parent with dementia; guiding a schizophrenic through a paranoid episode; sterilizing the wounds of someone who self-harms; supporting a partner through a hypermanic episode, or recurrent depression. Raising children. These are genuine skills; these are things that take immense strength, ingenuity, and patience to deal with, day after day.
But the problem with living in a meritocracy comes if your merits don’t register on the spectrum. So many of the key merits we think of as female don’t register on the spectrum. You cannot see what we are doing because it happens in the home, and the home is a place that is silent. No stories come out of it.
I WONDER, NOW, if this is where some of the pressure for women to have children comes from: The presumption that your children will care for you and your husband, in your old age—meaning you are less likely to need an expensive nursing home, or will have a child who will pay for it. Perhaps this is why women who choose not to have children are called “selfish”—I can think of no other reason. You must, brutally, breed your own carers.
I want to look to politics for the answer to all this—but, in the current climate, it seems . . . unwise. The major political parties—all founded in earlier centuries—are all struggling with who they are, what they believe, and who they represent. Every major party has a fissure—or multiple fissures—at their center. It feels like, over the next few years, the old parties will break under these divisions, and new parties will form—but, for now, how could politics find the space and time to talk about a new way of seeing things? And—the continuing, big question—how can women be in the room, and make up half the people suggesting a different way to do things, when the structure of our lives still, notoriously, makes it so difficult to take part in traditional politics? How can women—millions of women—be heard?