We Can Do Hard Things with Glennon Doyle - 246. The Answer to Caregiving Burnout with Ai-jen Poo

Episode Date: October 3, 2023

Calling all Caregivers!  Today is a tribute to the everyday efforts of all caregivers who are holding up the sky for everyone else.  Ai-jen Poo is here shining a light on why caregivers are exhausted, unsupported, and overwhelmed – all while doing the work that makes everything else possible.  We talk about how to give the people we love the care they deserve without neglecting our own needs, and what can be done to right the systemic failures that leave caregivers fending for themselves. Plus, we hear a heartfelt message from a Pod Squader who represents so many of us in the sandwich (or “panini”) generation.   About Ai-jen:  Ai-jen Poo is an award-winning organizer, author, and a leading voice in the women’s movement. She is the President of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Executive Director of Caring Across Generations, Senior Advisor to Care in Action, Co-Founder of SuperMajority, and a Trustee of the Ford Foundation. Ai-jen is a nationally recognized expert on caregiving, the future of work, and what’s at stake for women of color. She is the author of the celebrated book, The Age of Dignity: Preparing for the Elder Boom in a Changing America.  TW: @aijenpoo IG: @aijenp To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm not the problem sometimes things fall apart. Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things Pod Squad. Here's what today is going to be. Today is going to be a time where we figure out that the reason we're exhausted and upset and we feel like we can't keep it all together is not our fault. It's the fault of the system that we live in and there are ways that we can perhaps make it better, even just by understanding how the caretakers in our country became so undervalued and overtaxed. And the person who is here is the only person

who could help us put all of this into context and is a hero, truly a hero who is on the front lines and has been forever fighting for the rights of caretakers like so many people who are listening and who are in the pod squad right now. I, Jen, who is an award-winning organizer, author and a leading voice in the women's movement. She's the president of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, woo-woo, executive director of Caring Across Generations, senior advisor to care and action, co-founder of supermajority

and a trustee of the Ford Foundation. Oh, you must be tired, Igen. Igen is a nationally recognized expert on caregiving, the future of work, and what's at stake for women of color. She's the author of the celebrated book, The Age of Dignity, preparing for the elder boom in a changing America. You can follow her at at ijenpo. ijenpo, thank you for taking time out of your unbelievably important schedule to talk to us today. You forgot the most important part of my bio, which is that I'm a proud member of the Pod Squad.

Oh, no way! Oh, 100%. I live off of this pod. I love this pod. And I love the squad. Everyone is so awesome. That makes me so happy. How are you, Igen?

What's going on? We're going to, we've talked back and forth about this hour and what we want to do is really go from the nitty gritty. We have gotten so many voicemails from our pod squad, just people who are trying to keep it together with caring for parents, caring for kids, caring for sick people, caring for the whole world. And then being told to just put their oxygen mask on first, but nobody tells you what the oxygen mask is or where the oxygen mask is. It's a lot. And so we're going to ask you to help us figure out how we got here where caretakers are so burdened and under supported. Can we play you a voicemail first from somebody who just felt so deeply? Can we hear from Sarah? from somebody who we just felt so deeply. Can we hear from Sarah? My name is Sarah.

I'm 46, and I have a little family that I adore. I have an 14 year old son, my 10 year old daughter. I also have a family of origin that I love dearly to, specifically an 84 year old mom who's growing older. And her knees and her care are and creasing, and she's going to be a little spicy about it, which is admirable and frustrating at the same time. And I'm just trying to find my way through this time and life as a mom and a daughter and a wife and I'm also a second grade teacher.

I think some people call this a sandwich generation. Yeah, I'm in it and I'm trying to keep my sanity. And so my question is, while I'm trying to keep my own little family, you know, my whole heart and soul as my priority, my mom's neither ramping up if you really need help to. And I want to model for my kids that taking care of Asian parents is a loving and important thing to do. But I also want to model boundaries in self-care so my kids, especially my daughter, feel like they don't need to do it all for everyone all the time. So how I do this, care for my kids and the Asian parents and self-preserve at the same time, that's my big question.

Thanks everyone. I am so grateful for the work you do. Bye. Sarah's in it. Starting with a real softball. Sarah, well first of all, Sarah, you are not alone. There is this incredible statistic, which is more than half of us who are in our 40s, including me and you, are caring for both young children and aging parents. So there's like more than half of us in our 40s are in the sandwich, which by the way,

I think is like metaphor that is way too gentle for the situation. I call it the penini effect, it's because it's like being squeezed. And so it's like this phenomenon that's kind of affecting millions of us. And I would say that it's an impossible situation that we've been put in, because we're lots of different reasons, but the expectation that we should be able to do it all and just kind of woman up and figure it out is actually an impossible expectation. that is actually an impossible expectation. And it's designed that way. We have been taught that error is this individual personal responsibility,

mostly to be shoulder by women in our families and that we should all just woman up and figure it out. And if we can't figure it out, if we struggle, we are told it's a personal failure, right? We internalize it as a failure like, I don't have the right job, I don't make enough money, I didn't save enough, I didn't buy the right long-term care insurance, I did some set of things wrong. And the truth is, is that we're all doing the very best we can to take care of the people we love. And it's simply not enough because we're

supposed to have infrastructure to support us. We're supposed to have policies and programs, just like we have infrastructure like bridges and tunnels and broadband and public transportation. We're supposed to have childcare. We're supposed to have respite care for family caregivers. We're supposed to have paid family and medical leave.

We're supposed to have a really strong, well cared for, well compensated care workforce of early childhood educators and home care workers and all these other people who are supporting us and a part of our care squads and supported to be a part of our care squads. We're not supposed to do this on our own. It's nuts. Why don't we have the infrastructure and are there places that do have the infrastructure and what does it look like? Yes, there's a social scientist named Jessica Colarcho

who said other countries have a social safety net. The US has women. Oh, it's really rough. Oh, yes. When you put it that way. But yeah, there are in most developed countries, there's an expectation that you have subsidized child care, that you have aging and some level of disability care, and we are one of two countries in the developed world that

doesn't have any paid family and medical leave. Through the situation where one out of every four moms has to go back to work within two weeks of giving birth because we don't have paid family medical leave. Can you imagine? That is happening all over this country, people are having to go back to work within two weeks of having had a baby. So it is dire. It is a crisis in this country that we don't have the kind of care policies

and systems in place to support us. But what's interesting about it is that I have this friend named John Rogers who always says that there's two kinds of suffering in the world. There's a kind of suffering that is inevitable that's a part of the human experience. Like we are all going to have our hearts broken. We're all going to have loss and grief, we're all going to have to work hard at some point. And there's another kind of suffering that is actually avoidable that has to do with systematic choices, systems, problems, poverty, lack of access to childcare. These are policy decisions and choices, systemic system failures that were designed by people, which means that people can redesign them to put new systems in place to fix it. And that's what we're trying to do here in this country is to build the kind of systems for care that make sure that people like Sarah

have the support that they need to take care of the people that they love and they don't feel like it's all on them alone because that is impossible Can you explain to us Igen We know whenever we say women are most affected that what that means is women of color are the most effective of the women. How did in this country we get to a place where caregiving is so gendered, right? And then within that caregiving is something that is mostly placed upon women of color. It's so gendered and race-related, correct? It is. It really is. It's part of our societal, we have these hierarchies of human value in our society where the lives and contributions of men, especially white men, straight white men,

are valued more than everybody else. And it's why we're still fighting for pay equity. Women and men can be doing the same work and they're women are paid less. And it's true with work that has been associated with or assigned to women like care, right? It's valued less. It's compensated less. And then in the United States, care work as a profession has always been associated with black women, with women of color.

Some of the first domestic care workers in the US were enslaved African women. And it's always that association that imprint of that association has shaped the way this work has been treated as a profession for literally generations. In the 1930s, Congress was in a moment that's called the New Deal, where they were putting in place our labor laws, the laws that would define the conditions and the rights that we all have at work. And Southern members of Congress refused to support those laws if they included protections for domestic care workers and farm workers, two occupations that were dominated by black

workers. And that racial exclusion has been repeated over and over again in our laws and policy at the federal level, at the state level, and it's deep in our culture. I mean, the fact that we still refer to domestic work as help, as opposed to the dignified profession that it is for literally millions of people, women and men, is because it is associated

with women of color who have culturally been seen as the help. And it's deep. It's like not even always conscious that when we think about the types of work we really value and see as kind of a profession to aspire to. It's never care, but it should be. I mean, this is some of the most important work in our entire world. I mean, to nurture the potential of a child, to ensure that the people who raised us, our parents and our grandparents,

are able to live with dignity and have good quality of life until the very end. Like, why could be more important? That's right. And it's inevitable. It is universally true that everyone will need care in their lifetime, but because women are the backstop of that, we know we're gonna get it. It's just that we don't have to create structures

to compensate those people because historically, they haven't been compensated. And it just flows through everything. Like I'm thinking about how before women were predominantly in the workforce, men could have families and jobs because of the unpaid invisible labor of women at home who were subsidizing the ability for those men to go have jobs. And that was, that was help. That was not work. And then when women join the workforce, what do then they do turn around and see

the indispensable people like nannies and house cleaners and all of the people who are in turn subsidizing their work as help. Because if you never see the value, then that lack of value continues to be passed down and pushed down. Always. That's exactly right. I mean, back in the 1970s, Gloria Steinem wrote this article called Revaluing Economics. And it blew my mind when I read it, because she basically says that our entire economic system is built on the idea that we will have a forever resource that we can just draw from and take for granted to the planet's natural resources and the unpaid labor of women. And the assumption is that we will have an unlimited free access to both of those things. unlimited free access to both of those things. And what we are finding is that that is actually false. That that premise upon which our economy is built is false and designed to ensure that women will continue to do this work, especially women of color, either unpaid or shockingly underpaid.

unpaid or shockingly underpaid. And that is it's not sustainable, it's not practical, and it's not possible anymore. 70% of kids in our country are growing up in households where all the adults in the household have to work outside the home to make ends meet. It's breaking down. So this is way over simplified, but men work, women stay home, do everything to keep all of it going while the men work. Then, women start working. Most of those jobs go to white women. White women are like, oh shit, there's nobody in my house to take care of all my stuff. So then they recruit women of color. So now, women of color are doing all, is this the train that we're looking at here? This is the train.

And now, because we have such a huge aging population, baby boomers are aging into retirement at a rate of 10,000 people turning 65. And then because of advances in healthcare, people are living longer. And also millennials are starting to have babies, 4 million babies every year. So on both ends of the generational spectrum, we actually need more care than ever before at a time when we have less of it because everybody's working outside of the home. So we're reliant upon parents working moms, family caregivers, overstretching themselves, and care workers who are underpaid overstretching themselves, and it's still not enough.

And you'll see more like young people are caregivers. There's the whole support network of millions of young people under the age of 16 who are spending more than 20 hours a week caregiving. So they're loved ones with disabilities for their grandparents. You'll see more men. Now 36% of all caregivers for older adults who are aging are men. So you're seeing now it's not just women of color doing this work. It's like everybody, but everybody is invisible because of the way that women of color and their contributions have been devalued in our society. It's such a great example of how sexism and racism

hurts everybody, including white men, because it's like there actually are a few million white men who are primary caregivers, and they're totally invisible. But not to say, like the truth is, who's disproportionately impacted in this whole operation that is not, that is actually all upside down, are still women who are overwhelmingly doing the family caregiving responsibilities, and especially women of color who are

doubly family caregiving and the majority of the care workforce from child care to aging and disability care. And by the way, the average income of a home care worker in the US today, 2023 is $21,000 a year. So the people that we're counting on to take care of us can take care of themselves and their own families doing this work. To me, if you're looking at concentric circles around kind of the columns that keep societies moving, democracy, freedom. They all center from this

because it's and it's just like such a lens to see every single piece about our country that when you pull back a layer and you say, oh my god, that is because of that. It's just the idea of domestic labor. Like when I think of that word, I come from a background of studying violence against women. And when I even think about the word domestic, it's as if for people who are like, stuff you do at your house, that's just something you do. You have your work and then you have something

you do at your house. It's like, you do. You have your work and then you have something you do at your house. It's like, no, that is our conditioning to believe that. It's the same way if I walk out on the street and a man punches me in the face, that is assault and violence for which I can go to the court system and get recompense. If I am in my home and a man punches me in the face, this is now domestic violence. This has a whole separate set of rules that applies to it. Why? Because we've deemed

it domestic. Because you're the property of that man. That's right. That's in our conscious. You weren't the property of the dude that punched you in the street. But right, that's your private business in your house because you belong to him. Well, originally yes. And by, I think most people would rail against that in this moment to hear that. But originally that was the case that you had every right to do because of property. But still now it's that's something that happens and that is personal. But it's the same actual action that happened in the street or in your house. It's the same thing that applies to work and it's all based on economics. All of it. The whole domestic violence thing is too. The reason that the civil rights

remedy of the Violence Against Women Act was overturned is because the federal court could not conceive of a world in which domestic violence had any national federal impact. Even though there's millions of dollars a week that go to because of victimization by domestic violence. And if you bring dentures over the state lines, oh, so that's federal, we get that. But we just can't get our heads around the fact that things that women do and that happen to them have economic consequences.

It's so true and the whole domain of what is domestic is seen as the women's domain, the internal and also the less real. Yes. Yes. Like, it's real. The less real, the less valuable, the less, all kinds of things. I mean, the fight to get people to the sea care work as skilled work, it is the definition and all the economist literature of unskilled labor.

Show me a caregiver who isn't skilled. literature of unskilled labor, show me a caregiver who isn't skilled. You know, the amount of emotional is the call spiritual, all kinds of skills and capacities that are required to care for another human being well. It's really profound. And when you see it done well, you're just like, oh my, it's, it's really profound. And when you see it done well, you're just like, oh my, it's really quite humbling. And so I agree, there's something about the way that we have decided that society should be divided

between the public and the private. The public matters more. And the private is associated with women. How convenient. In our country, I'm just going to do a bunch of huge generalizations during this hour for which I'm sure I will not get in trouble. But is it because we just worship money and not people? Like at the end of the day, we care about hedge funds and not about human beings.

But if we worshiped money, we would value the work that makes making money possible. I mean, Igen always says, this is the work that makes everything else possible. If we had an intellectually honest accounting for why when I worked at my law firm, every single, and I will say, it's interesting that we say every woman had a nanny, every man also had a nanny. We just don't associate him with having a nanny.

We only associate the women with having a nanny. We just don't associate him with having a nanny. We only associate the women with having a nanny, but every single person had it. Why? Because it was a condition precedent to being able to be someone who worked at a law firm. So it isn't, those people are the ones who make you going out and making a lot of money possible. So it isn't just the worship of money.

It's the connection to the work that happens to make that possible and why we feel certain people deserve the bucket and the other people deserve the crumbs. That's right. And it's like conversely, if you were to think about, what if we invested in making care jobs, great jobs that earned really great salaries and that people aspired to do that had paid time off

and benefits and real economic security, you would not only benefit the workers and their families who do this work, but then you would support all of the working family caregivers and parents who rely on this workforce to go to work. And then you would support the kids who are being cared for by them. The older adults who are being supported, the people with disabilities who are able to actually live full lives because they have the supports and the services they need. It's like a win, win, win, win effect when you invest in caregivers and you support caregivers. It's like the best economic choice you can make. And somehow it's like the choice that never rises to the top of the priority. But that is, I think, what

our generation is going to change. There is no way. Like, even take the pot squad, if all of us actually picked up the phone and told our care stories, the way Sarah called in her story, Sarah called in her story to every member of Congress that represents us and says, we need you to make care a priority. We want child care. We want paid family, medical leave. We want aging and disability care. There is no way that all of us who are affected if we actually told our stories, we are a majority of this country.

We are the most powerful force for change in the history of the United States. We are the caring majority. There's nothing we couldn't win. Yeah. Do you know what annoys me though? Because I just like to take a hopeful moment and just be unhopeful.

Tell me. Okay. So even that, which we're gonna do, obviously, I'm in in great, but even that annoys me because it's like Now the women who are doing all the care I know have to care for the country by making all these phone calls, but the dudes Need this care also. We're already care taking now. Okay, real quick. We'll take care of the country by doing this because we need Child care no, no like my sister always says, it's not a women's issue, it's a human rights issue for all of us.

So are you seeing men getting that or still fixing this women's work? Well, I would say both. I would say more men are getting it. More men are actually getting engaged in caregiving, and more men who are elected officials are starting to lead on these issues. So the leader of the aging and disability care bill that we worked on is Senator Casey from Pennsylvania. Congressman Gomez from California actually created a dad's caucus of dads who are fighting

for paid leave policies and other policies. Actually this is really worth saying because the thing that we've heard is that caregivers don't believe that anything can change. And in the last three years we have seen so much change that it has to give us hope. So the president of the United States, who himself was a single parent when he lost his wife and his kid. And he also helped to care for his aging parents. He has made care one of the four core pillars of his economic agenda, not the women's agenda where it usually is.

Not the aging agenda, the economic agenda, and it isn't just child care. It isn't just paid family and medical leave. It's actually all the care and the policies we need. And it's not saying you can have this, but not this. It's actually saying we recognize that a whole infrastructure is needed to support caregiving in our families. So here's what we want to do. And a big part of that priority is making care jobs, living wage jobs with benefits so that people can take care of themselves and their families too as they do this work. That has never happened

before in our country. That's the national agenda from the White House right now. The Vice President of the United States, when she was a senator, was the lead sponsor of the domestic worker's Bill of Rights in Senate. So we've got people in pretty powerful places. They just need our flank right now. And then we need more of them. So any of you pod squadders who want to run for office, look me up. Yes.

I can help. Because we need more people to run and to champion these issues. OK, so if any pod squadders want to run for office, they can contact you. Absolutely. Absolutely. We support all kinds of people who want to champion care. If every woman who was doing her entire shift at work and then doing the invisible six

hour shift at night for the kids and then doing her four hour shift for her parents, we're to stop doing that, stop doing her other two shifts shift for her parents. We're to stop doing that, stop doing her other two shifts, and everybody did it. We would have a political response because the country would be in crisis. And it wouldn't be out of like good care and leadership. It would be because the governments, the state and federal government would say,

holy shit, we have a crisis that we need to address and allocate with dollars the same way we address other crises. But because women won't let their shit fall apart because to be human is to care and we care for our humans, there is a not a crisis point except individually in our lives when we don't have the use and enjoyment of our lives because we're so strong out. So since we can't make that happen and we have to advocate to giving us what we deserve, what are the ways Sarah's life will change if these policy priorities of the president are enacted? Like what tangibly in her life will change? So for one, if she needed to take time off

to take care of her aging parent, say they had a stroke or they had to have a procedure and they were coming home and they needed extra supports, she could take time off from work if she had paid family and medical leave and what we've been fighting for is 12 weeks paid family medical leave. We actually got a bill passed through the house that included four weeks paid family medical leave. It didn't make it through the Senate and what we want is 12, a minimum of 12, but she could do that. And then she would have the assurance

that she wouldn't have to pay more than 7% of her income on childcare. So it would just make childcare much more affordable. And it would be the kinds of infrastructure for childcare like if she worked odd hours, if she was an essential worker, and had to work at night, that there would be a set of daycare centers or some options for her to be able to compensate someone to help her with that care while she's at work. And then,

if for her parent who was aging, it would ensure that she wouldn't have to wait on a long waiting list to get access to home-based care through the Medicaid program. If she was eligible for Medicaid, she would be able to have access to home care and she would know that the home care worker who's coming to provide support for her parent is also being paid a living wage and has the kinds of training and support that allow her to sustain in this job. So that's the kind of difference. Now, would it be perfect? No, because we have to figure out, we've never had a care infrastructure in this country. And so we're going to have to kind of build it and iterate and learn and improve and modernize. And this is why I always compare care to infrastructure because it's like, we know that when it comes to bridges and roads that they need upkeeping, they need modernization, they need maintenance, they need a whole construction workforce

who can come in and do that work and that it's skilled work and they're compensated for that work. And the same thing is true with care. It's like we need policies that keep getting updated and modernized based off of our changing needs as families. We know that there's going to have to be a workforce in place and that that workforce should be compensated and supported. And then there's all these other systems and policies that we need to put into place. And it doesn't replace just like, you know, you can assemble a community to like carpool to work.

It doesn't replace the fact that you need a bridge and a road and a bridge and a road that's up kept. You know, that's like maintained well. Just like we can assemble our care squads, which we should talk about because it's really important that Sarah, you have your care squad in place and you have the support that you need. It doesn't replace the fact that we need these policies and that infrastructure underneath us to support our families. So, I have two questions. All of these pods waters who are calling us and saying they're taking care of their older

appearance. How are they doing it? If they're on these long wait lists, are all of these women just figuring out on their own how to care for aging people with dementia? Are they just doing it on their own? Yeah, almost 16 million of them are just caring for people with dementia or Alzheimer's, almost 16 million. And they're doing it on top of taking care of their kids. I mean, and everything else, it's so much.

And we don't have a conversation about it in public ever. And so oftentimes people are kind of just trying to figure it out on their own, maybe through some Facebook support groups or some communities have caregiver support groups, but it's really, really hard. I mean, just that disease is brutal because you're just watching your loved one disappear right before your eyes every single day, but they're still there. It's just such a brutal disease. I don't know how people are doing it. And in fact,

my friend Richard Louis made a documentary called Unconditional about caring for his dad with Alzheimer's and the kind of mental and emotional health issues that he dealt with and how he started to connect with other caregivers around this and I just think it's so important and for the pod squatters out there who are like there's no time for me. I think the main thing I would say is, I don't know how many of you watch the show, this is us, I was a big fan. The final season, there was a very powerful caregiving storyline when the matriarch of the family who's played by Mandy Moore is diagnosed with Alzheimer's. And the Thanksgiving episode, she calls the whole family together

and she gives them a speech about basically about how she wants to be cared for. And one of the things she says is, you will not diminish your dreams or your life because of this disease, this illness, this thing that's happening to me. And I think that that's like something we forget when we're in the chaos of caregiving is like, actually, we are our parents' legacies and they don't want us to get small or to get sad or to get depleted because of the disease, they want us to live. Is it possible that even considering

that caring for a person is a diminishing of life? Is it possible that that's even our framing of like that? It's because we don't value care that we say don't diminish your life by caring for me. Like what I want to say to Pod Squad is when I think about a woman, I haven't hit that yet. But when I think about a woman who's caring for their aging parent, and in the same home is caring for their children and is trying to figure out do I be a good daughter or do I be a good mother? Because certainly these women's children's lives are being affected by caring for the

older parent. I mean, I can't think of a more, you know, horrific and hard, but also more important use of a life. That's right. How could that possibly be diminished? What else is there? What's more human and like at the end of my life, I hope to God that I have cared for the people that I love well. And anything else is like, do you know what I'm saying about? I know exactly what you're saying.

You're doing actually what matters most. Yeah. Yes. And I'm sure it's harder than anything in the world, but what could possibly be more honorable, important and a better legacy? It is that that is exactly right. And I think that we have to also have other inputs and yes, and I think each of us has to spend the time to think about what those inputs are that nourish us because as much as caregiving should be nourishing and is sometimes nourishing and always meaningful, it can also be very exhausting and depleting. And so we have to find ways to regenerate.

And all those ways are possible. It's different for every person, but I think it's equally as important to make the space for that and to live outside of caregiving too, while acknowledging how important a part of life caregiving is. How do they do that? Because I want to talk about how we make the calls, we do the things to change the systems. And then in the meantime, what is a care squad? How do people make their lives livable? What is this oxygen mask of which everyone is always speaking? Is this the care squad?

always speaking, is this the care squad? I think so. I think care squad is part of it. And so when I say care squad, I mean, everyone probably has somebody in their life that they go to when there's a crisis and they know that that person is going to show up and show up well. And then there's a different person maybe when you need to really be listened to and really heard. Maybe there's a different person for when you need like sage advice to hear the thing that nobody else wants to say or you know there's different and to actually be intentional about who all of those people are, maybe even make a list, and proactively reach out to them and say,

I'm caring for a spouse who's really depressed or who's in recovery or who, you know, whatever it may be, and I'm gonna need my squad. And you're a really important part of my squad, and I just wanna give you a heads up. And there's maybe nothing to do right now, but I'm just putting like the squad alert out. And then it's like you're giving people this incredible opportunity to show up for you which is such a gift. I think a lot of us feel like, I don't want to, you know, ask for too much or be a burden. And I think it's like, it's a huge gift to give

somebody to help them care for the caregiver. And then I think there's probably also individual stuff like I need 10 different inputs a day in order to just maintain a baseline of functionality. I have an emotional support dog. I have therapy. I have a coach, I have my palaton, I do meditation and yoga. And on any given day, I have to do at least half of those things just to maintain a combination of figuring out what those things are for you. And then also building out your squad to be like, okay, these are the people I need and make it self conscious. Glen, and one thing I was thinking when you were talking about how dignified that use of a life is, is to, you know, be able to care for the people you love the most. I was thinking, and yet still, that's a privilege. life is to be able to care for the people you love the most.

I was thinking, and yet still that's a privilege. Like an exotic, ridiculous, awful privilege. But like that assumes that you don't have to be out of your house for 12 hours a day, working, a shift. And the people who do have to do that still have the parents and the children. And so it's just like some people don't even have access to the opportunity to do the impossible, awful, beautiful work of caring for people. And so really, it's about value and and dollars, which is about power and freedom to make the decisions as to what you choose to be the highest, most dignified use of your life. I'm wondering, I, Jen, if you will take us to when you were working at the hotline, and you discovered that this work was your life's work,

and the connections you made in that time. Yeah, so when I was in college, I wanted to get involved in the Asian community in New York City. And so I started to volunteer at the New York Asian Women's Shelter, which is a domestic violence shelter for Asian immigrant women. I saw a post that they needed bilingual hotline volunteers. And because my grandparents raised me,

I am bilingual and Mandarin, great gift that they gave me, even though I speak Mandarin like a ten-year-old, I could still manage all I'm, at least feeling the initial calls. And so I signed up, got trained as a volunteer and on the overnight shifts, I was just like so, so deeply moved and in a way kind of taken off guard

by the calls that came in. I was prepared for calls that would come in about surviving violence, but I was not prepared for all the calls that were just about surviving. And it was just about how do I pay the bills now? How do I get my kid into the right childcare given my work hours? And I have nobody else know back up. I'm just on my own like in this new strange community. Or, you know, what do I do when the numbers just don't add up? Right?

You're working 12 hour days, but the cost of child care is 3,000 a month and the cost of food is X and the cost of your kids, and you've done everything right, and you still can't make it work. The numbers are anything else. And so I think I was just so shocked by the cruelty of, how could it be that there's so many people who, especially women who are doing everything right? And it's still not working. They can't take care of their kids, which is their number one priority, the focal point of their life.

They can't take care of their kids, and they're working really hard. And many of them as caregivers, it just like, it just didn't add up for me. So I decided to try to figure out why there's so many women working in jobs that don't pay enough to pay the bills. And then a lot of those jobs ended up in the care economy, which by the way is like this part of the economy where all these people who don't have a lot of power are concentrated, right? It's like women, women of color, people with disabilities, older people, children, talk about the aggregation of a lot of people who don't have a lot of political power. It's really in care.

So that's kind of what led me into the world of care, trying to figure out how care becomes more available to women, especially single moms, and then how the caregivers also get care. It's kind of how I ended up here. What is helpful for single moms? What do single moms need? Single moms need affordable, quality, child care.

And that is the thing. I mean, right now, we've actually shown that we can build it. The US military actually has a pretty great childcare program where military families can get access to universal childcare. It has some gaps and people are trying to fix it right now, but it's a pretty great model for what really all of us should have access to. They have lots of options for childcare and it's affordable, it's subsidized. And if you can afford more, you can pay a little bit more, but if you can't, then it'll be there for you

so you can work or serve in the military. And that's kind of what we need for everyone, especially single parents. And you know the reason why they have that is because it's mission critical. The reason why they built that is not because they're sweet. It's because that they can't do their ultimate mission unless that exists. And the problem that we have right now is we have a failure to understand

that as a society, this shit is mission critical. Mission critical. That's right. Care is mission critical. We're not asking for this because it would be a nice thing to do for the ladies. We're asking for this is because all the other shit you guys want.

Oh, you don't want elderly people on the street. You don't want kids who don't have care and are roaming the streets. Like that is mission critical. And the only reason we don't have it is because the assumption and the faith that we're going to keep doing this shit on our own backs for no dollars until we hurt ourselves and our souls, that we are willing to not live our lives to do your job that is mission critical to your society.

Amen. That's exactly it. So what do we do, Ajahn? Let's say you had a million pods, Quattar's listening to you who are now all fired up because of you and sister, and I seriously going to have to send sister support after this. Sister is firing me up. I'm so excited about this. And many of your number one spokesperson from now. I don't know. I don't have a lot of fuxx when you go in front of Congress. I don't know. You're too far. You can.

I say it all the time. Oh, good, good, good. Also, it is annoying that the people who you have just said have the least political power are once again having to be the ones that come together to insist upon what Sister just said. So also, men, it would be wonderful if this were not just a women's issue as in everything else if they, if they behaved as if this would apply to them.

So that, and then for the, for other people, what do we do, I, Jen, I mean, I can't imagine an issue that's more important to me, my heart. What would you ask us to do? We have a really big moment ahead of us. 2024 is a big, big election year. And, you know, care thus far, we've come a really long way in the pandemic because everybody kind of dealt with a version of the care crisis inside of their own homes. And all of a sudden we kind of realized this is so broken.

And so I feel like we've kind of moved the conversation where people are not like, you know what, it's not just on me. We need policies, we need systems, we need programs, but we haven't yet asked the kind of transformational legislation that we need. And we came so close, which makes me think we can do it. 2024, if we show up to vote and make it a number one issue of this election coming up in 2025. It has to be number one priority for the new Congress. That's the two-year plan, Potsquad. So next year we're going to have to really have our voices heard. We're going to have to make sure that And we all see the candidates who are running for office around like they show up at the parades

and at the county fairs and at the fish fries and we have to show up and we have to ask a question. What are you gonna do to make child care affordable and accessible for all of us? What are you gonna do to make sure we have paid family and medical leave? What are you gonna do to make sure we have paid family medical leave? What are you going to do to make sure we have home care? Ask those questions every chance you get, because literally they have

staff who are keeping a tally of who's asking about what issues, and that becomes the priorities for their campaign agendas. And then talk to your local press, like, write an op-ed for your local newspaper or call your local radio station and tell your story about care and why you think these policies should be a priority. That is actually how we change the media narrative is by making the media pay attention to our stories and what matters to us. And 2024 is going to be a year where the media is going to be listening for what matters to voters and what candidates are doing to respond to those cries for help. And then finally, I think most of us, I mean, talk about a

kitchen table conversation in the homes of voters. There's not a kitchen table in America where people aren't talking about care. But the thing that we haven't done is help people connect the dots between their personal experiences and the act of voting and policy change. There really are policies that can change our ability to take care of the people that we love. That's what we're fighting to build. And so we have to help voters know that that's the case. And them showing up to vote really matters to whether or not we're able to get the care that we need. So just pods, quads responsible for helping everyone in the community connect those dots and for telling our shared care story which is that we're doing too much on our own. We need these systems. We need an infrastructure to support us. And that's why these conversations are also important because that's

how it all starts with women too. It's these consciousness raising conversations groups where and two, it's these consciousness raising conversations groups where like pod squatters right now who are you know teachers single parents women raising kids with special needs nannies all of these people for whom the life seems impossible and then they're too busy to have conversations with anybody about it so they think that they're failing they think something's wrong with them and it. So they think that they're failing. They think something's wrong with them. And it's true that there's nothing wrong with you. Absolutely. The system you are leaving living in who have it's not created the streets and bridges that you need to have a full life. That's right. Exactly. And not only is the system failing you, the system is actually exploiting you. Right. The system hasn't just failed to provide what you need.

The system has in fact failed to provide what you need precisely because the system has decided to just exploit you instead. Yeah. It's like we're the family member who just always does all the shit. So nobody else does their stuff and you're like just tell Susie to do it.

We are Susie. And that's not to say that you don't have the love and the dignity and you want to do it. It's not to say your exploitation is contrary to what your mission on Earth is. It just means that if you choose to do that with your life, you should not have to sacrifice the remainder of your life and all of your sanity the remainder of your life

and all of your sanity and all of your resources and all of your time. Yeah. So Ajahn Poo, will you come back next year and just keep us focused on this as we get those into the elections? I want it to. Stay focused on this.

We want to be having the right conversations. And by the way, if you are a person who is not working You know 15 hours a day and doesn't have a parent at home with dementia and two special needs kids and is a teacher in a nurse What and you have time? What an amazing use of privilege to because a lot of the people who are Most need this don't have the time. be having the conversations, to be calling politicians. So if we do have the time, that is the use of privilege that makes a difference. Absolutely. It's all hands on deck.

And if you do have the time, we can certainly use your help. And you should know that this movement is growing. I mean, more and more of us are just saying enough, enough. We're taking matters into our own hands. And we are so, so powerful. We can change it all. And we just have to decide we're going to do it. I believe, I believe in you. I believe in us. We can do hard things. Pod Squad. We will hear from Igen again and again and again and we are with you. We love you. The main message of this pod squad. Say it again. It is not you. It is them. That is my message of accountability. We love you. We love you, Karen Givers. We love you Sarah. So lift you up, Karen Givers.

All the Sarah's who are listening. It feels impossible because it's impossible. You are doing hard things. And I, Jen, and the rest of us now are fighting with her for you. Yeah. We love you. Bye. Following the pod helps you because you'll never miss an episode and it helps us because you'll never miss an episode. To do this, just go to the We Can Do Hard Things Show page on Apple podcasts, Spotify,

Odyssey or wherever you listen to podcasts, and then just tap the plus sign in the upper right-hand corner or click on Follow. This is the most important thing for the pod. While you're there, if you'd be willing to give us a 5-star rating and review and share an episode you loved with the friend, we would be so grateful. We appreciate you very much. We can do hard things, is produced in partnership with Keynes 13 Studios.

I give you Tish Melton and Brandy Carlyle. review, Tish Melton and Bradley Carlyle. I walked through a fire I came out the other side. I chased as I er, I made sure I got one's mind And I continue to believe That I'm the one for me And because I'm mine, I want the line the line. Cause we're adventurers in heartbreak. So now a final destination.

Can I stop asking directions? Some places they've never been And to be loved we need to be known We'll finally find our way back home And through the joy and pain That our life's spring We can do a heartache I hit rock bottom, it felt like a brand new star

a brand new star I'm not the problem sometimes things fall apart and I continue to believe the best people are free and it took some time But I'm finally fine Cause we're adventurers and heartbreak So man, a final destination

With that we stopped asking directions A final destination will happen We stopped asking directions Some places they've never been Come to be loved, we need to be known We'll finally find our way back home And through the joy and pain That our lives bring We can do a heartache This world finished her rose and heart breaks on my mind. We might get lost but we're only in that

Stopped asking directions Some places may have never been And to be loved we need to be known We'll finally find our way back home Through the joy and pain That our lives breathe We can do hard things Yeah, we can do the hard things

you