Susan Semaan

There’s so much to say about this year. There’s so many things that have been absurd or difficult or a silver lining or a lesson or something that deserves remarking on. There’s so many people who deserve to be recognised (front line health care workers, home-schooling parents, people who lost their jobs, people who lost loved ones … the list goes on) and that’s without getting into the specifics of every single place that suffered through the blows of 2020 in its own unique ways. On the personal level, there are so many lessons I’ve learned and realisations that I’ve had and problematic things that I’ve witnessed. Where to even start? For me, though, there is one big thing that I want to comment on at the end of 2020.

This year, more than any other, seemed to shout about the value of care. It provoked an obsessive fixation on home life, unsurprisingly since we spent the whole time stuck at home. It prompted a lot of hand-wringing about childcare, as parents were shoved into home-schooling roles and familiar gendered-divison-of-labour questions cropped up. And it generated a lot of poetic musings on the importance of family, as we became increasingly reliant on our co-inhabitants to keep us sane. There was also a tremendous amount of collective care fatigue. My Twitter feed all of a sudden started placing first-hand accounts of health care workers at the top, recounting how exhausted they were from fighting COVID-19. This fight was made particularly exhausting by a lack of support: in the UK, where I now live, that showed up most dramatically in the absence of funding and resources for the National Health Service (NHS). In the US, COVID skepticism hit the hardest. This kind of care fatigue did not reach me personally, but it was tragic to observe.

Other kinds of care fatigue were also commonplace. Everyone seemed to get a little tired of cooking and eating, as the effort of preparing, consuming, and tidying up multiple meals a day started to add up. Tending our own family or co-habiting relationships seemed like work, also: getting along with a partner or a roommate that you were sharing a small apartment with was a lot more difficult when 40+ hours of office time was shifted to home. And this is to say nothing of the endless social media content that flashed before my eyes about the fatigue of homeschooling, stay-at-home-mothering, or skyrocketing rates of postpartum depression and anxiety. There were also myriad other kinds of suffering and fatigue, of course. My selection here leans into the moodiness that characterised 2020 for people who had job security, reasonably good health, and safe homes. And today, as I say goodbye to the year, I feel deeply grateful to be in all those categories. I’m grateful to have commonplace care fatigue problems.

That doesn’t stop me from being sort of amazed at the way the weight of care has landed. We’ve all been a little shocked at how much work is involved in just keeping ourselves and our families balanced and well when we don’t have entire infrastructures of other people to help us do it. It tells us something that we’ve all been so blindsided by this. That we’re overwhelmed by providing care. That we find it exhausting and depressing and demoralising. (And occasionally life-changing and profound and beautiful, of course, but mostly the other stuff). And, most simply, that we are not doing most of it. That we are distributing most of it across structures that benefit us.

This does NOT mean I think those structures are beyond critique! Childcare, schools, domestic labor … all these things fail people/families/parents in loads of ways and can be improved. I am not telling people to stop complaining, no matter how privileged they are or how much excellent support they have to meet the caring needs of their households. Keep complaining and agitating for better support, from peers, partners, communities, governments, whoever you can think of to implicate. BUT. When we agitate, let’s make sure everyone knows how much work it is to keep it all together. Care takes a lot out of us, a lot of intelligence and planning as well as a lot of physical effort and energy and a lot of experience and wisdom. Care is not easy! It is not a thing for people to do if they aren’t smart/privileged/motivated/whatever enough to do ‘hard’ things like have managerial-level or intellectually stimulating jobs. Care is hard! And my wish for 2021 is that everyone who felt exhausted by keeping their household running this year remembers that. Care deserves respect. A lot more respect than it has been getting.