isn't it strange
on dented can deals, childcare and buying the ineffable
Dear friends and comrades,
As I begin to have more time when other people do childcare for my child, I’m thinking about what it means to exchange one existence for another. I’m thinking about what it means to trade. Trading includes an assumption that the things being traded have equal value—right? As I look into paying someone to spend time with my child, it feels extremely gross to negotiate a price for that. And yet it feels essential to price a caregiver’s time in order to dignify and respect the value of someone else’s attention and care.
My partner and I have a joke about how he’s always looking for the fanciest version of something and I’m always looking for a deal. (Usually this is about groceries, though I did recently put in a couple extra hours of time to go across town to get a cheap used stroller.) When we talk about paying for childcare, though, I’m not seeking bargain-basement prices. My acculturation under capitalism makes me suspicious of the cheap when it comes to care — my bias is that the cheapest childcare will not be great. Unlike my enthusiasm for, say, the dented can of artichokes or expired marmalade at Marshalls, I don’t feel excited about taking the childcare other people have left behind or considered not good enough.
Some of this has to do with the fact that I am new at this (parenting). I don’t consider myself any authority in childcare, so I don’t feel well equipped to assess whether an option others have discarded as insufficient is sufficient for me (like the marmalade). But my suspicion is that my lack of desire for a deal is most influenced by the fact that we’re talking about the cultivation and care of a body— I seek out a higher-priced version of a thing when I consider that thing to reproduce the immeasurable, ie, in the case of childcare, to keep life alive.
When it comes to putting prices on what we tend to think of as immeasurable, I’m reminded most of Sophia Giovannitti’s book Working Girl, in which she compares selling art and selling sex to theorize how to value and treasure things under capitalism while still respecting one’s own time, labor and need for an income. It will probably surprise no close reader of mine that what I like most about Giovannitti’s thinking is her interest in subsuming herself honestly unto capitalism instead of pretending she can get outside of it. Giovannitti describes how we consider both art and sex “priceless” as a way of valuing them—and thus damn ourselves to endless cycles of inflating or unfairly valuing the labor that goes into these.
In my friend Ayden’s thoughtful review of Giovannitti’s book, Ayden writes: “And with so much stigma and risk associated with sex work, who wouldn’t want to categorically circumvent those and call what they do art?”
Which helps me ask: With so much stigma and risk associated with mothering, who wouldn’t want to categorically circumvent those and call what they do art? (ie, priceless?)
Sure, it is a little weird of me to compare mothering and sex work, but this is how my mind works. I use thinking I have done before or have come across to help me think about new conditions I encounter. I assume there are no new conditions, and there must be some structures already in existence that can (intellectually, socially) guide my encounter.
Giovannitti helps me here because she warns me against calling relational labor “art” to remove it from a marketplace. Instead, I participate in the marketplace while knowing the market is an insufficient value system for everything occurring inside it (art, sex and childcare included). There is a market, and there is also the ineffable, and they overlap. Childcare, in this market, can be both commodified and sacred.
My thinking about this has been following me around. How do I care also for my own body in ways that are both commodified and ineffable? For example: I have been lifting weights as part of an attempt to be with my body postpartum, trying to be more comfortable without necessarily trying to modify or trim my shape. My partner gifted me a few personal training sessions with the brilliant Alexis Kyle Mitchell (more in collaboration with Alexis coming soon!) who works as a trainer in addition to as an artist and scholar. At the end of our final session, Alexis and I were discussing the intimacy of a training session, and Alexis shared that many of her clients are or have become friends, as Alexis and I have become.
“I mean, this should obviously be a free service for everyone,” she said.
“Well, sure” I rushed to say, “but your time should be valued.”
I liked the way Alexis shrugged in response, a shrug that could be a perfect review of Giovannitti’s book. Alexis gets paid to do something as a job that is physically intimate, and I am happy she gets paid for it so that she can keep living, so that she can keep being the person she is. That shrug of hers also knows it’s only a job because we live in the exchange system that we do. That it could also be otherwise, but only under different conditions.
Since those conditions are very far from our reality, we work with these. We shrug and grumble and gift and bargain. We try to give our loved ones as much as we can, within the conditions we have, knowing that all of our relationships are of course warped and shape-shifted by the money and structures they move through.
Before I leave you, another form of structure and warp: I recently finished reading my friend Harriet’s exquisite novel The Hill, which you should preorder right now if you haven’t already. With her mother imprisoned, the main character, Suzanna, offers her presence up as a visitor to the prison. She offers her body up for relationship (with her mother, grandparents, and a constellation of other kin and strangers) while also firmly withholding aspects of self. This character is very familiar with what it means to show up for others. Yet to each of these others, she remains also firmly opaque.
I’ve never seen a book portray the estranged interiority of a helpful child in such a poignant, precise way. Suzanna keeps something back, always, something that becomes the book’s narration even as she herself does not seem to own it as an identity. She is hilarious and strange—strange because she is defamiliarized from each of the social codes (family, prison, school) that shape her life. Loyal to — but defamiliarized from.
I loved being inside of Harriet’s book because it felt so broadly applicable to how to stay alive in un-ideal conditions. Loyal but defamiliarized. Loyal to our relationships, even as they are interfered with by economic, political and structural realities. Defamiliarized from said realities just enough to find humor in their corrupting, horrifying, grief-filled strangeness. May we all find the right amount of strangeness to survive.
Thank you for reading,
Leora