Composing a Life

old, ‘James James Morrison Morrison,” to take care of his mother, but we are largely blind to caretaking by children and often miss the mutual caretaking of men in mines and foxholes. When Johnnetta walks in the morning, she is taking care of herself by dealing with the stress that goes with her job and taking care of her students by giving them a useful model. She is also caring for an idea, the idea of young black women striding out into their lives, limber and free. Coming to New York to care for a hospitalized son could be seen as a distraction from her professional commitment, but in fact it provides a symbolic refocusing of the other kinds of care, a style of response and commitment learned over a lifetime. Being a mommy is part of being a good president.
    Ellen is the only one of the women I worked with who formally belongs to one of the caretaking professions. Our conversations often turned on alternative modes of caretaking, especially during the months when she was reconstructing her professional life around the care of a first and then a second child. Even the field of psychotherapy is divided on issues of how much care is needed and when, who may give it and what can be achieved by it. When Ellen was practicing as a psychotherapist, she was seeing patients once or twice a week, but analysts often see patients daily. Psychoanalysis is an intensive, skilled, and very expensive form of care or training; one of the principal thrusts in mental health has been to find briefer and less labor-intensive forms of treatment.
    It struck me, talking to Ellen, that the number of patients an analyst can treat intensively is not that different from the number of family members a full-time homemaker can care for. The model on which the traditional family is based is comparable to the most expensive and intense forms of professional care we have in our society, but it leaves out a readiness and a responsibility to take care of others that is spread throughout society. Johnnetta doesn’t need to be imprisoned by the care of one family, for her care and commitment reach more widely. But the particular commitments within her family inform everything else she does. She joked that there would be some in Atlanta who would be reassured to hear she was in New York with Che; she simultaneously wondered whether the same people would hold it against her.
    How much care is needed and how much human effort needs to go into caretaking? There is no way to compute it, for the meaning of the word “care” is endlessly ambiguous: it has one meaning in a hotel and another in a hospital, one in a day-care center and another in a university. There are different needs for care between infants and adults, healthy and well, and great differences are made by training, skill, and equipment. Part of our blindness comes from the fact that in some situations, the need for care is urgent because of accident or earlier neglect; in others, invisible care routinely given has meant that no need is ever apparent. Any computation of dollars or numbers for such a spectrum is nonsense, but the image of the songbirds stands as a reminder that caretaking is essential to survival, while the connection between the number of eggs and the hours of daylight poses a question of the underlying mathematics of human caring. For human beings, “caring for” means far more than hunting for worms for a nestful of squawking fledglings; it emerges in every activity, from electrical engineering to bookkeeping to farming.
    Today, we all risk being without needed care at some crucial moment, or of suffering from the effects on others of insufficient care. At one time, many men could assume that their wives would devote their lives to caring for them and their children; the elderly could once count on the care of their adult daughters and sons (or the sons’ wives). Now, the problems of giving and receiving needed care force everyone to improvisation and patchwork. For all our elaboration of professional forms of caretaking, caretaking is necessarily dispersed through the society. It is a skill that everyone can usefully learn, practiced mutually, necessary both in the workplace and at home, and no longer attached to a fixed set of roles. When Joan and I were taping interviews, Erik developed a ritual of bringing us tea—caring for us but also soliciting care, checking in with Joan for reassurance about the plans of the day.
    Homemaking can be done in tandem, but