Composing a Life

dangerous, really psychotic, and you wonder how the resident could possibly have missed it. Sometimes you have to follow a patient or hold their hand, and there are some people you just can’t let walk out of there because you just know they are going right down the tubes. Some residents were fabulous caretakers and you never had to say another word, but some, no matter what you told them, they didn’t have the foggiest idea about taking care of an ER patient. All you really needed to know was if somebody was in trouble. The rest was gobbledygook. Well, that’s too reductionist, but there’s an element of truth in that. I actually gave some residents a hard time around their inability to take care of people. The bottom line is that there are people who are good caretakers and some that you wouldn’t want taking care of your horse.”
    Today there are many people who decide not to have children, but this decision does not need to mean turning away from caring, as it does not for the Little Sisters of the Assumption at Project Hope. A more important question is whether an individual has had the opportunities to practice caregiving that can provide a frame of reference for less direct kinds of caring in the future. Girls are encouraged to imagine themselves into maternal and caretaking roles; boys have less opportunity for this kind of exploration unless they have younger siblings. Once upon a time, too, the work that men did contributed directly to caretaking: hunting trips that took men away from their families had a very direct connection with the sharing of food, and the battles that men fought carried a direct sense of protection. Today, the associations between jobs done by men and women and their care for their families are more obscure.
    There has been a great deal of discussion of the need for fathers to be more directly involved in childcare, but the actual division of labor will always vary from family to family according to the needs and abilities of the family members. Still, caretaking, in its many forms, can be part of the composition of every life, and it is important to give everyone the chance to learn to care for another. Some children learn to attend to the needs of others by having pets; parents learn from each other and from their sons and daughters, if they let themselves, garnering knowledge they will use long after the childbearing years; the childless can seek out children to spend time with, building an awareness that can flow over into their other relationships. Ellen and I both had children rather late, and both of us made a point of finding children to be friends with during our childless years. Alice has never had a child of her own, but she seeks out friendships with children, Jack’s daughters and mine, and even younger children. With children she becomes involved in their fantasies; listening to Alice talk to a teenager gives me a sense of how she supports and encourages her engineers and software designers.
    As we look ahead to longer and increasingly discontinuous lives, through which we can expect to move, from place to place and from task to task, it is clear that the congruence of different tasks, the recognition that a particular skill can be applied in the new context, is what makes the transfer of learning possible. Attention and empathy are skills, rather than biological givens for all women. Caring can be learned by all human beings, can be worked into the design of every life, meeting an individual need as well as a pervasive need in society. We need attention and empathy in every context where we encounter other living beings, and we need them to foster and protect all that we care for, laboratories and factories as well as homes and neighborhoods, fields and woodlands as well as nations and the peaceful relations between them.

NINE
MULTIPLE LIVES

    A ROW OF PORTRAITS of previous presidents of Spelman hangs on Johnnetta’s dining-room wall. It begins with the faces of four unmarried white women, devout Protestant ladies from New England. Their lives represent the tradition that women must choose between careers and domesticity—the old idea that it is not possible to be both a good wife and mother and also a scholar or a leader or a creative artist, even though it may be necessary to be a laborer or a menial. But the forced choice between intimacy and achievement is not limited to women. The continuing insistence on clerical celibacy by the Catholic Church reflects