Essential Labor

Mothering as Social Change

Angela Garbes

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780062937360
• eBook ISBN: 9780062937384
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Biografie in ambito medico

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

“Angela Garbes has given us the definitive explanation for something we all share: the sense that something is not right about our society’s treatment of parenting. Essential Labor is a beautifully written, painstakingly researched, and courageously personal book. Garbes reveals the way systems exploit caregiving and shows us how the essential work of mothering can fix not just family life, but society. A timely and unforgettable book.”—Heather McGhee, New York Times bestselling author of The Sum of Us

From the acclaimed author of Like a Mother comes a reflection on the state of caregiving in America, and an exploration of mothering as a means of social change.

The Covid-19 pandemic shed fresh light on a long-overlooked truth: mothering is among the only essential work humans do. In response to the increasing weight placed on mothers and caregivers—and the lack of a social safety net to support them—writer Angela Garbes found herself pondering a vital question: How, under our current circumstances that leave us lonely, exhausted, and financially strained, might we demand more from American family life? 

In Essential Labor, Garbes explores assumptions about care, work, and deservedness, offering a deeply personal and rigorously reported look at what mothering is, and can be. A first-generation Filipino-American, Garbes shares the perspective of her family's complicated relationship to care work, placing mothering in a global context—the invisible economic engine that has been historically demanded of women of color. 

Garbes contends that while the labor of raising children is devalued in America, the act of mothering offers the radical potential to create a more equitable society. In Essential Labor, Garbes reframes the physically and mentally draining work of meeting a child's bodily and emotional needs as opportunities to find meaning, to nurture a deeper sense of self, pleasure, and belonging. This is highly skilled labor, work that impacts society at its most foundational level.

Part galvanizing manifesto, part poignant narrative, Essential Labor is a beautifully rendered reflection on care that reminds us of the irrefutable power and beauty of mothering.

Part I

A Personal History of Mothering in America

The only way to survive is by taking care of one another.

—GRACE LEE BOGGS

1

Mothering as Survival

In March 2020, my daughters, five and two at the time, went to preschool every day. Our days began at 6:30 a.m. in a noisy, chaotic swirl of coffee grinding, diaper changing, egg frying, oatmeal simmering, dressing, undressing, crying, and redressing, shoelace tying, and coat zipping-up. In the wake, toys were left scattered across the living room and maple syrup stuck to the dining room table. My spouse dropped our kids off on his way to the office, though, so having doled out kisses and hugs by the front door, I was typically alone by 8:15. I enjoyed the silence, wondered how it was that I could feel so tired so early in the day. Then I’d head upstairs to our guest room, aka “my office,” where I worked on a book that I had been (mostly unsuccessfully) trying to write for two years.

Then the Covid-19 pandemic began. Lockdown changed the world and daily life as we knew it. Childcare centers, schools, offices, libraries, coffee shops, and friends’ homes closed to all of us overnight and indefinitely.

For the next four months, our family of four was together 24/7, mostly within the walls of our home. We knew little about the virus and how it was contracted, so we followed the advice we were given: we disinfected our groceries, washed and sanitized our hands until they were red and peeling. We went on daily walks and scooter rides during which the children instinctively led us to neighborhood parks where the swing sets and play structures stood ghostly empty, wrapped in yellow Caution tape. There were so many hours to fill each day, so much need, so much us.

During those early months, my daughters’ requirements were seemingly constant: three meals a day (plus snacks, always snacks), hours for physical play, piles of books to read aloud, at least four diaper changes. We did so much vulva and butt wiping those months that we vowed to turn quarantine summer into the season of potty training. During those months I was overwhelmed and clinically depressed, but things needed to get done. The kitchen sink was perpetually full of dishes; the laundry mountain grew every day.

My spouse and I know our professional work to be equally important. We spend an annoying amount of our time in logistical negotiations, discussing how to split domestic work equitably. Yet our new reality made clear the fact that my work, with its deadlines on the distant horizon, doesn’t provide us with a regular paycheck or health insurance. If I didn’t show up to my desk to write, no one would know—there were no consequences outside of my own psyche. But if my spouse failed to show up to the makeshift office he set up in our garage, the Uber, Lyft, and taxi drivers he was working with—mostly East African immigrants, nearly all of whom were suddenly out of work because no one was going anywhere—might not be able to access unemployment benefits. The results would be dire.

I am a woman of color, a writer, a mother. I don’t like the very gendered fact that I am dependent on my white husband’s salary, and I worry that it may take me a lifetime to undo the false notion that my work is somehow less valuable than his. Added to this long-standing issue was now the unfortunate fact that I could not seem to write anything during quarantine. It was impossible, without time and space and solitude, to get into the already elusive headspace I need to do deep, creative work.

In the fall of 2020, a New York Times survey found that among heterosexual couples working from home during the pandemic, men were more likely than women to work in a separate room or home office. “Women,” wrote Claire Cain Miller, “were more likely to work at the kitchen table, where they could be interrupted at any moment by children or household needs.”¹

My husband and I tag-team parented, a few hours on, a few hours off, a few hours together. When it was my turn to work, I closed the door to our guest bedroom and stared blankly at my computer screen, trying not to check daily infection rates. Inevitably, a child would breach the only two things protecting my solitude: the guest room door and a pair of noise-canceling headphones. It was inconceivable that I could write for one hour without disruption.

“More than in any other human relationship, overwhelmingly more, motherhood means being instantly interruptible,” wrote Tillie Olsen in 1968. “It is distraction, not meditation, that becomes habitual; interruption, not continuity.”²

Women are not innately better at caregiving than men. I am not more inclined or effective at it than my husband. What I found most troubling was realizing that I was the one allowing interruption to be habitual. That, it turns out, I had a hard time insisting upon my own time and space.

I took care of my daughters, shouldered a heavier load of domestic work, and tried to continue my writing—all while feeling that doing any of it well was impossible. Daily anxieties played out against the backdrop of America’s rising death toll, skyrocketing unemployment numbers, continued broadcast of murders of Black men and women and children, and climate crises that turned once sweltering states into surreal sheets of ice. As spring gave way to summer, we came back outside to meet our neighbors in the streets and protest. Walking in the sticky heat of the sun, among the bodies we’d been away from for so long, my emotions swelled with grief and fear that our country’s habits would never change.

I HAVE A NICE LIFE, one my parents say was made possible by the American Dream. But I am an American because of American imperialism.

My introduction to empire came in childhood, helping my mother pack and label balikbayan boxes for a trip back to the Philippines. Each member of our family was allotted two pieces of checked baggage; all children were expected to surrender at least one to a balikbayan box the size of the maximum space allowed by the airline. The balikbayan operation, which took over our living room for weeks, was one I had observed for years. I was thrilled to finally join the ritual, Tetris-like packing of enormous cardboard cubes filled with Reese’s Pieces, Nike sneakers, three-packs of Hane’s men’s briefs, boxes of Ziploc bags, Ferrero Rocher chocolates, and other items. All the gifts were crammed in amid hundreds of face towels and washcloths, bought in bulk at whatever department store had recently had a linen sale and exclusively for my paternal grandmother Ima, who sold them for profit at the supermarket she owned. The pasalubong was expected, my mom explained, given out of love and the financial success my parents had achieved abroad. At the time, I took it to mean we were giving our less fortunate Filipino relatives the American goods they could not afford otherwise.

After being filled and weighed, each balikbayan box was sealed and wrapped in packing tape, the screeching sound and chemical plastic smell of which filled the house. Cages of bright yellow or pink twine—for easy identification amid the sea of other boxes at baggage claim as well as easy lifting from the carousel—were knotted around them. Then our family name and address were written in foul-smelling black Sharpie on four sides of each box: Garbes Dizon Supermarket, MacArthur Highway, San Fernando, Pampanga. The road my grandparents lived and worked on is named after the American general whose decisions led to so much Philippine death and heartache during World War II.

I learned and memorized the proper spelling of the Philippines through labeling balikbayan boxes until my hand ached. It was an object lesson in the lasting effects of colonialism.

“Write PHILIP for the King of Spain,” my mom instructed me. “Then PINES, like the trees outside.” I found Spain on our globe afterward, unsure why our country on the other side of the world would be named for its king. Later I learned that in 1544, Spanish explorer Ruy López de Villalobos, having sailed across the Pacific from Mexico, claimed and named a few islands for his king. Eventually, this archipelago—comprised of more than seven thousand islands and over one hundred Indigenous ethnic groups with their own customs and languages—would be condensed into one country, now known as the Philippines.

YOU CAN SAY THAT MY parents came to America for a better life, and that they got one. In fact, they would be the first ones to say so. But that tidy narrative oversimplifies the story and fails to capture the geopolitical manipulations that shaped their paths.

My parents met in 1969 at Manila’s Philippine General Hospital. My mom was a quiet twenty-two-year-old nurse who kept her hair slicked neatly back in a ponytail at the nape of her neck; my dad was a medical student with a perpetually wrinkled lab coat, big lips, and a head of wild curls. My mom says her first impression of him was that he was a “slob.” Six months later they were married.

As the seventh of nine children, my mom was told that upon graduation she would work as a nurse in the United States and send money home to help her two younger sisters go to college. My father, the eldest of seven and the first person in his family to attend college, was instructed to study a profession he was expected to pursue for the rest of his life. Though my parents were not aware of it at the time, their decisions to work in health care and move to the United States were shaped and constrained by centuries of conquest, bloodshed, and American policy.

Prior to the passing of the US Immigration Act of 1965, also known as the Hart-Celler Act, which lifted quotas on visas for skilled workers from other countries, Filipino migration had been limited to just fifty visas a year. This was the lowest number allotted to any country in the world, a harsh reversal from the previous decades when Filipinos, called “U.S. Nationals” under American colonial rule, were able to travel freely throughout the United States and its territories. Filipino bodies—hands, backs, knees, minds, voices—have always been viewed as economic leverage for the United States.

The US government’s decision to allow an influx of Filipino workers such as my mother conveniently coincided with a nursing shortage in the United States. In the two decades following World War II, the rapid growth of hospitals, higher demand for health-care services, and creation of medical insurance made filling nursing positions across the country difficult. While hospital managers believed the shortage was caused by women leaving the workforce to care for their families, nurses stated that low wages and poor working conditions were to blame. They organized and advocated for better pay, but efforts stalled as nurses held little status within hospitals, and administrators opted to hire supporting workers—nurse aides and practical nurses, rather than registered nurses.³ Recruiting and bringing in a skilled foreign labor force, aided by the Hart-Celler Act, allowed hospital administrators to keep costs low.

My mother, a graduate of the colonial education system who spoke fluent English and held a brand-new nursing degree, qualified for immigration in 1970. My father, who never intended to leave the Philippines, reluctantly agreed to move to America for love. His medical degree made obtaining a visa relatively easy. My mother followed the path of many Filipina nurses before her—and tens of thousands after.

“Her story is a part of something larger, it is a part / of history,” poet Rick Barot writes of his grandmother’s journey from the Philippines to the United States many years before. With these words, I can grasp the magnitude of forces that sent my mother across the Pacific.

“Or, no, her story is separate / from the whole, as distinct as each person is distinct,” Barot goes on, and I see my mother—a brave individual in a foreign country, with a new husband, and a burgeoning sense of self—forging her way forward.

“Or, her story / is surrounded by history, the ambient spaciousness / of which she is the momentary foreground,” continues Barot.⁴ I now see my mother’s story as her own, important and distinct, but always part of a larger diasporic whole that I will spend my life trying to wrap my mind and heart around.

IN THE PHILIPPINES, THE UNITED STATES essentially created a farming ground, a steady and growing supply of health-care workers. The workforce, primarily Filipino nurses, was also decidedly gendered and racialized—female and brown.

The understanding of the wave of Filipina nurses who immigrated to America after 1965 is often framed solely in terms of the quotas lifted by Hart-Celler. But in this simplified version, historian Catherine Ceniza Choy notes, “rendered invisible are the ways U.S. hospital recruiters have collaborated across national boundaries with Philippine travel and recruitment agencies in their aggressive recruitment of Filipino nurses.” Ceniza Choy cites the work of Jon Goss and Bruce Lindquist, who call this practice the institutionalization of migration.⁵

Within this institutional framework, problems such as the exploitation of Filipina nurses by Philippine and American recruiters, as well as American hospitals, are erased from the story. So, too, are accounts of white women’s animosity toward Filipinx nurses. History purposely obscures ugly realities that, for different reasons, both Americans and Filipinos would prefer to forget. The truth, ever more complicated, is that these stories are painful for people to recount, especially those raised to worship the country they migrate to and be thankful for any opportunities given to them. And so, for the sake of not making a fuss, many immigrants willingly promote the narrative of coming to America simply for financial promise.

While my parents earned more money in the United States than they would have back home, they were on their own without any support, overwhelmed, and made to feel out of place. My mom often took double shifts when my father was working because she couldn’t bear to be home alone.

There wasn’t room in the house I grew up in for existential worry. Life’s difficulties were spoken about matter-of-factly, items to cross off a to-do list. I remember being a teenager at the dining room table when Dr. Jack Kevorkian dominated the news. My mother, a devout pro-life Catholic, looked at me and said, “When it’s my time, no heroics, you let me die.” For all their frank talk about disease and death, though, my parents never talked to me about the obvious realities of our bodies—how we were different from others in our community, how that might affect our emotions, our sense of selves. These are precisely the conversations I craved and the conversations I pursue now.

My parents never spoke openly about our bodies because of their cultural inheritance. They came from a country colonized first by Spain and the Catholic Church, and then by the United States. Subservience, an idea of being less than, of equating being good and acceptable with...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: A Personal History of Mothering in America
• Part II: Exploring Mothering as Social Change
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• About the Author
• Praise
• Also by Angela Garbes
• Copyright
• About the Publisher