It’s not your fault that you are not flourishing, Mama.

I’m lying awake at 3am and I can’t stop thinking about “Anonymous member”, the mother of two school-aged kids in our community who has posted on the Parents forum: “I’ve started and stopped this post so many times. But I’m getting to a point where I just don’t know what to do and doing nothing is not working.” She is struggling. She is locking herself in her room the minute her partner gets home to get some breathing room from her kids, who don’t stop touching her, needing her, overwhelming her.

I hate the idea that someone might have finally expressed her need for help, into the maw of Facebook, and might only get back an echo of her own cry, instead of a hug, a meal train, a massage, a weekend away with some girlfriends. So my brain obsesses over this unknown human, as if I can somehow do something to make this better by virtue of my insomnia.

It’s not your fault, I want to say, shaking her by imaginary shoulders that she doesn’t want to have draped in children’s neediness for just five minutes please. We are living in a system that is maybe thousands of years old, called patriarchy, that centres power as the ultimate value, and which makes mothering and fathering and caring for others incredibly undervalued and unsupported and draining.

The opposite system to patriarchy, in my mind, is one that could be called a matriarchy, but it isn’t about men and women or mothers and fathers, so the words themselves can be a stumbling block but essentially it’s a system that is entirely different to a system that centres power and control and domination. It’s simply about centring care. It’s the idea of a system that honours, uplifts and centres care, as the central thing that makes life flourish. In this other system, the kind of tending and attending that we all need and crave, that the Earth needs, that life-affirming “growth” needs (as opposed to extractive “economic growth”), is respected and supported and valued, and reciprocated, and nurtured, and fed. We would prioritize everything that supports and enhances care.

That’s not the system we live under. Our system is about power, domination, extraction of wealth and profits, and if you want care, you pay for it, and the care services that exist are band-aids that are either there to keep the economy growing, or are provided by non-profits, and charities, and food banks and sometimes churches, to try and keep the dam from bursting…

So what I want to say to Anonymous member with all the incandescence of my 3am brain is that not flourishing under the current system or in your current circumstances, as a primary care-giver for young children, is a very normal and human thing, certainly not any personal failing or shortcoming. It’s not YOUR nervous system. It’s the entire fucking system. Your short-circuiting is a signal that the larger system is broken. Late-stage capitalism with nuclear families treading water in isolated houses paying insane mortgages is fundamentally depleting. Mostly on the person spending the most time with the children who at some point reaches a breaking point. And the ripple effect of this runs into future generations.

I’d just shown my partner a substack from one of my favourite writers on the patriarchy, Celeste Davis, (https://celestemdavis.substack.com/p/not-believing-women ), which may be why the Insomnia Fairy had plucked this particular concern out of my restless brain for me to obsess over. Davis had shared a graph of the things mothers wanted most for Mothers Day. My laugh, when I showed it to my partner, was so raucous and unhinged, that he took a few steps backward, assessing the threat level of the situation. In the graph, 3% of women wanted a physical gift, which was just as many as wanted a Free Palestine for Mother’s Day. What women wanted, all 47% of them in fact, was alone time.

Just to be left alone.

Down in the emerging state of Gilead, aka the collapsing empire of the US, under the Trump Crime Syndicate regime, they’re pitching ways to maintain white supremacy and avoid the tipping point into there being more brown babies than white ones, by offering a medal for anyone insane enough to have six or more kids. (Removing access to women’s health care will force the issue for those struggling with intrinsic motivation to become a Super-Breeder.)

“Clearly, someone loves medals,” writes Davis, “And it’s not the mothers. I don’t know of one woman who would think, ‘you know what would make me have more kids? A medal.’”

What do mother’s actually want? She gathers up data from a range of surveys, and look at that, mothers want things like “mandated paid leave, regulation to address climate change, federally protected reproductive rights and increased gun control policies.” They want funding for health care, child care, parental leave for both parents, family-friendly benefits from employers, publicly funded pre-kindergarten programs… you know, an ecosystem of care. A network of care support, that makes caring for dependents actually survivable!

“My family lives far away and we don’t make enough money to afford babysitters regularly or therapy,” explains Anonymous member. “I’ve got friends with kids the same age but we are all so busy all the time.”

I start typing out a long screed, thinking about all the ways I’ve tried to resource myself, to have enough energy to give to my family, and give, and give, and work, and recreate and stay fit and maintain friendships, in an extractive culture, and how instagram and wine might have seemed the most accessible therapies at various times, but turned out to be not really all that sustainable or regenerative, and when I have a good long list, I log on, at 4:30am, and see that Anonymous member’s 13 hour old post has been met by more than 60 supporters and more than 35 offerings of advice and empathy. Of “I hear you, “same same”, “you are not alone” and “it is so hard.” Of “PM me if you want to talk.”

When you’re in the care trenches, relentlessly giving care out, it’s important to receive care back… the kids’ development and nervous systems literally depend on it. On the health and flourishing of their care-givers. And care does exist in this community, as the wave of support to that little signal flare indicates… But the wave of tips and hacks and suggestions indicates how many individual people are finding their own patch-kits and survival strategies in a fundamentally hostile-to-carers economic power system. An empathetic comment and a recommendation about ear plugs isn’t a substitute for practical care, for networks of mutual aid, for systems of support that provide slack for our individual nervous systems and our particular family systems.

The most important work that happens in this world – the one that is actually fundamental to both economic and emotional growth, the work of nurturing human life – is the least valued, the least visible, the least supported.

We need some kind of community-wide care restoration project, to seed ecosystems of care, that support everyone to flourish. Whoever comes up with projects like that is who really deserves a medal.

https://substack.com/home/post/p-161803241