Consumed by Caregiving
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You're listening to women network from harvard business review. I made me gallow .

and I made me bernstein to the end of twenty twenty three, our producer AManda saw linked in post one of our former guests, marty blood. So IT made her eyes go wide. Marty had titled the post a pretty big year in all caps, and justifiably so. In january, the order over two children, a freshman in high school, was still coming through a major depressive episode.

At the time, Martin was the executive director of the kids mental health foundation. So SHE knew enough about the disorder to quickly ordinate professional support by march. Happily, her teenager was in a Better place mentally and emotionally.

but Martin wasn't. SHE had resigned from her job because he was burned out, just like so many parents training to manage their kids anxiety or depression or anger, while also keeping up at work as exhausted as he was.

SHE immediately started applying to leadership roles elsewhere, hoping that changing workplaces would reenergize her between zoom calls with people in her network. SHE cried and napped.

A month into that routine, the landlord of the house sheet been running decided he was going to move in, which meant that Martin, her kids, had sixty days to pack up and leave. That's when her plans to bounce right back into the workforce really started to fall apart.

Yeah, I remember IT is very chaotic and out of my control. They spent twelve weeks .

at her mom's house before he found a new house within the same school district that would bid them. And her physic y and his daughter.

the last day of the move, her phya slipped and to patella tender.

an injury that requires surgery and a sixteen week plus recovery .

than her mom who lived nearby, needed emergency catarrh surgery than retina surgery as well as a couple of dental surgery. Then one kid was struggling to sea. Well, another was struggling to breathe. Well, each of these problems required multiple doctors visits in a considerable amount of martie's time and attention.

The ground left her utterly and completely spent maintaining all the standards.

The orthodox sap pointless getting the oil change, following up on bills, making sure the mal got forward at renewing everybody's prescriptions, driving my fiance to physical therapy, driving my mom to I recheck appointments and doing all kid, driving since those two were my backup drivers, juggling summer camp for my ten year old, signing up, paying for and then attending summer soft league for my oldest.

Coordinating at home counselling three times a week to continue supporting my kid's mental health, and then planning a year and wedding and brunch to celebrate our newly blended family. And that sounds like a happy one. But we actually that we have to we schedule the wedding because of the tom protect attention and the catches and the new brace. And we would have lost a lot of money. He.

had we done that, he ended up being OK enough to walk on the isle and got through their first stance.

And then IT was the time of year for open romance. And I was trying to, cuba, continue one set of benefits, figure out and romance into another set of benefits, because we had qualities event, which was very exciting, but also the paperwork was mind blowing. And then there was more driving. I kept thinking, is this really my life?

Just a color go. Who's a sociologist? The university content says this crime is ever expanding. Reinless set of responsibility lies is the norm for lots of us in the us.

Once women take a step back in the workforce, IT can be very easy to fall into that defauts caregiver role and also leads to choices that then make IT easier for you to be seen as the one who is logically most responsible for other types of care that comes down the line.

Jesica writes about the slippery slope in her book, holding IT together, how women became america's safety 呢？

She's here to help marty make sense of that pretty big year, as marty called her linton post or more like a year plus away from paid work. They're both here to help those of you who've ever been consumed by caregiving understand the forces that got you there. Here's my conversation with them.

and i'll be back afterwards to chat with you about IT.

Marty, you started looking for a new job as soon as you resigned. How did you set out? What did you want to accomplish each week, and then tell us what actually happened?

I wanted to spend an hour to a day on linked in, you know, looking around at folks in my network, what they were up to, following companies that might be in my line of work that I wanted to stay in and working on all the things that IT takes today to get a job because you need multiple versions of your resume so they can get past A I box that are screening. You need your elevator speech of what you're looking for and what you can do.

And I wanted to be consulting. I really felt like, gosh, I can look for a job and I can build out at my hourly rate. And then this really won't feel like too much .

of a of a bump. But your time wasn't spent just on finding your next job, right?

No, not at all. In fact, IT was amazing how the hours got eaten up. I was packing to move, moving and unpacking for quite a bit of that time.

I moved twice in the time that I wasn't working, once in with my mother. And of all the ridiculous things I spent time doing at that point, I remember posting on facebook to one of my networks. Hey, I have thirteen beautiful house plants that are in great shape and moving in with my mother.

SHE has a cat. Can anybody watch these house plants for ten weeks? And of course, the woman who volunteered lived thirty minutes away.

So I literally found myself arranging care for my house plants. I was doing all kinds of things that, you know, dropping off kids, picking up kids for a while. There we were in summer vacation, which is held for working parents. That was a different schedule every week. And IT just felt like every time I would sit down, my phone would paying, or somebody would need me, and the week would be gone.

Jessia help us understand this in the broader context. I mean, this is not an unfamiliar story to you. What does this happen to women like marty?

yes. So other countries have invested in policies that help people manage their care needs and responsibly. T ie. s. They have policies that allow people to live with dignity, to access economic opportunities and to contribute equitably and sustainably to a shared project of care in the U. S.

We instead tell people that they should be able to take care of themselves and their families without relying on the government to even their employers for support. But the reality is that that we can just D I Y society, you know, some people, you know, maybe most obviously children, but also people who are sick, people who are elderly, can fully take care of themselves. And some jobs don't pay enough to allow people to take care of themselves as well.

So acknowledging these realities would essentially destroyed the solution of the DIY society. But in the U. S, we essentially managed to maintain the illusion by relying on women to fill in the gaps to be that social safety at are for our families and for our community, and even for our economy, essentially by taking care of the people who can take care of themselves.

And we get women to do that work, in part by grooming them for caregiving roles from the time they're old enough to hold a baby, all but also by pushing them into caregiving roles and then denying them any support in meeting those roles. And and like Martin talked about in those situations, IT becomes very easy for women to become the default caregivers for their families. If you are a woman in a household where you are often because of gender pay apps earning less than your male partner, know, if someone has to sacrifice their paid work hours, you're probably going to do IT. And then once you step into that default caregiving role, like Martin was saying, the visibility of that work as a caregiver, as the default then that had compiled with the choices that defauts caregivers have to make to accommodate their caregiving responsiblities, ie. S makes IT logical and natural for women who are in that default position to take on even more of the responsibility for care as those care needs can increase over time.

So marty, having read the book and having heard with jusici, jess said that had, is that shape or reshape the way you think about what happened in your own life?

IT felt like I connected a lot of desperate feelings and concepts for me from an intellectual standpoint. I sort of felt a light bob like it's not just me.

It's truly .

the fact that the minute somebody sees a female with, couldn't quote, time on her hands.

watch out, right? How did that mess with your self steam with your own sort of conceptive who you are, Martin?

I think that was very psychologically destabilizing. If if that's A A way to explain that I felt gas, let, but kind of by myself and the people around me, IT was like, oh, you had two or three full time jobs. We're going to take one away and then the other two are going to fill in a lot of that room.

But don't forget, you should be trying to replace the third full time job with another full time job. And the the beginning of my job search, I looked back through all of my cover letters, and I was applying for executive director CEO C O O. Roles in mental health organizations, in child focus organizations.

And then I would sort of think to myself, what am I think, how in the world, if they called me tomorrow to interview for this, how I, how would I even manage IT? Let's say, they offered IT to me who's gonna pick up the plants when it's time to move them back to the house. I know that I can ask anybody else to do that.

And if I did, IT would probably be another woman who would fit IT into the fifty seven thousand things he has to do. And so I kind of started to back off the level of what I felt like I could look for. I I stopped going to the top of the or chart openings, and I started looking for you.

Director, associate director, senior manager type titles. Now these are titles I haven't held in my own career fifteen years. But I thought maybe i'm not going to be able at this time of my life to deliver what IT takes to be at the top of an ork chart because clearly, everybody needs me and even the people around me who benefit from that. I don't think we're sitting around going, wow, we're so lucky that you are caring and doing all these things and and I often think, oh my god, what if I had been work?

What if you had been working? So play that out force. What if you had been working full time?

I mean, I think you would have ve had to be either a role where I could say, look for the next, whatever, six months i'm gonna have to work part time, or i'm gonna have to use some short term disability and some know F M L A, or or somehow construct a scenario where I can give you part of the time, hopefully still quite a bit of the value, but I just cannot be available the way I would Normally be or would like to be.

But I wonder sometimes, you know, certainly had i've been in in a new job in that sort of time where you're learning so fast and you're trying to meet everybody and you're trying to prove yourself and get settled, that would have been a total, a total disaster. So I would have had to be somewhere, you know, where i'd been a while, where they had those kinds of time benefits, where I had an understanding manager. And you cannot you cannot over emphasize the importance of the individual manager and how they can make that viable or not viable. And at the end of the day, I still might have lost my job because I just hit kind of .

a wall of of .

contribution. And I think that's one of the things that I often reflect on. When we talk about baLance, work life baLance, I often like, okay, fine, let's just say that you get your partnership and your parenting and your working and yourself health in some sort of baLance. But if you, the person, are the full cum in the middle, I have a feeling you're pretty warm down on all sides.

Yeah, because IT seems to me, I mean, I strugling with picking up my dogs from daycare at the end of the day. So I don't know how you have made IT through the kinds of demands you've had to face, but that seems to me that it's always work life imbaLance all the time. Harvard business school executive education develops leaders who make a difference in the world.

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Hi, it's AMG. If you identify as queer, I hope you'll consider contributing to an episode we're working on about what it's like to be out at work these days like when people make assumptions about your personal life, assuming your street, for instance, or ms. Gendering you, how do you handle IT? What sort of community have you found with other queer colleagues? Respond to these questions in a few more m. At each year at org slash podcast survey, you can be as anonymous as you want. Your responses will help us create an episode that reflects the complexity, resilience in insight of clear women navigating today's workplaces.

Marty, your experience kind of flies in the face of the advice. All of us got lean and wondering how, how, how you think about that.

Lenin was published at a funny time in my career, in that I had one Young child, and I thought I could, I thought I could sustain pace. I was living forever. I thought I could probably lean in. I bought the DIY guilt of leaning the common girls, ask for the next thing, you know, take the next project, take the risk.

And by the time some of the I guess, I would say by the time some of the societal feedback to that concept had really started to get loud about, it's not just leaning in, and it's really not that easy for so many women. By that time, I had another child, and I thought, yeah, you know what, I actually kind of one of everything that cause I don't want to lean in any further, not only at work, but I didn't even want to lean in anymore home. I want to let down. Can we stop leaning and take a rest here? So IT does fly in the face of all of IT.

So Jessica, you know, what more do you saying I think is kind of a more universal experience? And i'm wondering, from your perspective, is there a narrative that's taking the place of leaning and what is IT?

I an unfortunately, the leaning narrative, I would argue, is still very much with this. Even if, you know, some people have pushed back against the specific notions of the book, for example, I think they're still very much this expectation.

Many of the the women that I talk to for my research, you know, first time mothers, or those are just starting out in their careers, still very much feel this pressure to to have IT all, to try to be at all, to chase every opportunity, and also to to sudden example for other women as well. You need to be the leader in the workforce while also being that interest. Perfect mom at home.

If anything, that feels like, you know, the only narrative that is threatening to unseat lean in at this point is maybe the tradeoff fe narrative part because of how unsustainable, you know, IT is to lean in, especially over the long term. And I think that is part of where I talk a little about my book about how some Young women are leaning into the idea of being a housewife instead of leaning in at work, in part because they realized that IT is so unsustainable. And they they see one of the things that leaning did was to deeply devalue the work of care of and to ignore both the value that that brings to families and communities and even the joy that many of us can get from doing that care work, particularly when we have the time and the energy to do IT well.

And so I think, if anything, what we need is to go back to an older narrative that has actually been around even longer than len, which is essentially the one that the feminist gave us in one thousand and sixty and one thousand nine hundred and seventies, and that really got cop ted by sort of the corporate world. And when I came to messages like clean, I mean, to give an example, in black feminist atter, an activist, billhooks was one of the sort of vocal critics of the leaning message from trying on on for a long body of work on these topics that, and he wrote a critical in two thousand thirteen of lemon SHE said sandberg sees women's lack of perseverance as more the problem than systemic inequality, and SHE effectively uses her race and class power and age to promote a narrow definition of feminism that obscures and undermines visioned st. Feminist concerns.

And essentially she's pushing back against this notion that we should try to do this. So individually and really, that's part of what my goal is to do with my own research to, is to help on gas, light women, to tell women that guilt and stress are not Normal or necessary. Parts of women hood or parts of motherhood. I mean, essentially we can help women to see that they have been task with serving as a social safety net in a society that has forced them to make do with about the support that they need.

And my hope is that I can show them how women's self health culture, in particular, and have to lose us into thinking that if we're struggling to manage IT, all that IT must be because we made the wrong choices, because we didn't lean, didn't wash your face, didn't get out of our own heads, didn't let that should go. You know, to use some other popular book titles, for example. And am, in reality is, is that we are being pushed into doing this work, that we are being kind of worked overtime and underpaid on projects that other people have designed for their own game and certainly hot for hours. And so I think this is a place for one of the core messages of the feminist movement of one thousand nine hundred, six and seventies, is that we really have to hold IT together collectively and not on our own. It's about recognizing that we are strongest when we work together and we are strongest when we fight for those who most margin zed among us as opposed to trying to just individually get ahead as far as we can because that's an easy way to to fall into the delusions and and the divisions that are designed to keep us scrambling as opposed to seeing how investments in stranger policies, for example, could Better support us all.

And at the heart of what you just said is the acceptance that there are indeed systemic inequalities and inequalities.

right? Yes, very much so. And I think those often get overlooked in these conversations. In the sense guy's society, all of us have an incentive to push as much risk and responsibility for care as possible on to someone else downstream. And for men, they're often economically in the most privileged positions to be able to do this, to leverage their higher salaries and of their bigger titles, to get the women around them to do more of that work of care, to persuade their wives, to persuade their ministry of assistance, to persuade their colleagues and coworkers to do more of that work that isn't as economically profitable so that they can focus on doing that most profitable work themselves.

Now for women, those who are in the most privileged positions can offload some of that work also by pushing IT on to often times women from systematically margin zed groups who have very little choice but to do the underpaid work of child care, of home health care, of food service, of house cleaning. Though of course we can never outsource all of the care. Responsibility lies IT often takes a great deal of management on the back end as well. But this creates a service morality trap in the sense that often times getting ahead for individual, relatively private women means exploiting someone else.

So you've talked chester about how the the really hard work of care, childcare, family care, gets pushed onto women routinely. I wonder how you deal with IT in your own life. You have kids, right? I do. I have a ten .

year old and a seven year old, and I think that is very, very much depending on the support level that I ve been able to access, uncertainty, the the level of support that my my husbands been able to, to provide, given his work situation as well. And when my and my oldest daughter was born, we were living in inDiana and at the time my husband had just started a new job.

I was a relatively new assistant professor um and I had access to to paid leave to paid family leave but my husband didn't um and so I ended up home with my daughter for the first almost six months and then what ended up happening that was we hoped together into childcare when I had to go back to teaching but like many people you know, we ran into a sort of child care crisis in the sense that the first spot that we could find for full time childcare wasn't open until my daughter was a year old. So I spent the first semester back teaching, cobble together a few hours a week to held care from college students who would watch my daughter while I was teaching, and trying to finish my first book, trying to do my researcher. And really, nothing had that.

I know. I was worried I wouldn't get ten year. I was worried I wouldn't be able to keep my job. I wasn't sure how things would go with my relationship because things were so unequal and stressful at the time.

I remember there was one point where I was so that I slammed my bathroom door in my bedroom, and it's like a pocket door, and I managed to slam my fingers in the process and lost two fingernails because I was, oh god, just so exhausted and stressed out during those early years. And so I was not an easy time. And, you know, certainly things got Better when I was able to get my kids into full time child care. And certainly when my husband was in a position, by the time our second kid was born and he had access to six weeks of paid family leave, and that made a world of difference. But IT was hard in terms of navigating those times, even for those of us who are relatively .

privilege in the process. Jessica, I keep coming back to the employer as a potential solution. Do you think that's naive of me? I I think about wellness benefits or even the idea as simple as making parental leave non gendered same amount of time for either parent or care subsidies or back up care, you know, accounts where they can book a back up babysitter and pay with a cope. Some of this stuff is out there in the hr world. Do you think it's going to go anywhere?

I think there's there's two parts to this answer here in the sense. Ly, yes, there are things that employers can be doing and should be doing to make life easier for caregivers and that those kinds of investments can go a long way in making life easier. Things like access to health care, access to to support with childcare, to access to support with flexible work policies that these can make a difference and can make life easier.

And when IT comes to the ability to combine full time paid work and. Caregiving respons ibi ie s. At the same time, I think we have to be careful about trusting employers to be the ones to solve this problem, particularly on their own. What we know, for example, is that when it's up to employers like with things like health care, often times the benefits of that kind of a system go disproportionate to the most privileged workers in our economy, in part because they are the ones who have the power in the privilege to demand Better benefits.

When IT comes to health care, when IT comes to which workers have access to paid family, the eve, when IT comes to which workers have no access to child care benefits or access to decent retirement benefits, that those are disproportionate, the most lish workers in our in our economy. And that is the workers who are the most precarious, who are disproportionate. Women, and especially women of color in our society, are the ones who are often most disadvantaged when IT comes to access to those kinds of benefits.

And I think we have to be wary of treating employers as capable of solving this problem on their own. And I think we have to recognize that, that's a function of the fact that even well meaning and players once who wants to put in place those benefits for their workers, face profit pressures that often discourage them from giving workers the support that they really need to live healthy, happy and productive lives. And this is a place where policymakers can step in to essentially help take the burden off of employers.

We know that other countries have shown that the policies are things that allow people to live with dignity, to access economic opportunities and and to contribute equitably and sustainably to a shared project of care, both you allowing people to have the well being and the time and the energy and the education to contribute to the force, but then also having the protection from paid work to keep IT from demanding so much of our time through access to things like paid with even pay vacation time, even things like thirty five hour work weeks or four day work weeks, that that baLance of policies can leave people not only Better off in a sort of health sense or a mental bill being sense, can avoid, burn out, but can also lead to Better productivity, can make workers more successful in their jobs in the end. And so this is a place where we need to, you think critically about, is this system working? And is this emphasis on employers as the only solution the right way to go?

Man, I wanna put all that on a very large poster. Because it's so interesting when we talk about health care. I mean, there was a peace from the maternal stress project. Several once go in the new york times that said, childcare is health care. Let's quick calling in a social service or even a personal thing to solve IT is health care. And when women are stressed by the preparation of IT and the inconsistency of IT, even coming back from cover is not consistent or you're on a waiting list like you said jesica. I mean, that stress can last for years .

and this is a place where I would say really the push couldn't should be to move away from employers and to say, how can we make these universal policies instead in ways that, you know, things like health care, if we had universal health care, that I wouldn't have to be something that employers worry about when IT comes to competing for workers.

If we had universal, affordable childcare, that again, wouldn't have to be something that employers had to worry about. When I came to figuring out, you know, of employees afford to live in my community because there's no child care here as well. These are things that we can solve, system ally with childcare.

We had national childcare, national public affordable childcare during world were two. And this is how we got mothers to enter the workforce to be the rosy, the revitts. We've proven that it's possible here, and yet we dismantle that policy in part because we didn't want to have to pay the higher taxes that would have been needed to expand and maintain in that system over time.

And so I think this is a place where we have proven that these these kinds of care base services are most effective when they are universal. And one of the the ironies of that too is that when these kinds of entries are universal, there's less sigma in using them in the sense that right now, yes, childcare we know is great for women, but women also feel guilty using childcare, in part because we treated as a benefit for women, and not also as a benefit for kids and for society. We know that kids, you know kids, benefit tremendously from access to childcare when IT comes to developmental benefits, the collated benefits, the social benefits and the benefits of having less stressed out parents in terms of the quality of parenting that they can provide.

And yet we maintain these stigma. And I talk in the book about how there's a long history of fear mongering around childcare, trying to persuade mothers that kids aren't safe with childcare providers. But I think the reality is that the fast majority of kids in these situations are Better off than they could be with a much more stressed out parent at home. And so this is, you know, a situation where investments in that kind of care can help destigmatize IT and can help you be more sustainable for all.

And I think it's important to point out that a lot of people don't work for companies. They work for themselves. So that argues for the universal care policy.

You you're talking about jaska, but were we're talking about care not just for children, we're talking about care for parents, for relatives who cannot take care of themselves. Marty, you've cared for your for your fios say you've cared for your mother. What policies just code would you recommend to take care of caregivers all the way around?

Yeah and and this is another place where where public investments in care can help to make sure that the kinds of care services are available, whether their child care services, whether their home health care services, whether they are nursing home care facilities, whether they are after school care for kids and things along those lines.

When we invest in those kinds of polis at a universal level, and then we put at a decent lever of funding behind them, we can ensure that they provide not only the high quality of care that people need, but also that the work of caregiving is sustainable. And we have examples, you know, things like washington state has the walk cares program, which is putting in place publicly funded, uh, long term can insurance for everyone within the state. Or you know, places like minnesota that i've invested in universal, affordable childcare to take the burden off of individual families and individual employers.

Just a given that those policies are not entirely available, how do women prepare themselves for the caregiving that they're going to be called on to do? It's so unpredictable.

I mean, one of the things I try to do with my workers is to ungalled women to essentially help to prepare them for this idea that the messaging in our society. I talk about this sort of myths that we use to delude americans into believing that we don't need a social safety net, and to keep us divided you by race and class and gender and politics and ligion in ways that kind of keep us thinking about ourselves, as opposed to coming together to demand the kind of safety net that could Better support us all.

And I think this is a place for helping women to not blame themselves, to recognize that this is a system that is stack against them, but also to help them stay hopeful, because that's not a particularly hopeful message. And to remember that, that we are strongest together and that this is a place where we can be using the energy that we do have to say, okay, now, who are the other women around me? And how can we be collectively organizing in ways that can demand Better policies, Better support from our employers, from our communities, from our policymakers? Because essentially, and yes, individual women can, to some extent, hold IT together on our on their own.

But what that risks enforcing is this idea that I talk about in some of my research that that kind of good choices can save women, that if women just pursue the right career path or find the right partner, or live in the right community, that they will be able to protect themselves from falling into these kinds of expectations, from becoming the defauts caregiver, or from having to face these kinds of any inequalities. When the reality is that even know, as in marty's case, good choices can't necessarily always save women, and often times those kinds of good choices also require a great deal of privilege to make. And so I think helping women to remember that that we are working in a system that is not designed for us and that, if anything, is designed against us and to see how really it'll take us coming together and finding allies, you know, to be able to fight for the kindness system that would Better support us all.

Harvard business school executive education develops leaders who make a difference in the world. They bring together executives with very red backgrounds, influential organizations around the globe. The viewpoints of a diverse peer group inspired e deep learning and chAllenger thinking in their programs.

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So marty, you are now back at work full time. Yeah, how did that shift go? How did you do IT?

IT didn't go well, I didn't go badly IT just it's amazing to me how still when push comes to shove, I am the one typically who accommodates we enrolled our high school or in a school that's quite far away from our home. It's a long drive and it's through the city and there's construction and traffic jams.

And there are days where I would really rather not do that at both ends of my work to anion, you can say, ends at the middle third and second third of my workday, because school is a core shorter than than work. And at the same time, I find that where I work now, people are willing to say, okay, that's fine. Go, you know, be there at the right time.

Get your student home. I get them home in a timely way so they can get on another class on zone um and so I juggle LED the time and so last night that looked like I worked you know ninety minutes at home in the evening while my kid was on the zoom class. And this morning I worked sixty in the morning before I got the Youngest on the bus.

So there is flexibility in the sense of i'm being trusted to get the work done, where and when and how I can do IT. But there is no reduced workload. There is no transportation option for my child or even letting my child take their zoom class at the high school building and stayed there all evening.

Those kinds of things. In fact, I said this morning, I said, your school really needs a coworking office right there. If I could drive you, drop you, take all my calls, pick you up and leave, we'd be, I want to half ahead.

So I think to me that idea of co locating some things and and making IT possible for people to study and work and eat and get services done all in the same place, I didn't really take off after the pandemic. I thought, hope that would. And I know there's a lot of neighborhoods aren't built for that.

They just are not set up to have those kinds of things together. But I really split people's lives up when they have to, you know, commute to everything. And more often than not, it's the moms in the drop of line.

and it's uteri exhAusting. So just, ka, I wonder, having heard what marty dealing with now every day, if there's anything you can offer her. The context is their advice that would help her out here.

I mean, I think this is again a place hesitant to put the owners of responsibility onto individuals in part because that of the message that we've been sold so long as you if you just make these right choices, you can find some seven step plan that will get you out of the stress. And I think unfortunately, what I can offer is, is so as to some extent in the sense that you're not alone in this kind of struggle, that this is a system that is not designed to help us, that is designed to extract from us and to get as much for us as possible while leaving as little behind as necessarily to survive, but not necessarily survive. And this is what we're up against.

And I think what maybe does give me hope and and maybe can offer marty some hope, is that I think we are at a moment, kind of politically and socially, where there is growing recognition of these chAllenges and growing recognition of the need to do something about the care crisis that we are facing because I think we've reached a tipping point where IT has become deeply unsustainable, where this is not just affecting those who are in the most precarious position, but we are even those with extremely high levels of privilege, are struggling you to make IT through day today. And I think this has shown us how unsustainable disease. And i'm hoping that this will lead to policy moments to change both at the individual level of employers but also with the broader er society of level emerging. Some states move in that direction, which i'm hoping will provide a testing ground to show that these kinds of changes can be made at a broader level. To put us in a place where we were actually able to to get the care that we need for ourselves and and the support that we need to care for others and to have that Better negotiation of the parts of our lives as opposed to maybe the baLance that might be too elusive to get.

Um yeah, we've got a we've got a long way to go, but but there's hope with the right people can hear the message and hear the need and need. And well, I want to thank you both marty for sharing your story and Jessica for sharing all your insight and and wisdom. Really appreciated. Thank you.

Thank thank you.

Already you you heard our conversation. What's struck you I mean.

so many things. I've obviously, of course, in deep, deep empathy for marty and what he went through. You wouldn't wish a you're like that on your worst enemy and I think as as a woman who relates to being the person in many people's lives who keeps things running lake, a kid having an unclear illness, I just could immediately think of the four conversations that involved with the doctor and waiting for the call back and stepping out of a meeting. The sheer number of logistics that Martin has had to deal with, never mind, emotional content, is just so intense for me.

What I really, what I really tried with, with this idea that if one ball drops are all gonna drop, you know.

and that I keep thinking, as I was listening to the conversation, how many women are bending time every day just to find the hours to do their job. And you add in these care, taking responsibility lies, whether it's for dogs, children, parents, husband ouses. Yeah, like plants. You know, we can talk about the plants at a moment, but like all of this category, IT goes unacknowledged. And it's supposed to be it's supposed to be in the curse of the rest of the things that we do.

And I mean, everything Martin was dealing with was legitimately urgent.

Yeah, exactly. The plant maybe. And I literally the plants die. yes.

But you know what? Marty probably loves those plans who care like stop judging which balls she's choosing to keep in the air. That's her choice.

And I think the message is not, hey, women, let's stop our perfectionism. Let's drop some of the balls. It's how how do we help build a society, whether IT doesn't feel like everyone's build in a house of cards?

I I actually .

have this pretty extreme example. This woman I know, and i'll be careful to preserve her privacy.

but saw her names in the shower.

her name and linked in provide. But she's married. SHE and her husband have the same job. They're two Young kids and SHE and I see each other every few years.

And the last time my song was like, how you managing and SHE said, we're not like, I just refuse to accept any expectation from my husband or from society. Our houses a mess. Our kids don't have clean clothes. The often times we are hobbling ling together crackers for dinner. The school has to chase us down for every permission slip.

She's like i'm sure everyone in my work and in my life things things were a disaster but I refuse to do the perfectionist way I like, what are you doing with all the time when you're not being perfectible? I'm reading SHE gets to read novels and SHE comes from a pretty unconventional family that's chAllenged a lot of of society y's expectations. So I think this is a path she's slightly comfortable with. But he recognizes that to outsiders who are have bought into society expectations that IT looks bonkers and edit.

I mean, I think good .

every time I ve signed something for harper or like, shop for something I think of my friend is not doing any of that.

I think there's a lot to be learned from your european friend 怎样？

I'd loved martis sort of off and suggestion that the school have a coworking space. I like that. I I was like.

this is .

brilliant actually, because and IT was a such a good metaphor for everything just was talking about, right? How do we make the and just easier on all of us in a collective way? And one piece of homework i'm taking, and I think I hope some of our listeners well as well as to read just as book and and really understand what SHE caused this D I Y society, how it's come to to exist. And I am SHE has solutions in their policy level, solutions of how we can change IT.

And the link to jesica s book will actually be in the shot .

notes he wants to be found.

That's her show. I made me gala and I made me burn. H, B, R regularly publishes articles with advice for managing work and family when we recently published, is a superb round up called your employees are also caregivers. Here's how to support them.

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