We’re All In This Together

Organizers need caregivers, caregivers need organizers.

Welcome! I’m Lisa Sibbett and this is The Auntie Bulletin, a weekly newsletter about kinship and community for people who choose to help raise other people’s kids – and the people who love us. You can read my archive here.

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Let’s Get To It

Things are rough out there. As I write this, large swaths of the United States are undergoing one form or another of climate apocalypse, while at the same time, in its first week, the new presidential administration has already enacted a raft of inhumane and unjust policies that will surely harm large numbers of people. There’s a ceasefire in Gaza, but so many have already lost their lives and their homes, and who knows if the ceasefire will hold? And anyway, what the heck can I do about any of it? It’s hard to feel sufficient to meet these times. So many of us feel inadequate. So many feel alone.

Today I’m writing about a perspective on interdependence that has helped me when I feel like everything is horrible and there’s nothing we can do about it. I hope this interpretation of the idea that “we’re all in this together” might help all of us (myself included) remember that we are not alone, and that together, we are sufficient.

I started thinking about this at the height of COVID, when I was in a pandemic bubble with parents who were always having to put their kids to bed while I was attending community organizing meetings. They sometimes reported feelings of inadequacy and missing out because they couldn’t show up for meetings where people were working to create more just communities in the face of clear and present injustice. They longed to attend. They grieved that they could not.

Meanwhile, I felt guilty for gallivanting off to (Zoom) meetings when my parent buddies were exhausted to the bone and could really have used my help with bedtime. It felt unfair that I was free while they were not.

None of us – not parents, not Auntie – felt like we were doing it right, or doing enough.

Look at That, You Son of a Bitch

Okay, so I’m a big fan of the idea that “we’re all in this together,” regardless of what we mean by “this” in any given case. When I first became a high school social studies teacher, I made a poster for my classroom. I cut out a large glossy satellite photo of the earth from a magazine, then pasted it to a large piece of construction paper. I wrote in large block letters, “WE’RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER” and drew a giant arrow pointing at the earth. I wanted my students to understand that we only have one world, and we’re all here together, so we’d better figure out how to get along and take good care. Kids would sometimes say, “Whoa, Ms. Sibbett, I’ve been staring at this poster all year and I just realized what it means. That’s deep.” And I’d be like, “I know, right??”

I wish I could’ve put this one up in my classroom, but no swear words at school! If you want to feel awe, watch this video of astronauts and scientists describing what it’s like to look back on earth from space. It makes me cry, in a good way.

“We’re all in this together” is a beautiful and important sentiment, and at the planetary level I think it’s pretty straightforward – certainly clear enough for 9th graders to understand.

But interdependence – the practical, everyday reality that we are utterly dependent upon one another – can be hard to hold in view as we make our way through the stresses and distractions of our days, often without adequate care or support. So let me unpack one example – namely, the symbiotic relationship between caregivers and political organizers/activists. These are two of the most important kinds of work we can do in the world, and when you really think about it, each side is holding the other up. When you really think about it, it’s possible to conceive of caregivers and organizers as part of one team, working together to make the world suck just a little bit less for the generations coming up after us.

Wages for Housework? For Reals?

It was in a very difficult feminist theory class in grad school that I first understood how society cannot operate without people to take care of the children. I was struggling through that course, feeling not very bright, but when we read about the Wages for Housework movement of the 1970s, I had a total lightbulb moment. I had always assumed that the family happens over here and the economy happens over there and the two are unrelated – with only, perhaps, the exception of the parents (especially moms) who dash frantically back and forth between them.

But as the Wages for Housework activists argued, nobody of any gender can go to work unless other people stay behind with the kids (not to mention the sick, disabled, and elderly); and there will be no workers in the future unless people have and raise children today. In other words, people who raise children and perform other kinds of care work are utterly, indispensably load-bearing. All other forms of work depend on child rearing and care. The idea was that parents (especially mothers) should be paid for their labor instead of raising, at their own expense, the entire future workforce.

In the 3 minute video below, you can see some wonderful footage of Wages for Housework marches in the 1970s, as well as Mariarosa Della Costa, one of the organizers, talking about what her group was trying to do. The video is in English but Della Costa speaks in Italian, so you can feel extra worldly and intellectual while you watch (unless you are Italian, in which case you’ll probably just feel like your usual (worldly, intellectual) self).

I couldn't decide between the amazing video above and this amazing poster here, so you get both. I want this poster on my wall. By The New York Wages for Housework Committee, from the collection of Silvia Federici. Wikimedia Commons.

By Our Powers Combined…

While care work is often joyful and rewarding, it is also demanding, and it is either undercompensated or not compensated at all. In the United States and many other parts of the world, the social safety nets that would support families to raise children are badly frayed, if not under active attack. Childcare is unaffordable and difficult to access, especially outside of school hours and over vacations; healthcare is unaffordable and difficult to access as well; families impacted by poverty struggle to obtain financial, housing, and food benefits; part-time jobs are scarce and almost never come with health insurance or retirement benefits; parental and family leave are all too brief and come with a pay cut or no pay at all; and the list goes on and on.

In other words, while parents and other caregivers are doing arguably the most essential work that allows societies to function, they are also chronically under-resourced and under-supported.

Theoretically, primary caregivers could organize to lobby for the supports they need – after all, they make up a huge segment of society across all social classes and ethnic groups. In the United States, 39% of adults have kids under 18 years old at home. Among adults aged 35-49, that number is over 80%. But parents rarely have time to attend community organizing meetings (which seem to always happen at 7pm): they’re too busy rushing back and forth between work and childcare, getting kids fed and into bed every night, and doing it all over again the next day.

Back in October, Elizabeth Gish of the democracy-focused Kettering Foundation spoke to Rebecca Gale about this problem at Gale’s newsletter, It Doesn’t Have to Be This Hard:

All of [parents’] energy goes to caring for their families – food and rent and health care, plus mental health that they probably can’t get. How could you possibly expect them to write a letter to their Congressperson, or go to a two-hour community meeting?

By comparison, as an Auntie with no kids of my own, I am able to participate in organizing and activism efforts as much as my energy and schedule allow. Here’s who else shows up to those 7pm community organizing meetings: childless adults like myself, Boomers whose kids are grown up, and (occasionally) exhausted parents whose loved ones are putting their kids to bed.

So here’s the perspective that has really helped me. Caregivers need organizers – to advocate for policies that will support them, and to show up during the seasons of life when they cannot. And organizers need caregivers – to take care of the kids so that we (including some parents) can make it to organizing meetings, and also to raise the humans who will inherit the better future that we are working to secure. Indeed, it’s not even just about the people out there raising kids so we can make it to the organizing meeting; it’s also the people caring for our aging parents and grandparents or our sick friends. If others weren’t doing that care work, we (who are otherwise going to community organizing meetings) would need to.

Back during the pandemic, I felt inadequate when I was doing activism stuff because I wasn’t helping my friends care for their kids, and my friends felt inadequate when they were caring for their kids because they weren’t doing activism stuff. And yet, by our powers combined, we were regularly engaging in two of the most important activities humans can do. It helped me so much to start thinking of ourselves as a team.

When we think of ourselves as a team, whatever one member of our community contributes, they do on behalf of us all, and whatever we offer, we enable others to make their own offering to the whole. I can help organize a conference or facilitate a community conversation about a local issue because you are reading to the children; you can go to work because I am caring for our sick neighbor. I can write a newsletter about kinship because someone else takes the garbage away. That person can attend their union meeting because a loved one is taking their mom to the doctor’s office that day. And so on, and so on, perhaps right around the world.

Indeed, when we think this way, the scope of what “we” are contributing is limited only by the number of people we’re willing to include under the umbrella of “us.” And the more we build community, the more we build kin, the more we can get done.

We surely have our work cut out for us, but there is so much good and worthy work to do, and fortunately, we’re all in this together.

Carl Sagan requested that NASA turn the Voyager spacecraft around in 1990 to take this image of Earth across the greatest extent of space yet traveled. Look reeeeeally closely and you will see us. Sagan wrote that on this pale blue dot, “everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

Coming Attractions

On Monday, your Kinship Snacks will include “How to Respond to Owies.” Other how-tos coming up:

• How to apologize to a child

• How to burst into song

• How to hold a newborn baby

Then, next Friday, I’m rolling out Part I of the 2025 Auntie Bulletin Strategic Plan, “The Story of the Auntie Bulletin.” I’m really excited to share this two-parter with you: a look at how the idea for this newsletter arose, and more importantly, where I hope we’re headed. Thank you for coming along with me, and for all your guidance along the way. Your feedback is always welcome and encouraged.

Speaking of which, I’m still collecting readers’ input for the upcoming “New Baby Bill of Rights,” which will explore the rights of primary caregivers and families to community care. For example, when a friend of mine had a new baby a while back (the inspiration for this essay), I realized that I believe any family with a new baby is entitled to a clean kitchen and a fridge full of tired-parent-friendly food when they get home.

What about you? The four open-ended questions in this survey will take a little more thought and time than multiple choice questions do. Feel free to think broadly and creatively, answer expansively, and answer the questions you wish you’d been asked rather than the ones I actually asked you.

I’ll be collecting your ideas all this month. Click the red button below to share your perspective – and be entered to win a 12-month paid-tier subscription to The Auntie Bulletin!

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Thanks for reading to the end! You get the secret scoop that if you can’t afford a paid subscription due to financial hardship, you can reply to this email, shoot me a message in the Substack app, or email me at auntiebulletin at gmail dot com and I’ll comp you a 12-month paid tier subscription, no questions asked.