5 Questions with Family Studies: Elissa Strauss on the “Wild and Transcendent” Magic of Motherhood

Elissa Strauss worked for years as a successful journalist, her work appearing in a slew of high-profile publications ranging from Slate to CNN to the New York Times. But in 2012, something else happened: Strauss became a mom.

The experience of becoming a parent was quite unlike what Strauss had expected, and in a recent conversation she described it to me as an “ethical epiphany.” Over the years following the birth of her first child, and then through the arrival of a second, that epiphany gradually coalesced into Strauss’ first book, When You Care: The Unexpected Magic of Caring for Others, out last month. Strauss told me she defined “care” for the project as an “ongoing dependency relationship.” Most obviously that includes parenting, but it also touches on things such as care for the elderly and disabled. The book is part personal journey, part journalistic investigation, and the goal is both straightforward and refreshing against the backdrop of a world mired in culture wars: To find practical ways that we can value and re-elevate caregiver roles. Strauss recently chatted with me about her argument and the origins of her book. What follows is a version of that conversation that has been edited for length and clarity. 

Jim Dalrymple: One of the first things that jumped out to me in this book was the way you described becoming a caregiver, or in your case, a mom. I think the words you used were “wild and transcendent.” And there’s this recurring idea that becoming a mother ended up being a more compelling experience than maybe you were led to believe. Why do you think that is? 

Elissa Strauss: It was significantly better. I always wanted kids, I grew up in a family of four and my parents really loved being parents. When I became a parent in 2012, it was on one hand the lean-in era where career feminism was the kind of be-all and end-all feminism. And you know, great. I also want women to have more economic power and political power. It's not that I believe that was all wrong, but it was one definition of a good life. And then the other big kind of cultural narrative was this cool literary woman who gained intellectual and cultural credibility by being ambivalent about motherhood, or by rejecting motherhood. So, I went into motherhood feeling like I had to protect the rest of myself from my mother self. But that was a fool's errand that was never going to happen. That dam broke and [my] care self ended up rushing into all parts of who I was. Overwhelmingly, so.

At the time, I was deep in opinion journalism. I would generate opinions on a daily basis, polish them up by four o'clock, and they'd be out in the world in under 24 hours. I had turned into this certainty machine. Then I had this kid that actually needed me to be uncertain, needed me to make space for what he thought. When you put it in anecdotal form it sounds small, but it was really profound. What better place to actually challenge your certainties than to have to be that close to another human being. To have to anticipate their needs, to have to see them so fully and deeply because they are dependent on you to survive and thrive. What better place could there really be [than motherhood] to really question your priorities and see your blind spots and then ultimately open up your understanding of yourself and the world around you.

Dalrymple: In the book, you address the tension between the way we conceive of feminism and the way we think of caregiving. Is there a way to salvage the better aspects of feminism while elevating the idea of caregiving and motherhood? 

Strauss: I think for me, it’s about recovering older feminisms that got lost in the last, let's say, half century and mostly erased care from any kind of formula or vision for women's liberation. It was so beautiful to recover those seeds. This isn't new, actually, we just don't pay attention. 

We've bundled care and work on opposite sides of each other, so you have to pick one or the other. How can we move forward? I think it’s letting that go. Like, we can hold our care identities as deeply valuable to us whether or not we work. So, I think that's one thing, moving beyond viewing work and care as so deeply oppositional that women have to choose one or the other. 

So much of the conversation about men has also framed them as lazy and unwilling to be caregivers. And while certainly that is the case sometimes, if you dig into the research, the bigger story is that men want to care, men are doing so much more care than their grandfathers or fathers did. But there's still so much getting in the way of men doing more care.

"I went into motherhood feeling like I had to protect the rest of myself from my mother self. But that was a fool's errand that was never going to happen. That dam broke and [my] care self ended up rushing into all parts of who I was. Overwhelmingly, so."

Dalrymple: You discuss the struggle to value and label caregiving. Walk me through that. When it comes to being a mom, is there a label we can use that captures the value of what that person does? 

Strauss: I think our language is representative of how we actually haven't solved this problem talking about care. In a way, I still love homemaker. You know, let's go back 100 years. It's active, you’re making. Housewife is a little less compelling to me because it speaks to the relationship. And then we get an even more passive identity with stay-at-home mom. I mean, show me a mom who's staying when they're staying at home. I don't know if we have a great term. I'm certainly still looking for one. And, you know, I wonder sometimes if we even need one. Like, could you just be a mom? Do we need something that sounds like it belongs on a resume? I don't know.

Dalrymple: What are some of the ways that giving care actually benefits the caregivers themselves? 

Strauss: Humans are quite cleverly designed to like things that benefit the collective. There's not actually a tiny division between wanting something for yourself and being other-directed. Our brains do a good job of actually making those things synonymous. When it comes to caregiving to the elderly, to disabled people, there was a lot of negativity bias in the research. But once researchers started digging into the good stuff, they found things that often surprised them. Longevity, inflammation reduction, in addition to the psychological benefits of having deep meaning and purpose. 

I want to be clear, there are really awful care experiences out there. But I think broadly speaking, there are all these benefits. When I became a parent, there were all these studies that showed how miserable parents were. But then you scratch the surface, and the picture is a lot more complicated.

I think in terms of psychology, this idea that caregiving makes you miserable is really not true. It's a much richer, more complicated picture than that. There are all these great philosophers and theologians today working to put care as a central experience for ethical epiphany, for any kind of spiritual revelation. I myself experienced that. 

Dalrymple: I enjoyed the parts of the book where you wrestled with religion and spirituality. What role do you think religion has to play as we try to re-elevate the idea of caregiving? 

Strauss: I think it's about bringing caregivers in their full selves into a community, allowing their struggles with care to be seen as a deep spiritual searching. So, can your religious leader make it clear that when you're wiping your father's tush or something, you are doing God's work? Can we make this abundantly clear that to care for one human—if we take the word of the Hebrew Bible—is to care for the divine. 

I also write in my book how I became more religiously observant—not just because I had these two wonderful unique singular consciousnesses and the whole thing is a miracle. But also because there’s this very practical part. At my synagogue my rabbi likes kids. He looks kids in the eyes. They don't annoy him. I can't overstate this. There's child care. It's huge. Forget my big dramatic caregiver story, I can actually just [show up] and my kids have somewhere to go. There's a lunch that I didn't have to cook and clean. At my synagogue there's so much respect for anyone who moves more slowly or anyone who thinks more slowly, not just to be there but to be active participants, to go up and lead prayer. 

When we make the world more hospitable for anyone who is dependent—and that could be a child or someone with a disability or someone who is old—we make the world more hospitable for the people caring for them.