Convivencia!

Or, musings on Mother's Day

When I was about to give birth, I would brag about my postpartum set up. We called it a convivencia, which is a Latin American concept for family gathering. We had not only two moms, but two abuelas and a great-aunt. It seemed as if we had cracked the care code.

There were many things beautiful about that time. But other parts failed to live up to expectation.

Before I gave birth, I had given my mother The First Forty Days: the Essential Art of Nourishing the New Mother. Grounding itself in traditional Chinese medicine, and peppered with other global traditions, the common threads resonate: feed the new mother with warm, nutrient-rich foods; help her to stay rested. Nutritional care for a newborn requires supporting the mother as her vessel.

My forty days of rest was out the window as soon as my mom read the congee recipe. As easy as it is to execute, I was standing at the stove a week after my C-Section demonstrating just how simple (and delicious) congee can be. Soon after, I was back to planning our meals and cooking breakfasts—a swift role reversal that was exacerbated by the energy demands of a newborn and the age of our parents’ generation. My post-operative journey into the sandwich generation had begun.

My wife and I would whisper to each other at night. What went wrong?

It’s as if we had forgotten the cultural memory of care. While I had waxed poetic about seeing postpartum as a return to intergenerational living, the reality is that an increasing number of American households are single individuals. We are having kids older if at all— meaning our parents are much older than our grandparents were, and less capable of the basics of childcare. Our own mothers were decades removed from their own early parenting and all the advice had changed, leaving them informationally disoriented and not physically up to the challenge.

The convivencia—or our experiment in intergenerational living—didn’t fail because of any of us individually. Rather, shifting family structures, an aging society, and redefined gender roles had conspired to make the infrastructure of care, at least as culturally remembered, a thing of the past. In Latin America, it is normal not only for grandmothers to spend months with their new grandkids, but also having months-worths of skill and wisdom to impart on the new mothers. It’s the last piece of that chain that feels especially broken.

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It’s not news that we have a childcare crisis. Millennials cite affordability as a driver for decreasing birth rates, which have fallen ~23% since 2007 (Reuters). This also means, however, that we are in a rapid demographic shift: fertility is bellow the replacement rate at the same time boomers are aging, leading to a crash of their own safety net.

Even having fewer children, most families struggle to afford their care. I’ve faced this conundrum: how to afford childcare with two salaries and whether it’s a living wage for our care workers. This is compounded by the fact we are both women, capping our earning potential but also insinuating that at least one of us (but maybe both) should be dropping out of the workforce to perform care. This forces an impossible choice that compounds on families that are not traditional—especially queer, single parents, and households with parental disabilities.

But there is another system at play: the family — meant to be a core care system — struggles to support itself in terms both of cost and unaccounted labor.

As excited as I am for Mamdami’s 2-K policy, it’s the extension of a broken system rather than a reimagining. And even as I head to New Mexico next week, heralded for its state-wide universal childcare policy, the reality is that I am having just as much trouble finding a few hours of care during my stay. We need to focus on what’s most broken—why family and other caregivers can’t sustain themselves through the act of caregiving. Before jumping to institutional solutions, we need a better systemic diagnosis.

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I’m reading another Murata novel now. Vanishing Worlds is described as “the Handmaid’s Tale on acid,” and it truly is. Murata writes like an alien, in stilted language, observing our nature from outside our culture. If, as birth trends are in free fall in Japan, marriage and even romantic love become irrelevant institutions, can we decouple family from sex in pursuit of a broader question of whether IVF or planned fertility is sufficient to ensure a future workforce?

If this scenario feels farfetched, then you haven’t been following South Korea’s 4b movement. The New Yorker paints this picture starkly in The End of Children, depicting women who reject much of society’s pressure — including sex, marriage, children, and even friendships with men. While political lesbianism has risen and fallen in favor, this feels different because of the identity and community it affords: whole social groups are restructuring on their own what they want out of future and family. Some of this is in protest of the massive gender pay gap within South Korean society; no matter the cause, it all seems so relatable. When your choice set is no good—it’s time to opt out.

I’m curious not only how this alternative system, the 4b movement, will play out, but what it hints for the rest of us—including the US as we unwittingly enter our own demographic free-fall.

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All of this is a long way to say that it’s not just the economics that aren’t supporting our ability to have children that are well-cared for and thriving. It’s something deeper, structural. In societies where this is being felt most acutely, like Japan and South Korea, they see it in clearer focus. With this diagnosis of the problem comes solutions—and hopefully not only the dystopian ones from the Vanishing Worlds.

How might we re-organize society to support caregiving? I’m talking more than family medical leave or a tax incentive; something more akin to an income guarantee. With this, we could recognize the labor of women, the undocumented, elders, and the others unseen and unrecognized financially in an equation so unbalanced, the math has stopped mathing.

We could design for interdependence—but we’d have to make that choice.