The Philippines has for decades served as the farm team for the US healthcare workforce, providing nurses and other healthcare workers to make up for shortages in the US workforce. Garbes alternates her well-researched, fact-based reportage on the state of mothering and caregiving in the US with personal reflections of her upbringing as a Filipinx-American with two parents in the healthcare field, a lens that allows a particularly powerful insight into the work of caregiving in America. Yet, what recognition do those involved in this essential labor receive in reality? Beyond hollow Atta-girls and sentimental talk about the importance, yay even the sacredness of mothers, how does American society actually recognize the people do the care work, the maintenance and domestic labor that keeps the whole shebang running? It is also highly skilled labor without which nothing in the world works as it should. During the “long, strange season” of the pandemic, people began to see-maybe for the first time-that caregiving is hard work-mentally, physically, and emotionally exhausting. The pandemic underscored for all of us that the essential work of caregiving is the only truly essential work humans do. As a writer, she didn’t get a regular paycheck or health insurance and her husband did, so by default it became her job to care full-time for their daughters, 2 and 5 at the time. Garbes wrote Essential Labor during the pandemic as her daughters’ preschool, along with much of the rest of the world, locked down. It makes the world go round it keeps life happening.

I felt as though I were right back in those days as a single mom when someone had a cold, someone had a science project, I had a deadline and how was I going to get all this mess to work? Always with the question running in the background, “Is this what my life is about ?” Then, I read Garbe’s eloquent reflections on mothering as maintenance and maintenance as essential and honorable. For several days, I intermittently read Garbes’ book, grabbed one cat or the other to administer medicine, made sure the baby cat had baby cat food and the older cat didn’t eat it and vice versa, shoveled the litter box more than I had ever imagined I could, and tried to keep the hissing and spitting to a minimum while I encouraged them to work out their differences.

The kitten had a little cold, nothing serious for her, but my older cat caught it and became scarily ill (better now, thanks). Just as I started reading Angela Garbes’ remarkable new book, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change, a new kitten came into my life.

Mothering as social change