I was on Auntie duty last weekend.
My sister and her husband, relatively new parents to the most precious human being on this here earth — a.k.a. their 6-month-old son — were in a refuge in the mountains somewhere with a whole bunch of friends. My parents were somewhere in the countryside, also with a whole bunch of friends, and my other sister is on the verge of giving birth.
So I gleefully volunteered to take care of my nephew, mostly because he’s adorable and I love spending time with him, and also because, let’s be honest, I have to practice what I preach. Can’t build the care society if I’m not being a care citizen.
I also enrolled my boyfriend — from here onwards to be referred to as T., lest Vogue burn me at the stake for using ‘myboifreend’ thirty-seven times in one essay — to join what was supposed to be a very relaxed dip in our hopefully future life as parents.
Except, plot twist, the aforementioned baby was delivered with the lovely gift of a stomach bug.
On Thursday and Friday, things were mostly fine. Apart from some spit-up and some other, rather more unsavoury fluids, he slept well at night, so I was only the normal amount of tired from waking up with him at 6am.
But by Saturday morning, right before my parents left and six-or-so hours before T. was due to come help, the bug had spread to me. At around four, I woke up to a delightful combo: the smell of an explosive diaper emanating from the crib, and the irrepressible urge to throw up.
Those first few hours alone with my nephew, oscillating between night and morning, both of us ill, gave me a visceral glimpse of what people mean when they talk about the ‘mother-baby dyad’. I’m not his mother, obviously — but in that moment, it felt like we were connected by our shared experience of vulnerability. We were in it together. Almost an extension of one another.
It felt like we had an understanding: when I had to urgently put him down to go to the bathroom, he didn’t cry or whine, he patiently waited in his crib; but when he needed changing or a bottle, even though everything in my body screamed at me to go back to bed, my needs became irrelevant. The knowledge that he depended entirely on me to be fed and clean temporarily erased the cognizance I had of my own weakness, headache and nausea.
To you parents, that’ll sound like a Tuesday. It’ll also probably sound like I’m being super dramatic. And I am a bit — it was only a couple of hours, after all, and it was a stomach bug that lasted for a day. But think about it: when you’re a twenty-something-year-old with no particular experience of dependency care, such as an ageing parent, a disabled partner, or a caregiving job, you don’t get very many occasions in your life to put your physical self at the service of another, pushing beyond your normal capabilities in the process. You just don’t. Many people physically push themselves for themselves, doing ultramarathons, trails, extreme sports or 75 Hard challenges, but doing it for others is, to say the least, unusual.
This is something Belgian photographer Charlotte Abramow talks about in her podcast interview with French feminist Lauren Bastide: she felt exhausted, physically depleted yet deeply emotionally nourished by her experience of taking care of her ailing father in her early twenties — but most of all, she felt very alone, since no one around her had yet been confronted with such an experience.
Because of the way caregiving is organised in our societies today, dependency care is mostly confined to specific sections of people’s lives. It’s not a norm. And that makes it really hard to grasp what it’s like if you haven’t lived it, and share with others when you have.
Similarly, from the outside, parenting often just looks tiring. For many young people, what they understand of the experience of raising children often boils down to ‘they all look exhausted’ — because they’re not seeing the visceral, the emotional, the complete reshaping of priorities that happens when your primary mission becomes to keep someone else alive.
This is precisely why alloparenting is so precious, and should be made a much more normal part of our lives, at every stage. Only by doing the thing can you truly understand how difficult, yes, but also complex, rich, and beautiful caregiving can be. And by alloparenting, I mean the full spectrum: from playing with someone else’s kid, to babysitting, to spending several days doing the job of the parent to children that aren’t your own. Care isn’t quite the same when you don’t have the responsibility of responding to the full range of somebody’s needs.
[During that weekend, I also kept thinking “damn, this is intense, parents really should be paid like football players”. I think if more people got the opportunity to care for other people’s kids, there would be a way more widespread understanding that children deserve better rights and a place in society, and that parents deserve all of the support we can give them.]
Which brings us back to our Saturday. Around eleven, T. arrived. And frankly, he was incredible. By the time he got to the flat, I’d ejected everything there possibly could have been in my stomach, and felt so weak that he had to take the baby from my arms for fear I’d just let him flop onto the floor. I couldn’t even drink a sip of water — it would come right back out.
So he took care of both of us. From what he thought was going to be an assistant position, he quickly had to adapt to being promoted to full temporary parent. He’s the eldest of both his siblings and his cousins, so he’d never taken care of a baby before. By the end of that day, he’d learned to soothe, feed, change, and dress a baby, apply gel on his gums for the teething pain, how to properly shake a bottle so it doesn’t have clumps, how to tell if a baby is hot, hungry, dirty, or just in need of some love. He took hundreds of laps with the pram around the Invalides so I could get some sleep. He cleaned the kitchen, the living room, threw out diapers, stroked my hair and kissed my forehead as I zombied out on the couch waiting for the moment I’d feel like I could safely swallow a paracetamol.
At one point, on our way back from a fairly unsuccessful attempt to get some air — I threw up on some tulip bulbs in the Tuileries gardens — I had a thought. (Noteworthy, because not very many thoughts were being had over that weekend). I thought, ‘this feels important’.
It struck me that seeing how a person, and particularly a man, reacts when confronted with vulnerability (and the responsibility of taking care of that vulnerability) is probably one of the most important factors that should inform whether or not you choose that person as your life partner. And that by compartmentalising caregiving, separating it out from our lives, and making parenting an exclusively individual responsibility, we rob ourselves — and women in particular — of opportunities to know how others around us care.
Of course, I already knew T. was a great caregiver in lots of other ways, and I already knew he’s most likely the person I want to build a family with. I know, from having seen him be in the world, that he’s a deeply kind, calm, and grounded person. I fully trusted that he would take good care of my nephew. But seeing it in action really cemented that for me. I think it deepened our love. It wasn’t a ‘fun’ weekend per se, but it was beautiful; paradoxically, the relative intensity of it made us want to experience that together even more, with children of our own.
More importantly, though, zooming out from my particular situation, we know that periods of enhanced vulnerability are acute windows of risk for relationships to break down. Faced with vulnerability and dependency, many men reveal themselves as incapable of dealing with it, instead responding with frustration, addictive behaviours, violence, or flight. Men are more likely to leave if their partner is in poor health1. Domestic violence rates increase during pregnancy and postpartum. About 70% of cases of shaken baby syndrome happen at the hands of men.
Therefore, the siloing of care and the lack of alloparenting opportunities — itself the product of the decline of large families and intergenerational living, but also of cultural norms around parenting that put the entire responsibility of raising kids on the nuclear family — rob women of a precious opportunity. The opportunity to see their partner care, in action. To see that they can and will be up to the task, the day they have their own caregiving duties. An opportunity that can potentially, in the worst cases, save theirs or their baby’s life.
I’m not saying ‘test your man’ — if you have reasons to be worried about your partner, for example if he exhibits aggressive tendencies, you definitely shouldn’t put him in charge of someone else’s baby. (Then again if you’re with a man who exhibits aggressive tendencies, the priority is not really to experiment how comfortable he is with vulnerability, the priority is to get yourself to safety.)
But this is essentially my convoluted way of writing a love letter to alloparenting, to auntiehood, to spending time around kids who aren’t your own. It’s a wonderful thing. Those of us who can should definitely do more of it. It has nothing but benefits for everybody involved. It provides parents with extended networks of support. It’s a great way to decide whether you want to have kids. It gives alloparents an opportunity to understand how rich caregiving is, thereby potentially also making them more tolerant of vulnerability, and more supportive of cultural norms and policies that favour interdependence.
And from a feminist perspective, it provides women who are considering spending their lives with a particular man with the opportunity to know that he can care. That when the situation calls for it, he will be able to — and will want to — care for them, for their children if they have them, for others in their lives. And as selection methods go, choosing someone based on their ability to care seems like a pretty solid bet.