The caregiver stories we most often miss are those that rarely make it into the archives of the United States because they often fall into the overlooked spaces that whiteness and cisness and wealth force them into because whiteness and cisness and wealth bulldoze everything in their path. Although the media is covering this, most of the stories they focus on are the stories of white, cis, middle-class women. Last month in this column, I wrote about how devastating the pandemic has been on caregivers and about one of the overarching sources of our collective rage: so many people, primarily women, have given up their careers and identities to care for children and disabled folks and the elderly because the government has refused to help. It’s the kind of rage that makes you dig your nails into your steering-wheel-bruised palms until they nearly puncture, the kind that makes you scream into your pillow at night until you want to tear it open with your teeth, the kind that shapes you and sometimes shaves a few pieces off, the kind that forever changes what it shapes. Another politician says the American people have been given enough to make do but corporations deserve more. Another piece-of-shit racist cop has murdered another Black man.
This rage is stealth, and there are spikes in it: another person you know gets COVID.
when the dog is barking to go out and no one else will take him, when the laundry is still sitting on the recliner where you left it a week ago, when your partner tosses their clothes on the floor for the hundredth time and is in the mood to fuck and the words well up in you like somebody’s sliced you open and you’re seeping blood: fuck you. when everyone is cranky and wanting dinner and you aren’t sure you have enough food to make it through the week so you pull open the fridge to see what you can stretch. when your youngest is whining about schoolwork and your eldest has already told you no a dozen times that day. I mean the kind that comes for you at 9 a.m. When I say rage, you know exactly what I mean. Last week, it was this: I was so filled with rage that I went out to my car and screamed and beat my hands so hard against my steering wheel that the soft edges of my palms ached for days. I have a confession: I’ve done things in quarantine that I hesitate to say aloud.