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The word ‘care’ invites feelings of tenderness and warmth – a need to nurture or soothe, a protective act. Indeed, the Cambridge Dictionary definition of ‘care’ is ‘the process of protecting someone or something and providing what that person or thing needs’. What definitions do not do, however, is consider the actual lived experience, the emotional labour behind the role of ‘care’.
Most of us, at some stage, will take on a caregiving role. This may be done voluntarily or out of necessity (most likely it’s a mix of both). The UK Census 2021 reported that 5 million residents in England and Wales were providing unpaid care, with 1.5 million people providing 50 or more hours of unpaid care a week.
Meanwhile, health and care sectors in the UK are drastically under-resourced and suffering from national staffing shortages, with many care workers suffering from stress and exhaustion.
Whatever format caregiving takes for the individual, there are expectations that run alongside all forms of emotional labour. Formally, these are known as the ‘display rules’ which prompt the caregiver to regulate their emotions and behave in certain, expected ways: a carer will be patient, reassuring, pleasant. While caregiving can undeniably be a rewarding experience, the pressure to suppress any negative emotions can add to an already heavy load. Caregiving is a nuanced mix of joy and sadness, patience and frustration. As Mary Oliver expresses in We Shake with Joy:
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‘We shake with joy, we shake with grief.
What a time they have, these two
housed as they are in the same body.’
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In Case Studies: the craft of care, we are looking for poetic and creative non-fiction responses to experiences of caregiving – the realities of caregiving today, and the feelings that go with this vital-yet-demanding role, once the display rules have been stripped away, the mask taken off.
The most obvious forms of caregiving are, perhaps, those discussed above, but this is a versatile subject area with a wealth of interpretation, and we encourage you to be broad and innovative in your exploration of the term.
For example, you may also choose to consider:
*Parenthood and the ‘wholly complicated dilemmas’ Carolyn Jess-Cooke speaks of in her poem All Right, where a mother contemplates
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‘…whether she is
wasting her life at the sink
or if she is in fact the wisest person alive…’
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*Care for nature and our responsibilities towards our environment, as Sophia Argyris writes in Measurements:
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‘All I want to do is go back to the river,
dip my hands in the freezing water…
do as little damage as I can.’
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*Self-care and the things we can do to look after ourselves, whether big life changes or much smaller, everyday little acts to make ourselves smile, as Wendy Cope demonstrates so perfectly in The Orange:
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‘And that orange, it made me so happy,
As ordinary things often do…’.
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However you choose to interpret the theme of caregiving, we would love to consider your writing. Please see our submission guidelines for details on how to send us your work.
Case Studies: the craft of care 