Over and Under Whelmed

let's talk about care work

In 2015, my family moved from the Oregon Coast to south of Portland because my spouse’s livelihood depended on a natural resource (salmon, sturgeon, steelhead) that was rapidly and continually disappearing. He took a more regular job to advocate for that resource and our move over the hill (scroll down on that link) was hard but also, in same that year, we saw the Ferguson uprisings, growing public awareness of the movement for Black lives, the political earth quaking of Donald Trump, fascism, and other rifts dividing in America and making things harder for millions. For a long time, 2015 was a personal demarcation of the year where the things I thought I used to be able to count on as feeling whole—i.e., my body, my mind, my sense of community, and my small but doable income—started to feel fragmented, unstable, and downright glitchy. But now, with increased public awareness of things like leaked viruses, global pandemics, genocides, climate events, and Project 2025, I know I’m hardly alone in feeling splintered, anxious, and brittle in these times.

The last year and a half, however, may mark my new “personal best” about remaining relatively sane and miraculously sober amid increasing instability. I started this post with a long nuts and bolts “Christmas card” (as my mom says) of what’s happened for my family since November 2022. Most of our hard things have to do with moves and medical crises for any one of my spouse’s and my four in-laws/parents. I’d say I edited that section out because I’ve written before about being in this hard space of the sandwich generation, but in truth, I only sort of edited that section, so if you’re really curious and you haven’t talked to me lately, you can read the long footnote.¹

Importantly, that 750+ word footnote about of the kind of care my spouse and I have been providing below is just the facts, that footnote doesn’t cover the emotional elements this time of our lives holds: the sadness of watching those you love decline, the gratitude and grief of having siblings in the mix of caring for aging parents, the nuances of tag-team-parenting a screenager with a driver’s permit, and the general horrors of our health and elder care systems. But, as I told my kid, “Although it’s not very typical that all four grandparents would experience such health crises at the same time, how lucky are we that we still have had all four for so long?” And how lucky are we that we have good enough relationships with our siblings to all contribute to the their care; that we own a house (or more!); that we have daily job flexibility that we can show up for our parents and still have enough resources to get by if only barely? Like the peonies from my yard I picked for my mother, I work each day to envision our abundance.

That said, I’ve stopped calling what I’ve been doing “caregiving,” because care is hard work that needs to be lifted up in a country that at this same moment is showing how much they don’t care much about most of the Americans they govern. In the judicial branch alone, the Supreme Court declared a US president can commit crimes as part of his official duty, the chasm between government accountability and human rights widens with each decision that says people experiencing homelessness outside can be punished or the recent federal regulation decision that says that experts from various agencies (in the environmental, technology, and financial sectors, for example) are not required for policy making and judges who may know very little about said sector (and who may or may not receive financial incentives) are free to rule on such policies. Meanwhile, the executive branch allows genocide to happen in Palestine and insists on backing a man with declining cognition and poll numbers (someone who needs far more care and much less presidential work), to be the next Democratic candidate. And the legislative branch has cat fights on the house floor because even when you’re a woman in power, how you look still is a point of discussion.

So, yeah, I’ve both been a little overwhelmed in my personal life, and I’ve been very underwhelmed with America. But seeing as I’m writing this post soon after the day so many Americans celebrate the independence of our country, I think it’s high time to revive and reissue the word whelmed, which stems from the Middle English whelmen, to overturn. As in, “we the people whelmed the existing government with our democratic direct action, care work, and community building.”

The Declaration of Independence says, “whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends [life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness], it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government.”

Myself and many others sense it is high time for a new government and yet, I am not talking about civil war. I’m talking about altering our culture, particularly the culture of folks like me with an abundance of advantages and relative safety. I’m an abolitionist who believes in nonviolent action, in consciousness raising, in relationships, and in, yes, community. And that energy is how we will whelm them, because we are connecting and networking in real life and online, we are providing care work, we are acting in joy. And acting is the key, as Ed Abbey said, “action is the antidote to despair.” Even with all the hardships of my immediate family life, I am able to be active with my local community, showing up as a citizen of democracy every day I can, and conditioning my body and fragmented mind to handle the discomfort and painful depths of global suffering through intentional resourcing.

The Nano is one publication dedicated to embodied writing for the purposes of our collective liberation. I’m hardly the only one talking about these ideas, so below are some links for your listening enjoyment, from some of my fav leaders in this imagination and energy movement toward a better America:

How to Imagine a Better Future for Democracy | adrienne maree brown and Baratunde Thurston | TED

The Embodied Path to Healing Trauma with Resmaa Menakem | We Can Do Hard Things Podcast

Ai-Jen Poo: From a Crisis Economy to a Care Economy | University of Hawaii Better Tomorrow Speakers Series

My family held the funeral and burial this week for my father-in-law at the Willamette National Cemetery, home to the Oregon Korean Veterans Memorial. I wonder how my father-in-law might not recognize the America he thought he was fighting for when he joined the military. While I feel my grief for his loss and my family, and I keep acting with care, love, and hard work to emerge an America that honors his legacy.

1. In order of appearance the nuts and bolts of my life since November of 2022 include: My spouse and I bought a new, bigger house so that my mother, whom my siblings I felt was in danger of a catastrophic injury, would be convinced to move in with us; my spouse went to the ER twice (the second time while I was away on a girls’ weekend and he had to leave our child on her own all night); my family moved into our new house over spring break; at the end of that week, my father-in-law-fell down and broke his hip, and that stress seem to flair my mother-in-law’s dementia . After a very short rehab stint, my FIL needed-full time care in his home and so my spouse lived with his parents, and not in our new house for at least two weeks. I traveled to Chicago to try to convince my mom in person to move to our house; she still was undecided. Then, our child, who was feeling neglected I am sure, acted out in ways that got her grounded for a month. To say my performance at my job suffered due to all this personal stress is an understatement. I tried to focus, but my mind and body could not seem to perform under such distress. By Memorial Day, my manager put me on a “personal improvement plan.” Soon after, I had a migraine so bad, I was sick for a week but, out of fear, I continued to work, which only resulted in me messing up more and the chasm of my “work-life balance” widening. Then my mom fell down, was hospitalized, and placed in rehab.

Late summer, I flew with our teenager to Chicago to help my mom out of rehab and back into her home. I worked five of my “vacation days” to set her up with a home health nurse, a physical therapist, and 24/7 care while also trying to get my kid some summer fun (pretty much failed that task). We flew back to Portland on Labor Day Sunday, and I readied our daughter to start high school. That day, after dropping her off at the high school with a greeting marching band and cheerleaders welcoming the Freshman, I felt weepy and exhausted. My spouse gave me one of my “do-you-need-a-hug” hugs (assigned by my therapist to help ground my nervous system), and he said, “You feel hot.” Well, well. I’d contracted my first-time case of COVID. Our daughter didn’t get sick, thankfully, but I was down and out; my spouse went off to find the few fish still out there for work. While still recovering from COVID, my manager said the quality of my writing was sub-standard and I did not meet the requirements of my improvement plan. For the first time in my life, I got fired from a job.

My mom had two more hospitalizations and rehab stints before Thanksgiving, which my siblings gratefully handled, and then, before the year ended, my own father, wanting to join the aging parents-palooza, tanked as well, experiencing small seizures that caused him to fall down hard at least six times and be hospitalized at least twice. Or maybe more; I may have lost count.

In early 2024, I visited my dad, then flew to Chicago one more time to put the hard sell on my mom, who finally admitted she needed full-time care and agreed to move across the country and into our house. That she made the move felt like a miracle, but not to rest on any laurels, the night before she arrived on a plane, my father-in-law fell again and went through a rough series of medical emergencies. My husband was gone helping his parents through that crisis and more rehab, and, staying for weeks at a time with his mom in her house, while I simultaneously integrated 146 boxes and items of my mother’s valuables, furniture, artwork, and stuff into our house. One day in there, my mom helped my daughter with a small sewing project in her bathroom, and then said, “I lost the needle.” The lost needed somehow ended up in her bedroom, and at 4:45 a.m. the next morning, my mom stepped right on that needle sticking straight up in the carpet, speared into her foot, and snapped off so that later that morning, after getting our daughter to school, my mom finally informed me what was going on and I had to take her to the emergency room where a patient doctor found that half-needle and dislodged it from the sole of my mom’s foot. My in-laws’ power line snapped off a few days later racking up more bills, and my husband and his brothers finally convinced their parents to move into an assisted living place. Then, a week after my in-laws moved into their new place, my mother-in-law fell and was hospitalized. My typically very cool spouse was visibly frustrated because he was supposed to go fishing for work that evening, so I said, “just get yourself ready,” and I went to see my MIL in the hospital that night. The very next day, the director of the assisted living facility called my spouse, who was working on his boat, to say his father had died. My spouse’s response was, “Are you fucking kidding me?” That night I went with my brother-in-law to tell my mother-in-law that her husband of 59 years had died.