Kate Bowler:
You know those moments when you think, surely someone has thought this through, right? Like, surely there’s a plan for the fact that everyone I know seems to be caring for their aging parents and for their little kids or supporting the needs of a disabled loved one or six spouses. But, spoiler alert, there is not a plan. Like, not really, but there could be. And that’s where today’s guest comes in. This is Everything Happens, and I’m Kate Bowler.
We are in a caregiving crisis. It’s the emergency playing out in homes and hospital rooms and daycare pickup lines. It’s a moment you realize there’s no system, no backup, no paid leave, no affordable care, no way to keep your job and your sanity and your loved one’s dignity all at the same time. This is a huge issue that eventually affects all of us. And thank God for people like my guest today who is finding a way forward.
Ai-jen Poo has spent her career making the invisible visible, especially the people who are unpaid, underpaid and undervalued as caregivers. These are all the people who make life even remotely possible for the rest of us. In this conversation, we’re going to talk about the panini generation—you’ll get it—the long shadow of why our labor laws were never actually designed to protect us, and the miracle of being helped when you need it most.
So look, if you’re just in the middle of caregiving of any kind, or you suspect that one day very soon you will be, you are not alone. There is so much in this episode just for you.
Ai-jen Poo is an award-winning organizer, writer, and a leading voice in the women’s movement. She is a nationally recognized expert on caregiving, the future of work, and building intergenerational empathy. She is the author of a book I am absolutely obsessed with. It’s called The Age of Dignity, Preparing for the Elder Boom and a Changing America. This book honestly blew my mind. I’ve been so excited to meet her. I feel radicalized—which is an energy I’m going to pass on to you.
She is the executive director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance and the director of Caring Across Generations. Ai-jen, I’m like really thrilled that you made time for this conversation. Thank you so much.
Ai-Jen Poo:
I’m excited and thank you for reading my book.
Kate Bowler:
I really want to cry talking about it. It’s perfect. And it had this quote, I thought, that might frame the conversation to start. It’s that lovely quote you took from Rosalynn Carter. She wrote, “There are only four kinds of people in the world: those who have been caregivers, those who are currently caregivers, those who will be caregivers, and those who need caregivers.” That’s just an issue that affects everyone. Every single—
Ai-Jen Poo:
Person. And you never know when it’s going to affect you. And most of us are in more than one role at the same time. Like we might need care and provide care at the same time.
I just think about all the times that caregiving—right now I’m a caregiver for my mother-in-law who just had a fall and was in the hospital, and she actually broke the top of her spine. And what’s so interesting is, even as I’m there in the hospital caring for her, she’s also caring for me, asking me how I’m doing and if I ate and if I remembered to go to therapy.
And so caregiving is just one of those beautiful things that’s so universal and also so reciprocal. And once you start to embrace it, it just has more and more of a profound role in your life.
Kate Bowler:
I don’t think I fully understood the scope of the crisis of caregiving that we have right now until I was introduced to your work. Could you give us a sense of the magnitude of this?
Ai-Jen Poo:
I mean, I think most of us kind of intuitively know it because we’re feeling it in one way or another, but basically because every day we have 10,000 babies born and 10,000 of us turn 65, with the boomer generation aging and we’re living longer. So we’ve basically added an entire generation onto our lifespan in this country without changing our policies or our culture to really support quality of life for a longer lifespan.
Kate Bowler:
Oh my gosh, I never thought of that language.
Ai-Jen Poo:
Oh yeah. A whole other generation. The number of people over the age of 85 is gonna double by the year 2040. That oldest generation is the generation that’s the fastest growing in our country.
Kate Bowler:
Wow.
Ai-Jen Poo:
Yeah, it’s really kind of wild and it just means that we’re a country that needs more care than we ever could have imagined. And we don’t have a lot of resources in place or infrastructure to support it. So we’ve got 105.6 million family caregivers, including probably a lot of your listeners who are caring for an aging loved one, an ill loved one, somebody who’s disabled.
Kate Bowler:
Did you say 106 million? And there’s only like 360 million people in the country.
Ai-Jen Poo:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Kate Bowler:
Holy crap. It’s a huge percentage of… okay, so like one third of us are doing something right now.
Ai-Jen Poo:
Exactly, right now in this very minute. And then there’s this whole phenomenon of those of us who are sandwiched between care for older loved ones and younger children. There’s 33 million households with kids under the age of 12.
And so those of us who are caring for both older people and younger people in our lives are called the sandwich generation. And we call it the panini effect because it’s actually way harsher than a sandwich. Sandwich feels too gentle.
Kate Bowler:
Yeah, totally. Yeah, a light cheese.
Ai-Jen Poo:
Yeah.
Kate Bowler:
I’m just a mattering of mayo. No, I like the squeeze you’re describing. It’s a squeeze. And the sandwich generation typically disproportionately affects—
Ai-Jen Poo:
Doesn’t it? It does, yes. Most family caregivers are women, but the thing that people don’t realize is that one of the fastest growing populations of caregivers is men and also children, young people. So 38% of family caregivers are men—still overwhelmingly women—but there’s a good number of men who are caring for their spouses, and there are youth caregivers: young people under the age of 16 who have really significant family caregiving responsibilities.
So there’s just all this invisible care that’s happening in our communities, and the work in the book is really about how do we lift those people up, let everyone know that they’re not alone, we’re in this together, and create the kind of policies and culture that can support us as we care for people we love
Kate Bowler:
That’s bringing back a memory of, I think it was maybe two years ago, here at Aspen, I interviewed a comedian named Iliza Shlesinger, and she has a lot of really fun stuff on roles of women and the ridiculous gender roles, but I remember her starting with like, people think that like, how do you do it all? She’s like, I don’t. I have caretakers, like I have nannies. There’s not a world in which I could do any of this.
And then it was like, oh, but it’s that feeling that your work gives shape to, which is that there’s this invisible economy of care and service and dependence and love and timed meds and bedpans and—
Ai-Jen Poo:
Yes. There’s a reason why we say it takes a village to raise a child. It actually just takes a village, period. Like caregiving was never meant to be a solo endeavor. Literally all of us have so many people in our lives who we should and do rely on to support us with care, and that’s how it was always meant to be. And we should really design our systems to support that. And we don’t currently, unfortunately.
Kate Bowler:
You had two grandfathers who had two very different experiences of end-of-life dignity. I wondered if you could tell me a bit about that.
Ai-Jen Poo:
Yeah, so my grandfather on my father’s side, he was a retired Air Force engineer. And when he retired, he came to live with us to help take care of me and my sister. And it was so great—he drove us to school. And he was also a Tai Chi master, and he would do Tai Chi in the driveway in the morning. So I just kind of like would watch him do Tai Chi in the mornings.
His favorite show was Wheel of Fortune. So I also grew up watching Wheel of Fortune every night. And so we were very close. And when he started aging and needing more assistance, it was really at the moment when he lost his vision and everything else started to decline really quickly.
We couldn’t find appropriate care for him in the home. And as hard as we could try, we just couldn’t find the right assistance. And we had to put him in a nursing home, which was literally his worst nightmare. He just begged us to never put him in a home, and we had to. And it was so heartbreaking because I think all of his worst fears came true.
He had to share a room with strangers, many of whom were in just devastating discomfort. He didn’t recognize the food and really didn’t eat. The lights in the facility didn’t work—they were like these horrible fluorescent lights that would flicker. I mean, it was just such a dehumanizing, institutional feeling. Not at all what you want your Wheel of Fortune Tai Chi master hero of a grandfather to experience in his most vulnerable and most important final days.
And so the heartbreak of him dying in that place, in a very alone and dehumanized condition, just really motivated me to try to figure out how we could create more options and more solutions when it comes to care.
And then when my grandmother on my mother’s side needed more assistance, it’s kind of like the tale of two care stories because she actually got home-based care and we were able to be supported by three different caregivers who enabled her to live independently. She could go to church twice a week and sing in the church choir. She could play mahjong with friends. She could watch the NBA games, which were her favorite. She somehow loved both LA teams.
She really did live life on her own terms to the very end because she had that assistance to live at home. And not everybody’s gonna want that, and some people are gonna need to be in a facility and there will always be a need for facilities. But the fact that not enough of us have enough choices to enable dignity for enough people—that’s what I think we can change. That is actually a choice. It’s a policy choice, it’s a leadership choice, and it’s also about you and I who have care stories and people we love, actually bringing those stories forward and saying, like, we really need this.
Kate Bowler:
It just brings to mind all the tiny little rungs on the ladder that were there or missing when somebody needed them. I think of my grandfather who was able to stay in his trailer till he was 94 because the government—because he was a veteran—gave him a gardener. And then we were able to cobble together the cleaning and it was just enough.
And then he was the last man standing at his trailer community. He took every old lady in the neighborhood to their appointments. But they leaned on each other, but they had enough to do it in a way that felt exactly like the stubborn SOB that he was.
Ai-Jen Poo:
Totally. On his terms. Exactly. And that’s the thing: dignity and agency go hand in hand. And so sometimes it’s like, what is dignity? It’s different for every person because it’s so much about the ability to make choices and to define the terms that we live in, and that’s so important to the very end.
Kate Bowler:
Some of the language you used around domestic workers—like that there’s a big category of kinds of people that we can have in and out of our homes and our lives. Maybe just naming some of those categories would be helpful for people.
Ai-Jen Poo:
Oh yeah, there’s so many professions that are about assisting families and people who need more care. I mean, domestic work as a profession includes nannies, it includes cleaners, it includes home care workers.
And then the home-based care profession is just vast. You have personal care aides, you have home health aides, you have direct support professionals who support people with disabilities. They’re all different names but essentially they are the professionals charged with supporting us to live dignified lives in our homes and to be able to stay as independent as possible.
And those workers are so valuable, and usually it’s somebody who gave so much to enable the rest of us to have our dignity and our opportunity. It’s just such an important profession that we so undervalue.
Kate Bowler:
So because my first impulse when I see need, though, is that I, Kate Bowler, have fundamentally failed to understand the scope of needs in my family. I have aging parents. I’ve got a young kid. And I’m an immigrant, so my parents are far away.
And I think, what do I have to do to completely rearrange my life to make sure that there’s no holes, there’s no gap, every appointment, every anything? You have like a loving pushback against that kind of totalizing view that family members really should be able to do everything, or else they’re failing.
Ai-Jen Poo:
No one can do everything. And the truth is, most of us are doing our very best. The story that we’ve been told is that if we are struggling and we can’t afford it or we can’t manage it, it’s a personal failure. Like we’re a bad daughter or we don’t have the right job or we didn’t save enough money. We didn’t buy the long-term care insurance, whatever it may be.
When it really is a system failure. It’s actually the world around us that has not established any infrastructure to support us on this universal need that’s actually fundamental to the economy functioning.
Right, it’s kind of like: if we need bridges and tunnels and transportation systems so that society and the economy can function, we also need care, right? Because that’s what makes everything else possible. We’re all professionals, but we’re also part of families and we’re mothers and we are daughters. And so we can actually design systems to make care more affordable, to have a strong workforce.
Kate Bowler:
And when you make care more affordable, it is astronomically inaccessible to most people to get the care they need.
Ai-Jen Poo:
It’s absurd actually, the math. Talk about the math not mathing. Most—60% of working people in this country earn less than $60,000, which is in and of itself a really profound data point when you think about cost of living in our country right now.
But then when you think about the average cost of childcare—$10,000 a year. The average cost of a room in a nursing home—$100,000 a year. And home care can cost anywhere from $68,000 a year to $288,000 a year depending on the level of need. It’s just—the numbers don’t add up.
And it’s not because we failed. It’s not that we didn’t save. It’s because we actually should have accounted for this.
There’s a woman named Jessica Calarco who wrote a book recently and in the book she talks about how there’s this beautiful line that kind of summarizes it: “Other countries have a safety net, and the US has women.”
I mean, yes, we are a safety net for each other, and that’s good, but that can’t be our only safety net.
Kate Bowler:
No, that’s not a plan.
Ai-Jen Poo:
No.
Kate Bowler:
Love is love, but love is not a plan.
Ai-Jen Poo:
Right, right.
Kate Bowler:
So other countries are genuinely doing this better. What country do you think stands out as the model of dignified last quarter-of-life healthcare?
Ai-Jen Poo:
In the UK, attached to their national healthcare system, they have a national long-term care system. So if you need long-term care, the government actually covers it.
In Germany, similarly, when it comes to childcare. In Canada, no one pays more than $10 per day for childcare, which I just find amazing.
Kate Bowler:
There’s another fun little law, too, that all my friends take advantage of, which is if you’re a career woman, you love your job, you can kind of put a pin in it when you have your child and come back when they enter school at your same level without getting demoted.
Ai-Jen Poo:
What?
Kate Bowler:
No. At least in Manitoba, that’s what my friends have done.
Ai-Jen Poo:
That’s incredible. Which means that then they can pick up their careers where they left off. Wait, but also doesn’t that—it’s an obvious… wouldn’t it be nice to still… it’s so simple actually. Such an elegant, simple idea.
Kate Bowler:
“I’m still this smart when I get back.”
Ai-Jen Poo:
Well, you are. 100%. Maybe smarter. Because you’ve just parented, which is the hardest thing in the world. So that’s the beauty of realizing that it’s a policy choice—because we can actually make a different set of choices.
And I want us to get to a place where we’re supported in the practical matters so that we can actually show up with the love and the care, for the joy and the human connection part of caregiving, in a totally different way.
And right now, we’re one of the only countries in the world that has no paid family medical leave program. So if you have a loved one—my friend is caring for her spouse who has stage four cancer—she doesn’t have paid family leave. So she has to make a call between caring for her soulmate in his time of greatest need and making the money required to care for her kids and pay the bills.
And it’s actually not a choice. It’s an impossible choice. And that’s the kind of position that we put our caregivers in every day without these policies.
Policy is this abstract concept, but in our lives, it’s the difference between getting time with the love of your life at their time of greatest need or going bankrupt and not being able to feed your kid. Like, it’s real.
Kate Bowler:
If you were going to wave a magic wand and a dignified and aggressively policy-heavy, lovely world were to come to be, what kind of transformation would you imagine?
Ai-Jen Poo:
I would love—I think that Social Security and Medicare work really well in this country. And I would love for there to be an extension of Social Security, a fund where we are all contributing and that we can all benefit from, that helps us pay for childcare, for paid leave, and for aging and disability care.
If it works like Social Security, it would be a social insurance fund. So we’re all contributing, we could all benefit. And those kinds of funds work best when you have a large risk pool. And this would be the largest risk pool in history because it would include all of us. We all have these care needs at different times in our lives.
And I just think it’s a simple solution—when the main pain point is affordability for families, it would just address that so that we could actually focus on the things about care that only we can do.
Kate Bowler:
I mean, I know we talked a little bit about women as the invisible assumed infrastructure for this, but one of the other enormous pieces that you talk about a lot is immigration. Can you tell me a bit about that?
Ai-Jen Poo:
Exactly. I mean, it is such a striking and profound moment of crisis for immigrants in our country, and there’s nowhere you can see it better than in the care industry, where a third of our care workforce is immigrant.
Already it’s such a challenge for our care workforce because the workforce is so undervalued and the programs that they work through are so underfunded. The median income of a home care worker in our country is $22,000 per year.
Kate Bowler:
Oh my gosh.
Ai-Jen Poo:
And so when you think about cost of living, think about what it must be like to try to raise your kids on $22,000 a year. And so that means there’s just a huge amount of sacrifice for the workers who are in this profession. And most of them are in it because they see it as a calling to care for others—and it’s so meaningful and purposeful.
But the low wages make it so hard to sustain. And so many of the women who do this work are immigrant women—a third of our care workforce are people born in other countries.
And the fact of the matter is, the need for care is so great that this is the fastest growing occupation in our entire economy because of the demand. And we won’t be able to meet our country’s need for care without a really strong immigrant care workforce.
And what we’re seeing with immigrants being targeted—there’s a chilling effect. People are afraid to go to work. People are frankly afraid that they’ll get detained, abducted, kidnapped and detained while their client, who needs them, who they’re a lifeline for, is put in jeopardy—let alone themselves and their own families.
This is a place where you can see so clearly the interdependence between immigrants and non-immigrants in our country. There are millions of people who are not immigrants who rely on immigrants for their fundamental survival as human beings, for their human dignity.
And how could it be that we as a country are robbing those people whose job it is to enable the dignity of our loved ones, of their very human dignity and their human rights? That’s what’s happening right now.
Kate Bowler:
And what would be a policy solution? Would it be to create an immigrant pathway for people who’ve established a history with a family?
Ai-Jen Poo:
Absolutely. We have an army—millions of care workers who are immigrants—who would love nothing more than to have work authorization, be able to sign up for more training, and get on a career pathway to be a part of the solution to our caregiving crisis in this country.
And I think it would be so easy to do that: to offer work authorization and a pathway to legal status for our nation’s immigrant care workforce.
Kate Bowler:
I’m just thinking about even in the last couple of years how they’ve super-tracked nurses. Of course there are ways to do that.
Ai-Jen Poo:
Of course there are, and there are bills in Congress to do it right now—for farm workers, for health care workers—and we should have it for frontline care workers.
Kate Bowler:
Say a bit more about the history of that, because there’s like an ugly twinning between there not being legal protections for in-home workers.
Ai-Jen Poo:
And farm workers. Yeah. No, this history is actually so painful. In the 1930s, when our labor laws were being put into place coming out of the Depression, there was a massive push toward improving the quality of jobs and economic opportunity.
A big milestone moment was establishing our labor rights—our right to minimum wage, our right to form a union and collectively bargain, our rights to Social Security.
When those bills were being debated in Congress, Southern Dixiecrats refused to support those bills if they included protections—equal protections—for farm workers and domestic workers, who were the vast majority Black workers at the time.
And we ended up passing those bills, making a concession to those Southern Dixiecrats and excluding farm workers and domestic workers from every single major labor law in our country.
And those exclusions kind of created the imprint for laws to come for years—for laws like occupational safety and health protections, anti-discrimination protections. Exclusion after exclusion after exclusion.
Kate Bowler:
It’s—I mean, just when you describe it, it’s such an obvious long shadow of slavery.
Ai-Jen Poo:
It’s a great way to put it—the long shadow of slavery, exactly. And the fact that throughout our history, it’s always been women who are in the shadows, who’ve done this work and done it with so much pride and care and have still been so devalued.
And now today it’s mostly immigrants. We still have a lot of Black women who do this work, and we have white working-class women who do this work. It’s all quite devaluing.
Kate Bowler:
Even the language, right? Where they say “unskilled labor,” as if the minutiae of caring for someone and these economies of love is not—
Ai-Jen Poo:
I know. I often talk about the genius of care for this reason, because there is such genius and skill and expertise and incredible capacities that caregivers—both paid and unpaid caregivers—bring to bear every day in what they do.
That is some of the most—there’s no other word for it but genius, because it is about this ability to connect in such a profound way to the human needs of another person.
Kate Bowler:
And that reminds me of an interview I did with—he was a mental health nurse—John Swinton, and he became a theologian. And he talked a lot about, when he worked with people with significant cognitive impairment, that there is a speed that you begin to take on, to make it slower.
He borrowed the phrase “the speed of love.” And it’s such a—because it sounds like it would just be flat, but there’s so much anticipation, there’s so much weaving yourself into somebody’s needs.
That is, you imagine it like nothing’s going on, but actually a million things are going on just to even get two people into a place where they can connect.
I mean, I’ve needed a lot of care in my life, medically, and when I think of the times in which I felt the most overwhelmed, it’s always that warm hand.
Ai-Jen Poo:
Yes.
Kate Bowler:
And then the relief of having somebody do something for you physically that you can’t, and preventing you from feeling so embarrassed in a thing where you just can’t solve your own stupid harm.
Ai-Jen Poo:
The ability to support someone else’s dignity and agency—yes. So powerful.
Kate Bowler:
And I love how you—I just, I love that you’re out there showing the beating heart of it. Are there things that people can do to be in step with you as we work on this?
Ai-Jen Poo:
Yes. Oh, I’m so happy to hear you say “we.”
So one is: if you are in a caregiving situation right now, or you anticipate one coming, just in your own family have a conversation—especially if you can do it before you’re in a moment of crisis. To just prepare together among family and friends, to even start to imagine what you might need as a caregiver, what you might want if you need care yourself.
Start to open up the conversation in as many spaces as you can, both for your own individual needs, but also for your community and the people who care about you.
And beyond our personal circles, we’re actually in a really crucial moment because there’s this budget bill moving through Congress very quickly that would cut Medicaid by almost $800 billion.
And the thing about Medicaid is people aren’t connected to it as a policy because in every state it has a different name.
Kate Bowler:
Oh, I see. Yeah. So they don’t think their thing applies.
Ai-Jen Poo:
Yes, exactly. So in Connecticut, it’s called Husky Care. In Wisconsin, it’s called BadgerCare. In California, it’s Medi-Cal or IHSS, or it has all these different names. But it’s this pot of money that funds 40% of childbirth in this country. It’s the main payer of long-term care services of any public funds.
A lot of people don’t realize that if you need long-term care, either at home or in a facility, if you can’t afford to pay out of pocket, your only option is to deplete your assets so you can be eligible for Medicaid. So a lot of middle-class people actually are on Medicaid for their home care or their nursing assistance.
On top of that, it’s a healthcare program that serves more than 70 million Americans. And so there’s a proposal to just cut it in a way that is irreplaceable.
And so now is really an important time to let your congressional delegation know that this program is important and we need more care, not less.
Kate Bowler:
Investments, not cuts. I can absolutely put in the show notes for people to call their local representative. And what would they just say?
Ai-Jen Poo:
They would just say, “Please don’t cut Medicaid.”
Kate Bowler:
Please don’t cut Medicaid.
Ai-Jen Poo:
Yes. And share your story. There’s nothing more powerful than people’s personal stories in this case. That’s what people remember.
And once we get through this fight and we save Medicaid—which we must—I really want us to think boldly about what could be possible if we had the kind of support we needed when it comes to care, and just not be afraid to demand what we actually need and deserve in this country, which is way, way more than what we have.
Kate Bowler:
Okay, here’s my final question then. Because you do so much intense, intense soul work in the world. I find—I’ve been working on a book about joy. There is just this incredible relationship between accepting your fragility and sort of allowing joy to walk in the door.
And I wonder if you see joy a lot in older people.
Ai-Jen Poo:
So much, actually. It’s really profound. And this is something that caregivers talk about all the time, which is that right alongside the burdens and the hardships of care, and all the role reversals, and the things that there’s no way you can prepare for, is this really profound connection to joy that happens.
Because you’re tapping into the most human, the most absurd—the things that you can’t control—and you’re just like, okay, well, whatever, you know? You’re just kind of giving in to humanity and the things you can control, and you are finding your agency within that, and there’s joy in that.
Kate Bowler:
There is a weird superhighway between essentially absurdity and being like, “All right, here we go. Here we go!”
This has been so lovely getting to know you.
Ai-Jen Poo:
Me too, thank you for having me.
Kate Bowler:
I’ve been thinking so much about what Ai-Jen said—that care was never meant to be a solo endeavor. But right now, that’s how it feels for a lot of us, somehow expected to magically hold it all together alone.
We have got to build better systems and policies to help.
We taped this conversation in June, 2025, which is important to note because Ai-Jen encouraged us to call our elected officials to tell them not to cut Medicaid. But unfortunately, Congress passed a massive bill that includes enormous cuts to Medicaid, which is the main way people pay for things like long-term care, in-home help, and aging with even a shred of dignity.
These changes are expected to cause coverage losses for 11 to 12 million Americans by 2034, according to the Congressional Budget Office, making it harder for people to qualify for care and harder for caregivers to do the work that already goes unnoticed.
If you’re in the U.S., call your member of Congress. We put the info in the show notes and just tell them, “Don’t cut Medicaid.” We all rely on it.
And if you’re in a caregiving season or you love someone who is, share your story. I know I’d love to hear it. Come on over to Substack—we’re talking about it there at katebowler.substack.com and I want to hear your caregiving story.
Let’s just remind each other that we are not alone, that we are changed by the stories of others. And let’s be compelled to take action, because it really does take a village to be a person.
And I just want to leave you with something very encouraging. Because hey, let’s just bless the crap out of our caregivers and our care receivers.
Sometimes bodies or minds come undone, and you are carried by a caregiver—often literally. Whether you wanted this or not, you have been given the great gift of a witness bearer, or med tracker, or insurance babbler, or “more ice chips please” fetcher.
But other times you haven’t found a partner, or never married, or they left, or your person died, or the friends aren’t there, or you feel like a burden to ask for the help. Bless you—you who are so worth caring for. You are worth having your needs met.
You are worth being shuttled to all those appointments, and having someone to complain to about another day of the same unresolved problem. Your pain does not disqualify you.
And to the caregivers who continue to put another’s needs before your own, bless you. We know this isn’t what you’d imagined your life to be either, and that sometimes you’re so tired and lonely and burnt out, but you serve and support and show up anyway.
You are worth having your needs met too, but so often don’t, because this is what the day requires. This is what love requires.
Bless you all—all you caregivers and care receivers—you who do the hard work of love and hope-making. May better systems and policies be built around you. And may you receive the love you so freely give others, and then a little extra, because too much love is never enough.
Hey, if this conversation is helping you have a conversation about caregiving, send it to someone. Sharing your worries with someone else can help you make a plan.
And you can find more blessings and reflections over at Substack—it’s katebowler.substack.com. And if you could help other people find this podcast—other than through creepy algorithms—if you leave us a review at Apple or Spotify, it really helps.
And come find me on YouTube—you can watch every episode. I’m at Kate C. Bowler.
Everything Happens—and everything happens with the help of Jess Ritchie, Harriet Putman, Keith Weston, Anne Herring, Hailie Durrett, Megan Crunkleton, Anna Fitzgerald Peterson, Elia Zaneo, and Katherine Smith. And a very special thank you to everyone’s favorite, the incomparable Iris Green. We love you, Iris.
This is Everything Happens with me, Kate Bowler.
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