I picked up Zoe from her day camp. She could have walked, but I was feeling kind of parental after taking her to a doctor’s appointment this morning, and so when I dropped her off, I agreed I’d be there at the end of her day.
On the way back home, she was showing me various fashion looks on her phone. I parked in the driveway, and we were having a nice conversation, but soon I noticed I had a work email and another email about planning an upcoming trip. Then I got antsy and felt I needed to get back to what I felt I needed to be doing.
She wasn’t feeling what I was feeling, and kept talking and not getting out the car, the way teenagers do, and finally I told her: Look, I have responsibilities, and you’re keeping me from getting to what I need to do.
As I was headed inside, I was musing about what Freud said, or might have said, about love and work being the cornerstone of our humanness, and it occurred to me: The man probably didn’t do much caregiving. And if he had, our whole understanding of human psychology might be different.
Because our humanness is really about taking care of babies and old people, and this applies to most of humanity over its entire history–with the notable exception of well-to-do men in Freud’s circumstances.
Caregiving, which has been the cornerstone of my own developing humanness, has its own satisfactions and frustrations, and these are different from Love (in the genital sense I think Freud was referring to, even if the quote itself is apocryphal).
And, as I found today, as I have found many times before, caregiving is antithetical to Work.
