Care, lego and other four letter words
‘Do you have a spare base plate?’ said one mum to the other. Three of us had gathered the day before restrictions lifted. An illicit get-together of kindred spirits, unable to wait another 24 hours. Our children go to school together, and so do we, enmeshed in a web of neighbourhood and time-of-life adjacency. Our ritualised, twice a day, five times a week interaction. We were joking about how much lego one of us has, verging on the obscene. The request related to the game we had been running during isolation, to create and share lego creations. ‘It’s never a question of if we have the lego, but where’, she said.
For the last five years I have had a cleaner. It’s one of the best things that’s ever happened to me. My second child was followed by a period of poor health and a six-month gift was extended to a fortnightly proposition. So, every second Tuesday morning, I clean for the cleaner — my attempt to return things to their logical place and provide the appropriate canvas for Dani, our household angel to do her work. A subject of amusement for some and the oft-quoted reason I am unable to meet at the cafe after drop-off. It is my ritual nonetheless, each time is the same.
‘Did you know that there are more lego mini figures in the world than there are people?’ she said, the mum with all of the lego. It wasn’t hard to believe her, if my house was anything to go by. I started to imagine how many pieces of lego there must be in the world. It made me queasy, the staggering number of rock-solid, immutable objects that we have created from the earth, our great twentieth century alchemical trick. Made to look like ourselves, our cities, our fantasies, our creation. Little charms of our existence, collecting under the couch in startling volume.
So, under the couch is where I begin, my quest to turn the plastic tide that piece by tiny piece infiltrates the domestic setting. I am not a neat freak by any stretch of the imagination, it’s a fear of waste that compels me. Dani, despite her thorough and cheerful approach to her work, does not have time to stop and bend for every tiny of piece of lego in her path. What if that minuscule golden brick gets sucked up by the vacuum cleaner? Kylo Ren’s space craft will be without a headlight. What if baby Voldemort is lost forever? How will Harry fulfil his destiny?
The first wave is an easy one to ride. The larger clusters of lego, the half-built ideas. They gather in clumps, like an X marking the site of play. To collect these, I scan the house whilst completing other acts of domestic upkeep. The trick here is to engage with the periphery. I am on alert, seeking out colourful bursts in my field of vision that might become lego on closer inspection. Stuffing them in pockets or gathered in my hands until I can’t carry anymore, I deposit them all on the kitchen bench, trying to keep them intact, to keep the possible alive. I don’t know if I enjoy doing this part anymore, but it builds up enough momentum to take on what’s next.
The children’s room. It’s a lego graveyard. It’s also a zoob, toy dinosaur and lid-less texta graveyard, but that’s another story. By virtue of its size, lego is the bottom feeder of the children’s bedroom ecosystem. It filters through all other mess to form an under-layer of plastic. To get to it, I categorise and put away the toys, fold and put away the clothes, unearth the apple cores from their landing spots and recycle the abandoned drawings, salvaging the ones that whisper quietly in the ear of my future self. Submitting to the mystical process of domestic transfiguration, I become the fairy godmother of the room, righting all that has been made wrong not with a wand but with my body. With my time. With my intent. It is a covenant requiring great emotional fortitude. It also takes the largest lego bucket, plonked in the middle of the room as a target for the multicoloured bricks I throw in, unsorted. Positioned with eyes close to the ground, the sighing begins. Perhaps it’s my body catching up with my thoughts. It’s probably oxygenating my brain for the final stage of lego repatriation, the hunt.
Its location is mysterious. It could be your desk. It could be the bathroom windowsill. It could be half way down the hallway, it has even been inside the fridge. You don’t know what you are looking for, but you need to find it nonetheless. Just keep looking whilst also not looking. It’s a subtle art. You might catch a glimpse of lego RJD2 on a bookshelf. Grab it, put it in the bottom of your empty pocket. Take a deep breath in. Imagine your movements through the house as a ribbon, unfurling before you in space, where does it tug? This is where you will find them. The special pieces. The latest star wars figurine fixation with ‘lightsaver’ dropped nearby. The broken down ‘jet-powered autocraft 3000'. ‘I made it for you mum’, they said.
Close as we are to home, have you guessed yet what I’m really talking about? The penny may not yet have dropped. But I have. I’m down on my knees. We are all down on our knees. The ones with their arms under the chest-of-drawers, reaching for the dismembered arm of Kylo Ren. Or Batman. Or Bad Cop. My past self could not have imagined a life that would so frequently call on me to re-attach such a tiny thing. That I would become transfixed by the glint in the corner of the room, intuiting it as not just plastic, but a headlight necessary for an intergalactic mission. That the lego stormtrooper helmet left insouciantly on your desk needs you to return it to its owner.
Caring is sharing. It rolls off the tongue so easily, a couplet meant to be. Am I caring for my children by keeping such vigilant watch on tiny pieces of lego? What does it mean anyway, when all I do is throw them back together in a pile? Inviting redistribution. Who shares this task with me? Who cares enough to keep the vision of completeness intact. That’s all caring is. Taking from your own wellbeing to shore up another’s. Digging deep to understand that what looks like a piece of plastic to you — to someone else is in fact an entire world. To care is to understand the importance of meeting other people’s needs. Automatically, unquestioningly, every second Tuesday (well, let’s just call it that for now, no point scaring people off).
Carers, parents, chosen people. Perhaps lockdown will give us a chance to finally ‘see’ these hidden figures. Not the ones strewn under couches, but the ones patiently, persistently, exasperatingly looking under them. Soldiers on the frontline of the care economy. Trading their equilibrium for the unrealised benefit of others. What a powerful thing. To hold in your mind the desires of another, giving it your centre. Inverting your identity to ensure that vision has its best chance of becoming reality. Silently keeping an internal ledger of unfulfilled potential and incomplete ideas, for all those in your care, vigilantly scanning for portals to fulfilment.
It can take your breath away, this observance. Carrying the emotional load of others. A sigh (and myriad other methods) can diffuse the pressure but the practice leaves you changed. Never more than when looking into the bucket of unsorted lego, simultaneously seeing its chaotic truth and its idealised mirror state. When it all sits comfortably together, grouped according to its own inherent ability to be useful, first by colour then by size. Ready to become anything. Ready to respond to experimentation, to celebration, to need, to play.
We know now that care is the missing ingredient from the so called ‘advanced economy’ (neoliberalism hiding behind a flimsy curtain just like the Wizard of Oz). Business can provide for you, but it can’t care for you. It can’t keep paying you when you are unable to work. It won’t set aside its own inherent need for profit for any need of yours, no matter how profound. I derive no benefit from scampering around my home on all fours, seeking out disappointments that haven’t happened yet. It makes me the lowest of the low, the invisible bottom feeder of the economic scale, cleaning for the cleaner.
Who has more power? The person who pursues their own advancement or the one who stays behind to take care of those in need? The maternal complex is where we derive our notion of care, the most miraculous and powerful energy available, the line with which we draw the circle of life. Try telling that to the childcare worker on minimum wage. Or the nurse earning a fraction of the doctor’s salary, not to speak of status. It certainly doesn’t give me life, every second Tuesday, knee deep in lego and other four letter words.
Care — as the modern ‘advanced economy’ would like to define it comes first for the self. Me-time, pampering, relaxation retreats, the wellbeing industry. Billions of dollars traded for an elusive moment of ‘self care’. A trick to keep us looking in the mirror, attuned to our own needs, convinced it’s possible to buy care neatly packaged, on special, as a members-only offer.
To truly reveal the power of care we must free it from the domestic setting to understand it as an elixir that we all need, in different quantities at different times of life. A caring society does not value the individual for their ability to return economic value, but simply for existing as their own imperfect self. We can’t choose to be cared for any more than we can choose to win the lottery. We can only hope to develop the quality in others by offering care ourselves. Trusting that care, once given is ordained to return to another in need. So I won’t give up on repairing Kylo Ren’s tiny broken arm. A small amount of effort for a lifetime reward. That sounds like a pretty good trade to me.