I’ve been sitting with an uncomfortable feeling lately.

It’s not anger. It’s not blame. It’s something quieter — the sense that some forms of care and contribution have become expected, almost invisible.

Not because people are ungrateful. Not because anyone intends harm. But because when something is always there, we stop seeing the cost of it.

In care work — especially family child care, early education, and community advocacy — generosity is everywhere. People give time, energy, emotional labor, physical labor, often while carrying pain in their bodies and stress in their lives. They show up because someone has to. Because children matter. Because families matter. Because the work matters.

And over time, that willingness becomes part of the background. Care becomes assumed.

What troubles me

What troubles me isn’t that people accept help — we all need help. What troubles me is when the system quietly relies on the same people always giving, without pausing to ask what that costs, or how responsibility is shared.

At a structural level, care work is already undervalued. Society treats it as something that should cost less, something whose value is hard to calculate, something sustained by goodwill rather than investment. That mindset shows up in wages, in policy, and even in how “quality” and “professionalism” are defined.

But at a relational level, there’s another layer we don’t talk about enough: when giving becomes predictable, it becomes taken for granted — even unintentionally.

And when that happens, the people who give the most often feel the least seen.

This isn’t about guilt — it’s about awareness

Equity isn’t only about access to resources or opportunities. It’s also about how we distribute responsibility, expectation, and care. If contribution flows in only one direction, something eventually breaks — not because people don’t care, but because no one can carry indefinitely without support.

I don’t want us to respond by demanding more, proving more, or sacrificing more to justify our worth. That logic keeps us stuck in the same cycle.

Instead, I want us to pause and ask different questions:

• What kinds of contribution have we normalized without naming?
• Who are we unconsciously relying on to always step up?
• What would it look like to make care — and the people who provide it — visible again?

Care should not survive on exhaustion. Generosity should not require self-erasure. And community should not depend on a few people quietly carrying the weight for everyone else.

Naming this isn’t divisive. It’s an invitation — to share the load, to see each other more clearly, and to build something that doesn’t require anyone to disappear in order to keep going.