Sticky Note Autoethnography: Caring As an Au Pair

My 2019 diary begins with, “I don’t know whose room this is, but my things are scattered all over the place.” I call it my au pair diary, and from 2019 to 2022, I did my best to avoid reading it. But after three years, I went back to that house, visited the kids, and met the new au pair, who, like me, was Georgian. We went down to the basement, to her room—or mine, or the au pair’s. We wanted to talk (ex-)au pair to au pair, and there I saw my sticky notes from three years ago, still sitting on the table, waiting for someone to make use of their stickiness. Those sticky notes shook my sense of space and time and sparked my affective turn toward care politics. They made me read my abandoned diary, reflect on care work and careless domesticities, and write my Master’s thesis.

The turning point of this brief encounter with my past, embodied in those sticky notes, was the realization of the inherent characteristics of domestic care, which reproduce the emotional web between the carer and the cared-for. But most importantly, it made me see that there was no room, and has never been, for my fluidity in this space. Being told that I was someone’s “older sister” was enough to make me responsible for taking care of them.

This abstract aims to study the non-binary experience of care work, as exploitative as it is, embodied in non-human bodies that affectively reshape the notions of time and space. It follows the interplay between the different versions of myself — the one writing this abstract, the one visiting the family after three years, and the “big sister” — and attempts to understand how these “selves” could be condensed onto a single sticky note.