HOW DOES ANYONE MAKE ANY OF THIS WORK

A and I are hanging out at home together because they're sick today, and I'm having some thoughts.

This is the first time since I was 16 that I don't have a job or any immediate plans to get a job. Building and maintaining financial independence was a huge focus of my childhood; my parents always drilled into me the importance of education, of keeping my own money, of using my powers as a rational economic actor to make reasonably profitable decisions. So this feels pretty weird.

My plan was to look for another job once my NASA paychecks ran out, but it's been almost 3 months since then. I considered trying to focus on writing my book proposal or articles, but I haven't made much progress on that front either. I'm lucky that my partner makes enough to support our family on one paycheck - it feels like an impossible luxury in this economy. But the real reason I haven't gone back to work yet?

A goes to preschool. Preschool ends at 2 PM. Then we spend a while hanging out before picking K up from daycare at 4 PM. At least once a month there's teacher development day - no school. 2 weeks for winter break, several snow days, 1 week for spring break, assorted holidays - no school, no school, no school. And of course, on top of that, they're getting sick (which means we're all getting sick) constantly. No school.

This is only somewhat tenable at the moment because I'm not working. I can pick them up from school. I can be the one to stay home and set them up with infinite TV time during sick days, since my wife's sick leave policy kind of sucks now. If I started a new job, then on top of all the work at the job, we'd also have to deal with all the logistics of (and paying out-of-pocket for) before/after care, backup childcare, summer camps, and so on.

Bringing this up gets me a lot of blank stares. "Well, yeah, that's what you signed up for when you decided to become a parent."

True. And I'm dealing with it. But this isn't the same as saying "ugh, I had a baby, and now I have to change all these diapers, what the hell." This isn't an inherent part of childcare at all.

There are a lot of different ways we could deal with this as a society, if we wanted to. We could have a universal childcare system that also incorporates non-standard-hour care, e.g. as is outlined in this childcare strategy document for the city of Vancouver. We could invest in robust air filtering systems and masking policies to drastically reduce disease transmission in these facilities. Or we could funnel the gains in worker productivity towards shortening the workday instead of allowing the bourgeoisie to appropriate them all. Or we could structure homes and public spaces to be more accessible to children so that they don't require quite as much direct, intensive care from adults in the first place.

And yeah, I am complaining about this from a relatively privileged position where I can afford to take the time off from work to focus on childcare for so much of the day. A lot of people can't afford to do that. The burden of emergency childcare still falls disproportionately on mothers. They risk being fired for taking too much time off (especially unexpectedly) - resulting in a loss of income, medical care, housing, and food, because we exist in a living nightmare.

So how are these working mothers handling it?

A lot of them rely on "patchwork" care: informal networks of childcare relying on (again, disproportionately female) extended family, friends, and acquaintances. Sociologist Helma Lutz talks about this extensively in her book The Backstage of the Care Economy, which focuses on the experiences of Eastern European migrant care workers. These workers rely on these informal networks quite heavily, since they are gone from home for months or years at a time. But mothers who work more locally rely on patchwork childcare as well, especially racialized mothers. But as informal childcare receives even less structural support or oversight than its formal counterpart, these systems are very precarious for everyone involved: most of all for children, who face worse abuse when their caregivers are stressed, stretched thin, and burnt out. And sometimes, large-scale emergent situations (like the beginning of the COVID pandemic) push mothers out of the workforce altogether, whether they can afford it or not.

The thing that gets me over and over and over is that this whole situation is so contrived. It doesn't have to be this way. It's bad for mothers, it's bad for children, and it's bad for society at large. But capitalism runs on invisibilized social reproductive labor; it fundamentally lacks the capacity to support this care at scale, especially long-term; the ongoing precarity of childcare is just one piece of that; families keep finding ways to make it work anyway. So here we are. Here we will continue to be.

A just vomited again. I'm going to go clean it up.