Much like “Breastfeeding seems simple, but is actually really complicated and hard!” or, “You’ll never have time alone with your partner after you have kids,” childcare-related lamentations had always been theoretical to me in my pre-parenthood life. The struggles of my friends and community members already deep in the child-rearing trenches were upsetting but still abstract to me, even in my first few hazy postpartum months.
"Of course it will be impossible to have kids and keep working at the same time," I remember thinking on more than one occasion, my baby punching my left breast as he fed from my right, his chubby fist gripping the lock of hair he’d yanked out of my ponytail. And then: "Of course I also won’t be able to stop working—for my family’s financial survival. This is parenthood in America. We’ll figure it out like everyone else somehow does." This was a “someday” problem. It only occurred to me later that the “everyone else” I was thinking of was either decidedly not figuring it out, or was a generation or two older than me; a gulf of inflation and recession separated my circumstances and theirs.
It only occurred to me later that the “everyone else” I was thinking of was either decidedly not figuring it out or was a generation or two older than me; a gulf of inflation and recession separated my circumstances and theirs.
When my child was a newborn, I was able to leave him with my parents for an hour here and there, so I could go for a slow, leaky walk, or close my eyes for the first time in 24 hours, or even do some freelance writing to make an extra $300 while my breast pump parts soaked in the sink and my savings account shriveled to a wan husk of its former self. Then, when my twelve weeks of unpaid leave from my in-person job were up, and my husband’s even briefer leave was on its last legs, we found ourselves on waitlists for several local daycares–none of which we could actually afford without borrowing money from our families or somehow taking on more work. Of course, it was impossible to do more work with no childcare in place. Eventually, we figured out a grandparent-and-daycare mixture that allowed me to return to full-time work. The salaries we earned—mine, for my job as a health care worker and my freelance writing work; and my partner’s, for his work as a carpenter—could pay either our mortgage or our full-time childcare costs, but not both.
It’s one thing to observe that the parents in your communities are drowning, hearing their desperate pleas and throwing them whatever ragged life vests you have. It’s quite another thing to find yourself treading that open water, no land in sight. When I first realized that my feet were no longer touching the sea floor–my toddler spending three days a week in a corporate-feeling strip mall daycare after months on a waitlist–the abstract became very real.
I always imagined a house full of siblings. But as the daycare bills keep arriving, and my student loan debt keeps piling up, it s now not hard for me to imagine that my son may very well become an only child. This is not because of any definitive choice my partner and I made, but because–simply put–we might not ever be able to afford a sibling for him. When I realized that the second child I’d always planned to have would also need childcare, a third copy of that mortgage-sized check we can barely afford to write in the first place, I cycled through desperation, to rage, to despair. The United States may be a country on the verge of banning abortion care, and eventually–if its “pro-life” minority manage to grab even more power– contraception altogether. And yet, in this same country, I can’t even do what all those white-haired old men are always claiming they want and need me to do–have more babies!
I feel ashamed that I only truly understood the depth of the childcare crisis once my own family was struggling. It wasn’t when my friend, six months postpartum, got off the daycare waitlist she had applied for during a previous pregnancy that had resulted in a miscarriage more than a year prior. It wasn’t when I added up the money I’d lost because I couldn t work when my son was sick or had a snow day. It wasn’t even when I first read that the cost of childcare in the U.S. has increased 220% over the last three decades, and that–according to the 2023 edition of the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s annual report–more than half of working parents with infants or toddlers reported having been late to work or leaving early in the previous three months due to child care issues. (Twenty-three percent reported being fired for this reason, by the way.) This was all horrifying information, but scrolling through it at will is very different than living it.
In my daily life, I see my friends and colleagues who are parents–let’s be honest, mostly those who are mothers–faced with an unbearable set of non-choices: dropping out of the workforce completely, trying to take on better-paying positions that they might otherwise recognize as too stressful or not fulfilling to them personally (and that often give them even less time and mental energy for their children and themselves), or declining to pursue the creative work they might have once called essential. This tightening financial fist is shaping not only when and how we build the families we dream of, but also if it s even possible to build them in the first place.