The Pandemic Is Continuing To Affect Women's Ability to Work & Be A Mother

Dear Liz,

I’m a working mom with three kids, and the pandemic is making my life a nightmare. Our school district recently closed the elementary school following a COVID breakout, which would be fine if both my husband and I didn’t have to work, but my youngest daughter (Eden, age 8) is suddenly and unexpectedly home. Eden has special needs that require a degree of attention that’s impossible for either my husband and me to maintain while we’re at work. I’m with a remote call center and my husband’s an electrician, which means he can’t work from home. We’re a two-income household out of necessity; we can’t afford for either of us not to work. 

But our schools have been closed for a couple of weeks now and aren’t expected to reopen until early October at the absolute earliest, and there’s zero childcare availability around here as far as I can tell. Eden requires a great deal of present, proactive care because she’s not good at communicating her needs, which means I can’t field anywhere close to the same volume of calls I’m expected to because I have to make sure Eden is doing her remote schoolwork, eating, and gets cleaned up throughout the day. It takes a huge chunk of my day away from my “desk,” which has got me on the ropes with my supervisor (who has only gotten harder and harder to deal with). But what am I supposed to do? We might be able to afford in-home babysitting, but my daughter isn’t fantastic with strangers and, again, she’s got intellectual and physical disabilities, which means we can’t just hire someone in the neighborhood. I’m terrified I’m going to get fired if my reduced capacity keeps up, but I have to take care of my child. 

Help!

-Tori R. 

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Hi, Tori!

Hoo boy. That is quite the pickle and a whole lot for your family to be going through. I’m so sorry you’re in this position.  

One of the great disappointments of the pandemic era is our collective inability—on a societal and structural level—to rise to the occasion, which has only complicated a problem that was already wildly complex. I saw a comment online the other day that the push to return kids to school is just about getting parents back to work, which I don’t think is entirely true, but is true enough to warrant a real discussion and some much-needed structural change, and your situation illustrates that; your kid can’t go to school right now, and that means you aren’t free to do your job—which, on a grand scale, is part of this ongoing calamity. You do need to get your daughter Eden (beautiful name, by the way) back to school, and that’s entirely because you’re in an untenable and unsustainable position, through no fault of your own. 

I want to preface my advice by noting that none of this is ideal—it’s merely the best advice I can give for navigating an unfair situation. 

Call centers are notorious for how demanding they are, requiring high volume and low pay, and treating workers as disposable. My best advice (given the reality around how little empathy and support there are at your place of work for what you’re going through) would be to look for another job, but I’m not sure when you would find the time. The sad reality is that this is a crunch many working moms are having to face; I read just yesterday that 1.7 million moms remain unable to return to the workforce for exactly the sorts of circumstances you’re up against: a lack of childcare infrastructure, premature school openings leading to sudden and unexpected closings, and partners who are either unable or unwilling to put in sacrifices to ease the burden on their wives. I understand your husband is an electrician, though, which perhaps might present a real solution: if he’s an independent contractor, there may be ways that you can provide administrative and business support to help him find more clients and secure more jobs, essentially launching a small business together. Alternatively, if he does work for a company, depending on the nature of that relationship, you might be able to suss out whether his employer is looking to fill any administrative roles. The bottom line though, start asking around, do some digging, seek out new opportunities, and lean on your current connections and relationships to help with your job hunt, especially for entry-level positions like data entry that might not pay well but will let you keep working while leaving you the capacity to take care of your daughter. 

Running a business and administration are certainly demanding work, but they can also be more flexible than your current job; it usually doesn’t matter when exactly invoices get entered into the computer as long as they get entered within a reasonable window of time, and because the nature of the work is fundamentally different than your current job, you could discuss your temporary situation with a potential employer upfront; that all you need is to get through this current closure and then you’ll be at full capacity.

This clearly isn’t an ideal situation, and you may not find a job you love, but in a crisis situation like yours, where the need and the threat alike are both immediate, finding a new job strikes me as the wisest course of action. 

Lastly, if your other children are old enough, it might be worth seeing to what extent they can be involved in her care—in a paid capacity, rather than paying a stranger—especially if you have an older teenager, which could free up your afternoons since high school tends to skew earlier in the day. You want to make sure you approach this in the right way though; one of my first jobs was babysitting when I was a teen, which I really loved, but be careful not to put too much pressure on your children or make them feel like they don’t have a choice in this. A family member or close family friend might be an option here as well.

The key thing here is to get you out of a situation where unpredictable school closures create financial crises, because I anticipate this won’t be the last one you have to face this year. And next year. And maybe the year after that. It’s time, such as you are able, to think about the long-term alongside the next couple of weeks. 

It’s likely going to be a challenging transition, and changing jobs isn’t without risk, but, barring your employer experiencing a rapid growth spurt in empathy, I think change may be your only real option under the current circumstances. I know that’s scary, but you can do this!