Just when we thought we had this whole working parents during a pandemic thing down, the world comes at us. Pretty par for the course for the last couple of years, when everything has felt—MORE.
A stomach bug kept Sweet Pea home a couple of days in a row. Then an ice storm followed by four inches of snow shut daycare down for a week. We were stuck in the house with the kids for over 10 days because of a couple of inches of snow and ice made the Tennessee roads treacherous. That made for some serious changes to our schedules.
We were expected to work the same amount but also entertain a toddler who doesn’t know what it means to play on his own and an infant who’s just learning how to army-crawl. The toddler keeps throwing tiny bits of crayon on the floor and trying to share his goldfish crackers with his sister, who is doing her best to sweep all of these things in her mouth and choke on them.
Oh, and we’re trying to potty train the toddler, so we have to be hyper-vigilant of his movements, lest they indicate he needs to go sit on the potty. One morning, he told me he had to go poop (yay! progress!), sat on the portable toilet, then stood up at the crucial moment (oh no, sit down!). We were all surprised by the size of the turd that plopped onto the floor. Thankfully his sister wasn’t within army-crawl arm-sweeping distance.
All of this is kinda funny when I write it out like that. It’s kinda funny because for us, when the snow melted and the daycare opened up again, the kids went back to school. It’s kinda funny because there’s an end in sight. This was a tough week, but we juggled meetings and kid duty, living for nap time, and sharing our kids with our coworkers on our video calls.
I’m grateful for long afternoon nap times and the amount of grace our companies afford us right now: Our bosses don’t constantly check to make sure we’re getting work done, because they know that we will do our best to produce work, despite the childcare challenges. I took a half-day off for the first day of ice, but after that Max and I worked out the schedule so that we could swap out childcare to cover meetings and get in a couple of uninterrupted hours of work. That meant that neither of us missed more than a couple of hours each day; hours that we made up in the evening after the kids went to bed.
We had about 10 days of no relief. I can only imagine what this past year has been like for other families. Those families that don’t have reliable daycare. Those families who have balanced full-time childcare with meeting schedules. Those families who don’t have the freedom to move meetings around or work from home.
We all deal with life the way it comes. Most of us try to make the best of the situation we’re in. This week has made me want to work harder to bring childcare equity to my town.
Tennessee was affected by the same ice storm that hit Texas, although our situation was much less dire. If you feel moved, please donate to a charity to help families in Texas. Consider giving to Feed The People Dallas a female-run, Black/Latinx aid society.