The Kids Are Alright in S.B.
Are the Parents?
Five Families Explain How They Are Navigating Local Childcare
By Zoë Schiffer | Photos by Ingrid Bostrom | September 1, 2022
At a certain point between pregnancy and childbirth, my vision of how I would care for my daughter disintegrated. Before she was born, I assumed I would take two months off for maternity leave and then return to work and drop her off at daycare. As my due date approached, I confidently told my husband that if I had to choose between interviewing a source and nursing a baby, I wanted to interview the source. Then she was born.
“I have spent a lot of time wondering why neither parenting nor the pandemic has been universally radicalizing,” wrote Jia Tolentino in a recent article in the New Yorker. But to me, it was. Overnight, I went from being someone who prioritized my career and organized my life around achieving professional success to being a person who would gladly sacrifice my job and my body for the well-being of my child. In other words, I became a mother.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, such a sacrifice was not warranted, or possible. When my husband and I moved from Oakland to Santa Barbara, our rent tripled, and we needed my job to stay afloat. I no longer felt comfortable dropping my child off with a stranger. But I couldn’t afford to take care of her instead. Instead, when my leave ended in May, my husband and I were faced with a decision: Who would take care of the baby?
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