The Kids Are Alright in Santa Barbara. Are the Parents?

Five Families Explain How They Are Navigating Local Childcare

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

Damian and Pilar Cruz | Credit: Ingrid Bostrom

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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