How Baby

School is great, but boy, is it ever a shock to go from childcare being a service that you pay for to something that’s ultra-regulated and standardized. In the first five weeks of school, fully half of those weeks haven’t been full days. Y’all know what a struggle it was to set up the delicate balancing act of our childcare before and after school, so to have literally every week have an outlier day (or two!) is… really frustrating. It’s like, hey! You’re my de facto childcare now! Please stop just deciding to… not be that.

It’s an uncomfortable echo of how I got pushed out of steady employment when I went back to work the first time. When both parents work and you don’t have the kind of family network where there’s always people around to help, you really do OFTEN run into these cases where it’s like… well, I WISH I could work, but if I do… someone will probably literally die, so… It’s been five weeks now, and the hits just keep coming, and eventually we’re gonna run out of goodwill from the people who, y’know, expect us to be at work.

I’ve just hit this point where I am so frustrated with everything about modern family configurations and how they intersect with capitalism and gender roles and the educational system in general. How do other people do it?? How have we built a system where a) it takes two incomes to sustain a household, but b) the nuclear family only has two adults in it, and c) there’s not enough daycare spots available to compensate, and d) the school system still apparently operates under the assumption none of the rest is true??

Argh. Taking applications for third responsible adult to take care of all the thankless but extremely necessary domestic and emotional labour I’ve rejected, thanks.

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If you missed it, the third chapter of Motherlover has started! Go take a look, and catch up on chapter two if you were waiting to read it all at once!