My twitter feed blew up over the weekend. The Lily ran a story about how women are losing professional ground in the pandemic. They titled/subtitled the piece, “‘I had to choose being a mother’: With no child care or summer camps, women are being edged out of the workforce When parents can’t do it all, women’s paid labor is often the first to go.” Overall, the article was about bias against women and mothers in the workplace, but the opening story was problematic. A woman chose to close a successful business and lay off several employees to care for her kid during the pandemic lockdown. It was problematic because her husband wasn’t working outside the home, and they ignored the obvious solution for him to take over the parenting. “could she ask her husband to handle 12-hour shifts of child care, with no help, no breaks and no clear end point? She wasn’t sure her family could survive that. She wasn’t sure he’d do it, even if she asked.”

Of course, women do this all the time. Sometimes for longer than 12 hours. And rarely does anyone actually ask us–it is simply expected. The problem in that particular family wasn’t coronavirus or the workplace bias against women or mothers. It was the unwillingness of the dad to do the work of parenting. It wasn’t that “parents” couldn’t “do it all,” it’s that the dad refused to do it at all. The article has come under fire because it seemed to accept many layers of sexism as a given: the mom is the default primary parent, the dad is not obligated to develop parenting skills, and moms are always expected to sacrifice their careers. “Her husband was exhausted,” the article says about the mom who closed her business. ‘I can’t do it,’ she remembers [her husband] saying: ‘I can’t watch him for this long.’” What’s with all this himpathy? Women are exhausted all the time from mothering, but nobody cares. If he couldn’t handle twelve-hour parenting days, why does anyone assume that she could? It only makes sense if it’s based on the notion that the very fact of her being female made it her job and qualified her to do it. The article should have been. called:  “‘My Husband Wouldn’t Step Up in this Crisis’: Pandemic further Reveals Male Fragility: Everyone loses when male-dominated families and workplaces have rigid roles for women.” Okay, it’s a little cumbersome, but you get the idea.

‘I can’t do it,’ she remembers [her husband] saying: ‘I can’t watch him for this long.’” What’s with all this himpathy? Women are exhausted all the time from mothering, but nobody cares.

My biggest fault with the article was how it painted this woman closing her business as a “choice.” This wasn’t a choice, it was a defeat because sexism took the most equitable option off the table. The article failed to show the way in which heterosexual motherhood can become a hostage situation.

In action movies, even the strongest heroines or heroes can be broken when the villains threaten the ones they love. This is what it’s like when you watch a dad who doesn’t have the emotional labor skills be in charge of your kid, hour after hour.

Parenting a young person is an ongoing act of sacrifice. You want to finish the fabulous book you’ve been reading, but your kid wants to watch a line of ants crawl across the sidewalk and ask you a thousand questions about it. So you don’t read your book, and instead you answer the questions. Later, you pour the grains of rice into the tiny dump truck and dump it out twenty times. You try to maintain your excitement about it, because your kid is totally thrilled each time. Parenting is about putting another person’s physical and emotional needs before yours. But in a twelve-hour stretch, it’s also about putting a younger person’s interests before yours. And it can be unbelievably boring. This, more than anything, is what makes parenting young children tedious for many parents. I don’t believe that the work is any harder for men to do. Rrather, men are more likely to feel entitled to a life where they get the benefit of having children, but don’t have to make those kinds of emotional sacrifices to ensure their children’s emotional well-being. Men haven’t been conditioned to pay attention to anyone else’s mind for long hours at a stretch, to be the cheerleaders, the nurturers. Men are conditioned to be in the center. To parent is to sacrifice being in the center of your own life. Patriarchy decrees that women will be the ones to make that sacrifice. And if we don’t, the kids suffer. So if the dads drop the ball, they know we will pick it up, because we can’t stand to leave the kids with their emotional needs unmet. Like I said, a hostage situation.

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I am an ambitious woman. Pre- and post- becoming a mom, I have consistently had incredible drive and hustle. I always imagined that by the time I had a kid I would be a wildly successful writer. I had made my living as a writer for many years, and I was just waiting for my big break. I put off having kids for as long as I could, hoping to get my career to the next level—where it could not only support me but support a family. I’m still not there. And when I had pushed my biological clock as far as possible, I decided to have a kid, even though I hadn’t reached my goal. This meant that I would not be in an economic position to be the primary breadwinner for the family, but my male partner would. I’ve held a job all through my pregnancy and motherhood, with a short maternity leave. I’m a lecturer at a university with a two-thirds-time job. My partner works in tech and makes significantly more money than me, although my job has always provided the family’s health insurance, thanks to my union.

As a feminist, I had very much wanted it to look different. I wanted to go into parenting with a clear argument for why our domestic and parenting duties should be exactly equal, especially when I had front-loaded the labor by growing the baby inside my body and providing all the initial food from my internal factory.

But given our work lives, it made sense for me to be the primary parent, because I was the one who was only on campus 8-10 hours/week, with the rest of my work flexible and online.  I was the one with a fifteen-minute drive from home, while he had an hour-long subway commute into a San Francisco office.

If I had been the primary breadwinner, or even an equal one, I might have found myself in the situation that so many moms face: they are equal or greater economic providers, but their partners still expect them to do a disproportionate amount of domestic work. To round things out, the larger society still holds moms responsible for any lapses or failures in homemaking or parenting. And the moms themselves feel responsible. So even when the moms often know that it’s unfair, our love for our kids pushes us to do more and more. We become the human shields to protect our children from the neglect of the patriarchy.

Because my partner spent more hours wage-earning than me, there were legitimate reasons for me to be the primary parent and domestic worker. In the sudden explosion of labor that is parenting, I had more open time in my schedule to do that domestic work. I was nursing the baby anyway. But above all, I was female, and we were both socialized with the idea that I would be the main one to do it.

Of course, all those unpaid hours that I spent parenting meant that I had fewer hours to spend on the unpaid (or underpaid) labor of writing. And it was this that I resented most about motherhood, that being an exploited mom gave me less time to be an exploited artist.

In the early years, I despaired that I would ever be able to succeed as a novelist. But I worked tirelessly and broke into the industry. I also shirked many domestic duties and the house was a wreck for years. I have always been a much better parent than homemaker.

This is one of my partner’s complaints about me, and it’s a fair one. But like so many moms in heterosexual couples, if he would like a cleaner house, I wish that he would spend more time cleaning. Still, I have accepted this division of labor because I wage-earn for many fewer hours than him and because I have such a high level of satisfaction in my work life. I chose writing and teaching writing because I love it. I didn’t sacrifice any personal fulfillment to get a job that would be lucrative. He did. He’s a West Indian immigrant and works hard at jobs that are not his deepest passion. I get paid (albeit much less so far) to do what I love, and for that, I feel incredibly fortunate and blessed.

Yet there are days when it’s too much. Especially when there are special events in my writing career or extra demands at work. That’s when I wish I had a partner with those exactly equal parenting and domestic responsibilities. Because here’s the thing: whoever does most of the parenting gets better and better at it. Whoever doesn’t do it, keeps falling behind in their skills. At a certain point, as a mom, you are carrying all the info in your head. It gets easier to just do it yourself than to explain it to your partner.

And we didn’t go into parenting as equals. I babysat all through high school and worked at a daycare center. I was a camp counselor, an afterschool rec counselor. After college, I started working at a youth empowerment program. As an adult professional, I ran programs for middle and high school students. I’ve conducted national trainings for providers about best practices in youth work. For the last fourteen years, I’ve taught at a university. I have a professional history of working with young people from age three to young adult. He has always worked in corporate and tech settings.

He’s a great guy, and a loving dad, but he’s an introverted nerdy type who hasn’t had a chance to develop the skillset that he would need to be as effective as me as a primary parent. Most of the time, when he’s “on” as a parent with our kid, it’s great. But if he’s tired or preoccupied with work, he’ll let her watch videos or just do his own thing on one screen (work, video games, web surfing, reading) and let her figure out her thing. When she’s having a good day, it’s fine. But when she’s having a harder day and needs extra emotional engagement, he doesn’t necessarily have it to give. I have hard days, too. I have days when I’m fried. But I’ve been socialized as a female. I know how to suck it up and take care of other people. He wasn’t conditioned that way.

Sometimes it plays out like a game of chicken. I’m trying to work and it’s his turn to parent. But he’s absorbed in his phone or his laptop. The kid is demanding attention. He doesn’t close the screen. The kid calls across the house to me. I could yell “I’m working,” but I can hear the emotional urgency in my kid’s voice. If this was actually a game of chicken between me and my partner, I would always break first.

On the one hand, he was a much more self-sufficient kid and doesn’t think it’s necessary to give that much attention to a young person all the time. In that way, it’s a difference in values. On the other hand, he gets the benefit of having a kid who receives a lot of attention without being the one who has to do that emotional labor. So often in mom/dad families, this is the case.

Sometimes parenting plays out like a game of chicken. It’s his turn to parent, but he’s absorbed in his phone. The kid calls across the house to me. I could yell “I’m working,” but I can hear the emotional urgency in my kid’s voice. If this was actually a game of chicken, I would always break first.

And in a pandemic, you can’t supplement with a little babysitter here and a grandma visit there. It’s just the guy and the kid. And if he’s your partner, you already know his emotional strengths and weaknesses. When your kid has a high need and it lands in one of the places of your partner’s weaknesses, it’s heartbreaking to have to sit on the sidelines. And in the pandemic, all our kids are really struggling. I get it. I don’t think I could watch my partner struggle through the learning curve of being a primary parent in this pandemic. The emotional stakes for our kids are too high because we parents are the only other humans they have contact with.

But the fault isn’t with the mom who sacrificed her business, or even with the dad who refused to step up (although that is an asshole move). It’s with the society that set everything up to let a dad get away with a move like that. Our isolated nuclear families, our lack of safety net for families, a lack of part-time work opportunities for parents, lack of parental leave, lack of family support services, not enough living wage jobs with benefits. But above all, the society is at fault by regarding reproductive and parenting labor as something other than labor, because it is mostly done by women. Countries that care about their citizens have extended parental leave and high quality, affordable or free daycare. They know that parenting is work and they organize their society with a clear plan for how that work can go well for the workers and above all for the kids, themselves.

In US capitalism, parenting is framed as a personal choice. The economy of the future will need leaders, workers, consumers. Parents are doing the work of raising them. If there’s one thing we have learned in the pandemic: PARENTING IS ESSENTIAL LABOR. Our society offers a sexist framing of motherhood as part of womanhood. This way, women who don’t have children can be shamed for failing as women. Women who do have children have only themselves to blame for the difficult labor conditions of their lives, because it was their choice. And yet, with abortion services under attack, increasing numbers of women do not actually have the right to opt out of motherhood. So it’s framed as a choice, but the choice is being taken away. There is a reason that abusive men poke holes in women’s birth control. Women with children are much more vulnerable to control and abuse. Particularly in a society where having children is a leading cause of poverty for women. Being a mother in the US is a hostage situation. Our most beloved children may fall into the hands of a corrupt system at any time. We may have to make brutal choices. I just wish we would name them accurately. Patriarchy. Exploitation. Hostage-taking.

This is why the Green New Deal is so important. Not only does it push for drastic reduction in fossil-fuel dependency, employing a massive force of workers who would shift our infrastructure to sustainable energy sources. But it also creates an inclusive vision of the labor force that leaves no one behind, including all the caring and domestic labor that is traditionally done by women. Many proponents of the Green New Deal also advocate for initiatives like Medicare For All, living wages for caring labor, a Universal Basic Income or federal programs to create affordable, high-quality daycare. These provisions would revolutionize parenting, particularly motherhood. Because the climate crisis is the ultimate hostage situation. The fossil fuel industry and the billionaires who profit from it are holding all our children’s futures in their hands, threatening the ultimate in brutality. But unlike the woman in the article, we are not giving in. We will not shut down our businesses, because we moms are in the business of ensuring that our children have a future, and we climate activists are in the business of ensuring that there will be a future at all.

 

Images are from Aya de Leon’s #WriterMomPortraits series which she posted on Twitter