Except that now I have a job (sort of), and my coworker Like has a son, Mason, who has severe developmental disabilities and needs full-time care. Luke struggles with child care, particularly in the Age of COVID, and I had a very short, very illuminating conversation with him yesterday.
Luke's son was born around the same time as his coworker Andy's, and Andy's wife Chris took care of both boys when they were tiny. Chris was (reportedly) the first to notice that Mason was exhibiting developmentally delays. Around the time that the boys were two, Luke told me that Andy asked him to find other child care arrangements. I don't know how Andy made the request, but Luke believes the reason is because having his wife care for the other boy "cut into his (Andy's) free time." Please imagine all possible inflected bitterness in this statement. Luke actually called Andy a dick for—reading between the lines—wanting Chris to be able to take off the same vacation time that Andy did, even if Luke wanted childcare during that time. (Which is not to say that Andy wasn't a selfish dick in other ways—he most certainly was—but expecting Chris to schedule her life in order to raise the child that Luke and his wife Katie didn't want to take care of is pretty fucking selfish too.)
I also wonder whether Chris, who was a social worker before the children came, felt unqualified or, quite understandably, unwilling to take on the difficult task of caring for a special needs child along side her own toddler. The only time she ever mentioned the situation to me, it was in passing to criticize Katie for being an indifferent mother who seemed insufficiently engaged with her son—leaving me pondering the days when ASD was called "cold mother syndrome." (Yes, I know absolutely that being a moderately crappy mother does not cause autism, but the head still tilted when I heard that archaic term.) Everyone has a price, but I doubt that Luke could possibly have paid me enough to take on the task of caring full-time for a child with severe developmental and behavioral issues—while also caring for my own dubiously neurotypical child. (Andy Junior was no day at the beach either.)
So Luke and Katie set about finding other childcare, which is challenging for parents of a neurotypical child, and much more so for a child with profound ASD. And of course, they referred to it as "preschool." Ten hours a day for a toddler is not preschool. It's daycare. And Luke bitched about how the "preschool" they found would provide "only" ten hours a day of care, which was impossible for people who work a full eight hours plus an hour lunch plus commute. So he was bitter that he was always late to work, and his wife was always late picking the boy up, and the daycare workers were always pissed that she was late. But "fuck them" because "they didn't work hard enough for it."
The expectation that someone should provide an 11 hour day's worth of safe, supportive, enriching care for any child, much less a small child with severe, violent behavioral disturbances, at a price substantially less than a minimum wage 40 hour workweek is INSANE!!!!! Which doesn't stop parents from expecting it and being angry when they don't get it.
When Mason became (properly) school-aged, hallelujah!, they got eight hours a day of free daycare—which seems to be the main reason people send their children to school because who the fuck needs to learn to...read and do math and learn history—and then his grandmother would get him off the school bus and watch him until one of his parents could get home. That went on until the pandemic struck and the school closed and the grandmother refused to take Mason for the whole 55 hour childcare workweek. So Luke and Katie were trading days "working from home," and I, idiot that I am, volunteered to watch Mason once a week to try to keep Luke at work for a few more hours so the ever-shrinking company that supported MY family as well could keep limping along. I did that until school re-started, then agreed to watch Mason twice a week in the afternoons because Grandma had discovered that she really enjoyed doing literally anything other than taking care of her disturbed grandson in the afternoons.
Eventually, Luke got federal money to hire a care worker and asked me to take over every day for pay instead of a couple of times a week out of the goodness of my heart. I declined because I am DONE taking care of children. It turns out, I don't really like children, and I would not be a happy teacher or daycare worker. I volunteered to do it during a GLOBAL FUCKING PANDEMIC because sometimes you need to take one for the team, not because I really missed wiping butts and being a snack bitch to an ungrateful child. And I also declined because taking money from them would have shifted the dynamic of our relationship. They would have felt that I owed them something rather than the other way around, and I do not need money that badly. (And indeed, immediately after they found someone to take the job, Luke and Katie started bickering over her time as if it was a resource that belonged to them. Note also the expectation above that Chris should be available to care for Mason when Luke wanted, at the expense of when Andy wanted family vacations, a sense of entitlement that stems entirely from Luke's worship of paid employment.)
I filled in a couple of times when his "respite care" worker (his common-law sister-in-law who would watch Mason for money but not for free) couldn't make it, but the first time I declined to take a shift, Luke stopped asking, and I haven't seen Mason since. I can't really say I miss it, and it is partially the bitterness that THEY THEMSELVES view this as a chore that someone should have to be paid to do, because most of his own family and hers won't volunteer to do it for free, either out of familial obligation or, like me, a sense of community responsibility, with the excuse that—cue the celestial chorus—"they all 😇WORK😇."
Now that the pandemic is well on its way, but not quite, to the level of endemic, Mason's special ed school keeps shutting down, or he specifically keeps being exposed and quarantined, causing major disruption to their childcare situation, more so than any normal schools. Luke was wondering whether it was due to lack of staffing, more stringent COVID guidelines, or a greater propensity on the part of the special needs children to be exposed, or their parents to test them and declare it. In any case this is a recurring inconvenience and irritation to Luke and Katie, which is what brought up childcare yesterday.
And I quietly refused to volunteer to watch Mason, in part because I am not going to increase my own and my family's exposure to COVID, but mostly because FUCK LUKE.
I stayed home with my kids. It was a choice that cost our family nearly a million dollars in lost income. I changed my own kids' diapers, I kept them safe from their own recklessness, I taught them to read, helped them with homework, drove them to and from school and soccer and music lessons and playdates and birthday parties. I intensively parented my son out of what might have been a diagnosable behavioral disorder. I managed my daughter's endlessly demanding chronic illness until she was able to do it herself. I was present for them for nearly two decades and they are both about to go to elite universities. (Yes, part of that is luck that they were both healthy and at least close to "normal.") And as much as I love my children, my two decades of unrelenting WORK was hard and exhausting and draining in a way that is seldom acknowledged, and it HAD VALUE, even if I didn't get paid for it.
And I am done enabling someone else who values childcare only insofar as it is a paid activity.
