When it takes a village . . . and a day care . . . and a taekwondo instructor to raise a child - Boston Globe Magazine
By Brooke Hauser
In good times and bad, families with young children need to piece together a network of caregivers. Here are four families and the people they rely on.
“Lady with children.” That’s what the slip said on the pizza box I picked up, after I’d forgotten to leave my name with the guy taking the order. My kids squabbling loudly in the background, I’d hung up prematurely. As COVID-19 encroached, and I struggled to balance parenting two young children with working from home while my husband commuted an hour away, there were days when I felt like I not only forgot my name — I forgot myself.
From Northampton, I sent texts — little cries of help to my parents in Florida and my husband’s parents in Vermont who wanted to be there for us physically but couldn’t under lockdown. None of this is working, none of this is possible, I vented, I need to quit my job.
But in the summer and fall of 2020, the impossible became possible for one reason: child care. Specifically, two child-care providers who became a big part of our lives. Our former baby sitter, Ezra, opened their heart and home to my 4-year-old daughter and 8-year-old son when there was nowhere else to go. And that September, my daughter started attending a home-based, mixed-age program run by a woman named Lise McGuinness, who adapted her entire curriculum to her backyard and weathered the pandemic with the children outdoors all winter. She used tents, sleeping bags, hand warmers, hot cocoa, and a fire pit to get them through even the coldest days.
Anyone who’s counted on a child-care provider in order to keep their own job knows just how essential — how fundamental — that labor is to a functioning, equitable society. Yet somehow, there’s still debate over whether child care is infrastructure.