- I wake up every day at 4 a.m. to get a couple hours of paid work before my daughter wakes up.
- I can't afford full-time childcare, so I have her with me some days of the week.
Every morning that I wake up to my 4 a.m. alarm — which is most mornings these days — I try to pump myself up by thinking about Toni Morrison, who famously used to wake up at this time so she could write before her kids woke up.
But unlike her, I am not writing the next great American novel as I watch the sun come up. I’m just doing what I need to do to get what I need to get done every day.
I can usually get a couple of hours of paid work done before my daughter wakes up, then my attention shifts. On the days she goes to day care, I have six hours to get things — including housework and basic self-care — done before I have to go pick her up. On the days she doesn’t go to day care, I’m her primary caretaker, so I don’t get much “done.”
At almost 3, my daughter is starting to skip naps, but on the days she does nap, I squeeze an hour or two of work in. Most nights after she goes to bed around 9 p.m., I try to do a little more before I finally crash around midnight.
I'm exhausted but have no option
I’m exhausted, and this is completely unsustainable, but it’s the only way our family can make it work right now. We can’t afford full time childcare with our current income, even though we both need to work full-time hours.
Our day care offers a sliding scale fee structure, which feels like a privilege, but it’s somehow also still unaffordable. If we were enrolled in the full-time program, yearly tuition would be a little over $31,000 based on our income bracket, which means it would cost more than 25% of our total income.
Factoring in already high housing costs, relentlessly rising food costs, and completely unpredictable and unwieldy healthcare costs, we decided it made the most sense to minimize expenses where we could by enrolling in part-time childcare.
Our yearly tuition for part-time attendance (two days a week) is $15,000, or $1,250 per month, which is “only” about 12.5% of our total income currently.
We have mountains of debt
I’m lucky in the sense that because I freelance, I generally can do my work during whatever hours are best for me. But also, because I freelance, my income is unpredictable and unsteady, which makes it hard to make ends meet for many months.
We are in mountains of debt, and we’ve often had to make hard choices about which bills to pay and which to delay, ultimately choosing to prioritize food and childcare. As a result, we've overdraft our account more times than I can count (the day care bill was once, optimistically, on autopay), and our car was repossessed recently (we were able to get it back thanks to yet another loan, adding to our seemingly endless debt).
I often think about families who make far less than us and don’t have the luxury of a flexible schedule. How do they do this?
We want day care employees to be paid fairly
While we could’ve chosen slightly less expensive day care — though it seems that $36,000 annually is pretty standard for many American families these days — it’s very important to us that care providers are paid a living wage since that continues to be an enormous problem, and is a major reason there’s such a shortage of childcare workers.
The school we selected does provide livable wages to their staff. But should it come at the expense of attending families’ own financial stability?
I believe childcare should be affordable, and childcare workers should have livable wages, and the solution might be subsidies. This is common practice in many parts of the world.
If only the place where I lived did the same, maybe I’d finally be able to get a full night of sleep. Or maybe find time to try to write the next great American novel.