How this became real to me: Women and the hidden burdens of Coronavirus.
I walk to Crossroads Day Nursery as I always do for afternoon pick-up. It is Friday, March 13th. There’s the familiar smell as I enter the building of freshly baked goods, laundry detergent, and dried mud. Rows of cubbies line the walls. In front of each one is a bag, affectionately termed the “drag bag,” to describe the way that a small person transports it down the hallway and into class. Each drag bag, labeled with duct tape and hand-written names in sharpie pens, sits overflowing with bedding, rain gear, and lunchboxes, ready to go home for a wash as they always are on a Friday afternoon. But this Friday is different. The clean out is more thorough and complete. In the empty cubbies, I see the outline of a closed down preschool, which is to say one without baking, mud, and laundry. Without young voices crying, laughing, shouting, and singing. Without the teachers whose caring labor I depend on and trust in so that I can do my own work of teaching University students. I walk outside and see my oldest son’s teacher before she sees me. Her face is sad. I bite back tears as I walk up to her, feeling, for the first time, a sadness in the core of my being, a sadness that will not go away but will turn into grief in the coming months. This is it. The last day of school. My oldest son’s departure from preschool is without closure or preparation for the uncertain future of kindergarten to come. The pandemic becomes real as I see that we will not be back.
My three-year-old is eager to take a walk to escape the house for a while. I give him a choice as to which way to go at the end of the driveway. “The park,” he replies. We turn right. He is doing a good job walking. Such a long walk for a three-year-old, but he is determined and enjoying newfound freedom and fresh air. There is a lightness to his step at the prospect of the playground, the sandbox, the jungle gym, and the swings. His gate suggests that he might break into a run at any minute. As we approach the park, I see the red mesh fencing. At first, I cannot process what I am seeing. Coincidental construction? No. They have really shut down the playground. “I have some bad news,” I tell my son. “They closed the playground.” I pick him up for the first time since we left the house so that he can see. He looks confused. Disappointed. “Coronavirus,” I explain. There is no more to say. We play with other things. Trees, rocks, grass, anything not built by humans, and not likely to be touched by other human hands in the near future. My son wants to go home. I carry him most of the way. In the mudroom, while taking off his shoes, he says to my husband, “Daddy, I have some bad news…”
My youngest asks, “Mama, when will things go back to normal?” His older brother declares, “I like Coronavirus. I get to take life easy. I don’t have to do a bunch of things all day.” “Will coronavirus be over this weekend?” “I hate coronavirus.” For months, their words mirror big adult emotions that are hard to wrap our heads around, hard to manage.
Can words capture an experience? People certainly try. Memoirs, journals, articles on everything from what it’s like to be on the front line to how to rearrange your pantry or exercise in your living room. Words carry the potential to transcend social isolation.
Everyone has been saying that these are “unprecedented times.” And yet there is much precedent. Precedent as old as recorded time. Microbes killed tens of millions of Indigenous people when North America was colonized. The Black Death killed a third of Europe from 1347 - 1351. Boccaccio’s words record the experience:
“It was not merely a question of one citizen avoiding another, and of people almost invariably neglecting their neighbors and rarely or never visiting their relatives, addressing them only from a distance; this scourge had implanted so great a terror in the hearts of men and women that brothers abandoned brothers, uncles their nephews, sisters their brothers, and in many cases, wives deserted their husbands. But even worse, and almost incredible, was the fact that fathers and mothers refused to nurse and assist their own children, as though they did not belong to them.”
Pandemics shape human history by reshaping humans. The body politic struggles to reconcile its own powerlessness in the face of nature. We become more aligned with our human nature which consists—perhaps in equal measure—of resilience and love as well as callous self-interest in the face of survival. This is an uncomfortable truth to confront, let alone to live with daily.
The pandemic exposed just how fragile the body politic is. As childcare and support evaporated, caregivers emerged as the essential workers, caregiving as non-negotiable social obligation. Our survival depends on it. And yet, caregiving, so much of which is performed by women, remains under-valued, under-appreciated, and non-monetized. Pandemic parenting exposed the illusion of family-friendly work environments and parental policies as rhetorical cover ups for the deep reality of just how difficult it is to inhabit the competing worlds of career and motherhood.
By Sarah Rivett
See other stories about the impact of COVID on women in Maria Russo Photography Documentary