Thank you for this. I signed up for a free trial subscription. The reason I became a paid subscriber to CS was because of this one line in the original article where you quoted Jessica Calarco as saying “Other countries have social safety nets. The U.S. has women.”
This newsletter made me cry. Yes, we are all weird and wondrous and worthy. What a world it would be if we could all take that on. Thank you for doing this work.
I am so angry all the time these days at how these realities have been dismissed.
Case in point: while my city's schools required masking, not one of the kids in my building got covid. Since masking became optional, six out of the seven school-aged kids have gotten covid (and the seventh kid attends a specialized school for kids with disabilities). I'm recovering from covid myself right now after my kid got it -- one of the kids in the building got it at school and three more kids plus four of the parents got it as a result, while our schools deny that in-school transmission even exists. Literally one of the kids in the building got covid the week after masks became optional despite continuing to wear a mask herself, and the school nurse insisted that she could not have gotten it at school because there wasn't a case in her classroom. Except 1) in-person school for her was literally the only exposure her extremely careful family had (these people were still getting all their groceries delivered, that's how careful I'm talking about), and 2) the nurse *also* said that she would not be in the (optional) testing pool for four months after her return to school, highlighting the fact that they did not actually know if there had been a case in her classroom. Our schools claimed that only 39 cases of in-school transmission happened in all of 2021-2022, which is just such obvious bullshit it's offensive.
In tears right now. This past Sunday, a friend of mine said “Covid ruined my life.” And as she uttered those words, was when I put a finger on what is wrong with me in my life right now. Equally, Covid ruined my life. I know how dramatic that sounds, but it’s also so much truth.
I’m a single parent of four children with exceptional needs. The oldest two have what used to be diagnosed as Aspergers. My daughter (2nd oldest) also has ADHD, agoraphobia, a mood disorder, and a nonverbal learning disorder. My middle son has ADHD and ODD. My youngest ADHD, PTSD (from domestic and school), likely Tourette’s, and seriously sensory and behavioral issues.
Because I’m a single parent and it was ME 24/7 with my children during the early days of Covid, when my ex moved in with his fiancée a couple or few months after shutdown, and suggested they have the kids more often, I agreed (because I was exhausted and needed a break). I tried to go back to just visitation every other weekend after the first couple of every other full weeks they spent with him and were not happy, but he bullied me into continuing, and because of Covid, I let him. That was mistake #3 or maybe even higher - that set a precedent and routine of shared custody... and likely cemented the 50% custody that was decided in the divorce. That was a very costly mistake. For me, and for my children. It’s likely it would have ended up 50/50 anyway because the state of Iowa basically gives fathers 50% unless they are major criminals or worse...
Anyway, this is the first I’ve heard of this book, and can’t wait to read it!
This is such great work, in the tradition of Studs Terkel and others who listen to voices from the trenches of this essential labor and share their insights and struggles with the world. I appreciate it as a parent and now in particular as a caregiver to elders in my family.
My aspiration is do a similar project with activists someday.
As an aside, when I click on the 60 day free trial Scribd offers only 30 days, as far as I can tell. It's still good, but thought you'd want to know...
I spent much of those early months feeling so guiltily grateful that my kids were grown, but this piece has me realizing that I was still a parent through the pandemic. My college-senior daughter was in Europe when the borders closed, and then she finally came home for a long, miserable summer. My son was in the Marines, which he exited at the end of the first year. Supporting young barely-adults through these past two+ years hasn’t just left a bruise; it’s been more like wound that won’t heal or a cancer that keeps coming out of remission—and somehow I didn’t realize that until just now. (Denial is a survival mechanism.) This work is important, but I can’t read it quite yet. Too soon, still on-going.
I am very excited to read this, and simultaneously I think it's very funny because Scribd was my college-era platform for sourcing and exchanging bootlegged versions of musical theater scores for my college theater troupe. I logged on and immediately was awash in recommendations for copies of the piano score for Spring Awakening and Dogfight and Edges and Guys and Dolls.
THANK YOU--for taking the time to listen to these parents, for telling the stories, for making space. I'm a little verklempt just reading this--def pressing the bruise.
I'm currently working on a research project that draws from narrative interviews, and I so appreciate the details you include here of logistically how to do these kind of interviews, and also the winnowing/editing process. I can't wait wait to read the piece!
Thank you for this piece. I’m home recovering from Covid so read the entire thing today. I am a teacher who taught through Covid with three children 5 and under (including one born during the pandemic) and it was so beautiful to read all these stories. I appreciated the different sections and variety of perspectives offered! So beautiful and so appreciated! Thank you!
"And that’s how we can choose to vote, and legislate, and act, and plan, and give: as if each one of us is precious." --> and this is when I started to tear up, because , really if "we" (collective we) could just operate from this point... if seeing each other as precious was the baseline. Remarkable. Thank you anne for sharing your worded
Added to my "saved" pile in Scribd. Really interested in how you frame others' stories. I can barely tell my own, although I've written hundreds of thousands of words trying to.
And I hope to write more, somewhere, soon: we have been broken for at least a few hundred years, if "we" denotes Euro-American settler colonial culture. The string of adjectives could be longer: hetero/cis-normative, sexist, racist, patriarchal, etc etc etc. But all of these apply to Euro-American settler colonial culture. "The West", so to speak.
The pandemic has underscored one of our central points of fracture: care, connection, some valuation of life that is entirely independent of capital, of market value, and even of labor. (I think "work" deserves a nuanced rearticulation because it has become a commodity under capitalism: labor is inventoried and exchanged, whereas work is simply what we do because we are alive. Untangling work from the logic of the compulsory free market would, I think, make it less of a four-letter word for anyone who has ever dreaded Monday. And maybe it would allow us to understand the inherent worth of living, of all who do live--and all who have).
Where and how we became separated--or separated ourselves--from life on Earth is a question I've been trying to puzzle out for years. Thank you for collecting these stories and putting them into circulation and for reminding us to remember. Our dominant cultures are damnably adept at reducing history to nothing particularly compelling, nothing we have to worry about. It has already come back to bite almost everyone in the ass. The market will try to swallow every complaint; keeping them sharp and impossible to ignore is the challenge.
I read it all last night and this morning. I thought I had lived/read about/talked about all of these things already. But you're right. It hits different to simply see so many firsthand accounts together.
And: thank you for including a stepmom story. (Even aside from the pandemic, stepparenting is stranger and more isolating than I ever would have guessed. I don't feel right in mom spaces/communities online or IRL. But I'm definitely not NOT parenting.) Anyway, navigating a shared custody situation in a pandemic was/is ... something. Your "bubble" necessarily includes people you didn't directly choose a relationship with, and who might have different ways of assessing risk than you and your partner. Is the other household going out? Masking? Social distancing? What do they think constitutes an exposure and would they tell us? What happens if the kid gets sick? Or a parent? etc. There are obviously a lot of similar circumstances that show up in the piece (needing to rely on family or friends for childcare, not getting to BE in a bubble at all because of work) but .. I don't know. It's a situation where the most basic stuff is already a negotiation. I think we did pretty well, so far, but the only way I ever saw anyone talk about it was on twitter, by chance. I don't remember seeing it come up mcuh in reporting.
I am so excited (not maybe the right word) to read this. Every time I read one of your newsletters, I feel seen.
But I’m wondering, would you be willing to share the questions you asked?
At the beginning of lock down everyone was saying “document it! Write it down!” But I couldn’t. I couldn’t find words for the anxiety and pain and panic and relief (???) and fear I felt. I couldn’t squeeze in the time for it in between work and parenting and fucking covid.
But maybe as you said above, if I had the questions, I could answer them for myself as an introspective process. I’m still struggling to know what’s happening in my life even with the help of my wonderful therapist (who is probably reading these comments too).
Would writing my own answers to your questions help me process whatever this is that happened to me? Would you share those?
I simultaneously can't wait to read this but also dread reading this because I don't feel far enough removed from the worst of covid yet because I'm still dealing with long covid... :-(
Thank you for this. I signed up for a free trial subscription. The reason I became a paid subscriber to CS was because of this one line in the original article where you quoted Jessica Calarco as saying “Other countries have social safety nets. The U.S. has women.”
This newsletter made me cry. Yes, we are all weird and wondrous and worthy. What a world it would be if we could all take that on. Thank you for doing this work.
I am so angry all the time these days at how these realities have been dismissed.
Case in point: while my city's schools required masking, not one of the kids in my building got covid. Since masking became optional, six out of the seven school-aged kids have gotten covid (and the seventh kid attends a specialized school for kids with disabilities). I'm recovering from covid myself right now after my kid got it -- one of the kids in the building got it at school and three more kids plus four of the parents got it as a result, while our schools deny that in-school transmission even exists. Literally one of the kids in the building got covid the week after masks became optional despite continuing to wear a mask herself, and the school nurse insisted that she could not have gotten it at school because there wasn't a case in her classroom. Except 1) in-person school for her was literally the only exposure her extremely careful family had (these people were still getting all their groceries delivered, that's how careful I'm talking about), and 2) the nurse *also* said that she would not be in the (optional) testing pool for four months after her return to school, highlighting the fact that they did not actually know if there had been a case in her classroom. Our schools claimed that only 39 cases of in-school transmission happened in all of 2021-2022, which is just such obvious bullshit it's offensive.
In tears right now. This past Sunday, a friend of mine said “Covid ruined my life.” And as she uttered those words, was when I put a finger on what is wrong with me in my life right now. Equally, Covid ruined my life. I know how dramatic that sounds, but it’s also so much truth.
I’m a single parent of four children with exceptional needs. The oldest two have what used to be diagnosed as Aspergers. My daughter (2nd oldest) also has ADHD, agoraphobia, a mood disorder, and a nonverbal learning disorder. My middle son has ADHD and ODD. My youngest ADHD, PTSD (from domestic and school), likely Tourette’s, and seriously sensory and behavioral issues.
Because I’m a single parent and it was ME 24/7 with my children during the early days of Covid, when my ex moved in with his fiancée a couple or few months after shutdown, and suggested they have the kids more often, I agreed (because I was exhausted and needed a break). I tried to go back to just visitation every other weekend after the first couple of every other full weeks they spent with him and were not happy, but he bullied me into continuing, and because of Covid, I let him. That was mistake #3 or maybe even higher - that set a precedent and routine of shared custody... and likely cemented the 50% custody that was decided in the divorce. That was a very costly mistake. For me, and for my children. It’s likely it would have ended up 50/50 anyway because the state of Iowa basically gives fathers 50% unless they are major criminals or worse...
Anyway, this is the first I’ve heard of this book, and can’t wait to read it!
This is such great work, in the tradition of Studs Terkel and others who listen to voices from the trenches of this essential labor and share their insights and struggles with the world. I appreciate it as a parent and now in particular as a caregiver to elders in my family.
My aspiration is do a similar project with activists someday.
As an aside, when I click on the 60 day free trial Scribd offers only 30 days, as far as I can tell. It's still good, but thought you'd want to know...
I spent much of those early months feeling so guiltily grateful that my kids were grown, but this piece has me realizing that I was still a parent through the pandemic. My college-senior daughter was in Europe when the borders closed, and then she finally came home for a long, miserable summer. My son was in the Marines, which he exited at the end of the first year. Supporting young barely-adults through these past two+ years hasn’t just left a bruise; it’s been more like wound that won’t heal or a cancer that keeps coming out of remission—and somehow I didn’t realize that until just now. (Denial is a survival mechanism.) This work is important, but I can’t read it quite yet. Too soon, still on-going.
I am very excited to read this, and simultaneously I think it's very funny because Scribd was my college-era platform for sourcing and exchanging bootlegged versions of musical theater scores for my college theater troupe. I logged on and immediately was awash in recommendations for copies of the piano score for Spring Awakening and Dogfight and Edges and Guys and Dolls.
THANK YOU--for taking the time to listen to these parents, for telling the stories, for making space. I'm a little verklempt just reading this--def pressing the bruise.
I'm currently working on a research project that draws from narrative interviews, and I so appreciate the details you include here of logistically how to do these kind of interviews, and also the winnowing/editing process. I can't wait wait to read the piece!
Thank you for this piece. I’m home recovering from Covid so read the entire thing today. I am a teacher who taught through Covid with three children 5 and under (including one born during the pandemic) and it was so beautiful to read all these stories. I appreciated the different sections and variety of perspectives offered! So beautiful and so appreciated! Thank you!
"And that’s how we can choose to vote, and legislate, and act, and plan, and give: as if each one of us is precious." --> and this is when I started to tear up, because , really if "we" (collective we) could just operate from this point... if seeing each other as precious was the baseline. Remarkable. Thank you anne for sharing your worded
Added to my "saved" pile in Scribd. Really interested in how you frame others' stories. I can barely tell my own, although I've written hundreds of thousands of words trying to.
And I hope to write more, somewhere, soon: we have been broken for at least a few hundred years, if "we" denotes Euro-American settler colonial culture. The string of adjectives could be longer: hetero/cis-normative, sexist, racist, patriarchal, etc etc etc. But all of these apply to Euro-American settler colonial culture. "The West", so to speak.
The pandemic has underscored one of our central points of fracture: care, connection, some valuation of life that is entirely independent of capital, of market value, and even of labor. (I think "work" deserves a nuanced rearticulation because it has become a commodity under capitalism: labor is inventoried and exchanged, whereas work is simply what we do because we are alive. Untangling work from the logic of the compulsory free market would, I think, make it less of a four-letter word for anyone who has ever dreaded Monday. And maybe it would allow us to understand the inherent worth of living, of all who do live--and all who have).
Where and how we became separated--or separated ourselves--from life on Earth is a question I've been trying to puzzle out for years. Thank you for collecting these stories and putting them into circulation and for reminding us to remember. Our dominant cultures are damnably adept at reducing history to nothing particularly compelling, nothing we have to worry about. It has already come back to bite almost everyone in the ass. The market will try to swallow every complaint; keeping them sharp and impossible to ignore is the challenge.
I read it all last night and this morning. I thought I had lived/read about/talked about all of these things already. But you're right. It hits different to simply see so many firsthand accounts together.
And: thank you for including a stepmom story. (Even aside from the pandemic, stepparenting is stranger and more isolating than I ever would have guessed. I don't feel right in mom spaces/communities online or IRL. But I'm definitely not NOT parenting.) Anyway, navigating a shared custody situation in a pandemic was/is ... something. Your "bubble" necessarily includes people you didn't directly choose a relationship with, and who might have different ways of assessing risk than you and your partner. Is the other household going out? Masking? Social distancing? What do they think constitutes an exposure and would they tell us? What happens if the kid gets sick? Or a parent? etc. There are obviously a lot of similar circumstances that show up in the piece (needing to rely on family or friends for childcare, not getting to BE in a bubble at all because of work) but .. I don't know. It's a situation where the most basic stuff is already a negotiation. I think we did pretty well, so far, but the only way I ever saw anyone talk about it was on twitter, by chance. I don't remember seeing it come up mcuh in reporting.
I am so excited (not maybe the right word) to read this. Every time I read one of your newsletters, I feel seen.
But I’m wondering, would you be willing to share the questions you asked?
At the beginning of lock down everyone was saying “document it! Write it down!” But I couldn’t. I couldn’t find words for the anxiety and pain and panic and relief (???) and fear I felt. I couldn’t squeeze in the time for it in between work and parenting and fucking covid.
But maybe as you said above, if I had the questions, I could answer them for myself as an introspective process. I’m still struggling to know what’s happening in my life even with the help of my wonderful therapist (who is probably reading these comments too).
Would writing my own answers to your questions help me process whatever this is that happened to me? Would you share those?
That final interview question rules so much.
I simultaneously can't wait to read this but also dread reading this because I don't feel far enough removed from the worst of covid yet because I'm still dealing with long covid... :-(