America Doesn’t Care About Mothers
I finally understand that help is not coming
I spent the first six months of the pandemic sure that help for mothers was on its way. Bills would be passed, systems would be reworked. Workplaces would shift to include caretaking within their cultures. A year of the country “staying home” would validate the work of stay-at-home mothers. As the fall brought more remote learning, we’d reconfigure school standards to keep children safe from virtual truancy and failing grades given over Zoom in the name of academic rigor. We would listen to women like Natalie Brown, mother of two and a PhD candidate, when she says we’d “shift our focus and policies to helping families survive this time in ways that work for them.”
When it came to the 2020–2021 school year, maybe that meant we’d take a cue from Bolivia and suspend academics. We’d figure this disease out and then we could start again, on an even footing, a year later. Maybe it meant remote school accompanied by a temporary measure that untied education funding from enrollment. If schools were allowed to keep their enrollment funding from the previous year, a working mother who pulled her kid from their kindergarten class because she couldn’t supervise their remote learning wouldn’t be culpable for impoverishing her neighborhood school. Maybe it meant a government check every month until…
