Help for Caregivers May Already Be Too Late
Relief might be trickling in, but those who care for kids, parents, or both, are already ready to quit
I am writing this from my car, waiting before my daughter’s Halloween costume parade at school. All these little traditions are so important now, after the lost pandemic year. I need to be here even though my work morning was blown up by trying to coordinate care for my aging parents — and navigate their personalities. Over the course of last year’s lockdown, the uncertainty of the pandemic and working in an always unreliable media industry, I often felt as though I was in what could too-easily become a final battle to maintain a career I’ve built over a decade. With each story, each interview, I grasped to hold onto my professional identity.
Today, my car has become my office, a refuge for the work I need to squeeze out between all the sorts of caretaking that are also my responsibility.
So many other Americans, especially women, are likewise working and caretaking during the pandemic limbo period. We called last year our pandemic year — one of rampant illness, death, lockdowns, and political strife. Our collective “surge capacity” ran out. This year has a different flavor of pandemic time, with the promise of vaccines (and fights over them)…
