Parenting in the Pandemic: Why I Quit My Repro Job
A guest post by anonymous
Recently, when I quit my job in the repro movement, I joined the more than 865,000 women who also left the general labor force in September due to the never ending demands of parenting during the pandemic, or because they were laid off from their collapsing industries. The New York Times called the parents who left “shock absorbers”: mothers quitting their jobs to relieve the stress that the pandemic put on their families.
I quit my repro job because parenting in a pandemic while working a full-time, urgent-deadline job is impossible. I have young children and believe it or not, they cannot pay attention to their virtual classes without someone sitting directly next to them navigating the mute button, helping them participate, and reminding them not to moon their class. They cannot regulate their own emotions--though they are really, really trying. They cannot make their own food. They have meltdowns because they haven’t seen friends in months (relatable, tbh!). They cannot wipe their own butts. They need me to be by their side near constantly.
I quit my repro job because I’m still working through PTSD from intimate partner violence in a past relationship. The PTSD has been triggered by different bosses in the repro movement, having to pay attention to Trump’s degrading antics, and now the pandemic. My brain started to feel muddy. I couldn’t keep track of things, despite trying so many different systems. I couldn’t remember words. I could not concentrate. I wasn’t sleeping. I could not physically do my job and be a parent. My body told me it was time to leave.
I’m very aware that while I quit for a lot of very specific reasons that piled up on each other, the biggest one that allowed me to quit is my privilege. Because of my partner’s income, I’m able to step back and take a break. Because we own our home and we were able to refinance our mortgage and reduce costs. Because we had free family help early on, I was able to put off the decision a little longer. Because of the privilege I hold as a white cisgender woman, I feel fairly confident that I could return to the movement when I am ready.
I also held a lot of privilege through my work. Because I had a job that could be fully remote, I never had to think about exposing my family to COVID. My bosses did care about me.
My partner and I made this decision together. We were both aware that what I am doing falls within traditional heteronormativegender roles, and how painful that is, but it was still the decision that made the most sense for our family. Though I have an advanced degree, he makes a more sizable amount of money than I do. His job had more flexibility and that preserved much of his mental health.
But even with all this privilege, what parents and caregivers are facing right now in this movement is impossible.
Of course, it’s not just this movement. All my friends who are parents across industries--specifically the mothers--are struggling. Several are sprinkling FMLA (Family Medical Leave Act) so that they can work fewer days per week. Some are just blocking off their calendars and not working a full day so they can split the childcare with their partners while others are working overnight because it’s the only time we have uninterrupted. This is unworkable.
Caregivers are not heroes, powering through it. We are struggling. We are tired. We are seething with rage that we work in a movement supposedly dedicated to feminism and building our families, yet all we get is a lot of lip service, useless work-life hacks, about our impossible situation but no real structural solutions. We need help.
The truth is the repro movement has been working everyone to the bone for decades, and it is not working. Yes, it’s partly because we’re constantly under attack, but also even when times are calm, we’re still moving at hyperspeed. The fact that most organizations aren’t willing to take a step back during a pandemic, an uprising for Black lives, and national descent into facism to figure out big structural change, is one of the reasons why we are losing. We are not just losing the fight on our issue but we are losing good, talented people. We are losing people of color to white supremacist culture and capitalism and we are losing parents and caregivers to the same.
I don’t want to just come to you with my rage and leave. I want this movement to do better. We have to realize that things are only going to get worse. Here are some ways that organizations could help parents and caregivers now:
It should not be up to parents and caregivers to figure this out. My org would ask me what I needed and how they could help me. But, it felt like they were asking me to put a puzzle together with missing pieces. It’s another impossible ask on top of expecting productivity to stay at nearly pre-pandemic levels. It wasn’t about me—it’s about our systems.
Realize that not all parents are in positions of power in the organization. There were multiple people with smaller kids in my organization, but they were all executives who already had built-in accommodations and were in charge of making the decisions. Solutions should be for everyone, not just those who can make it work for themselves.
End surveillance culture. Your employees don’t need to report when they sign on, or when they step away from the computer. It creates an unhealthy culture in pre-pandemic times, but even more stress right now. No one should be worried about taking a quick break away from their computers to feed their children.
Get rid of unnecessary time-wasting back-to-back meetings. Coworkers would tell me not to apologize for my kids barging through my back-to-back Zoom calls. But no one seemed to understand that even if it was cute that my kid was asking for a hug because they had big feelings or needed a snack, it was incredibly stressful for me and impossible to concentrate.
Urgent deadline culture has to go. Yes, there are urgent, important things happening in the election, in Congress, in the states, and at the Supreme Court, but we need new strategies. Everyone is exhausted. We need to preserve our energy, we need compassion. We need to re-evaluate our reliance on arbitrary urgent deadlines for the sake of urgency furthering our reliance on habits of whiteness. Is this actually urgent, or are we just making it urgent to feed our need to feel busy? It’s unsustainable.
Let employees protect their time and mean it. This means guilt-free unlimited vacation time and work-free evenings and weekends. Your parents were already struggling to take the vacation time they had before the pandemic, and now they feel guilty for needing more time. This also means when they need to reduce hours, they are not asked to work beyond those hours. Give them the autonomy and the trust to put off the work they didn’t get to and sign off when they were supposed to.
It’s not just parents and caregivers who are struggling right now. Having big structural change would help everyone preserve their health, their energy, and make our movement not only stronger but really live our values.