Child-Care Story Is Very Close to Home

Before dawn on a rainy Monday, I roll out of bed and start to work.

This morning is going to be a pressure cooker. I need to interview lawyers, legislators and leaders of national organizations and write a story by noon about the child-care/attorney general crisis.

At the same time, I know I will soon have to oversee my 11-year-old daughter.

My own child-care crisis.

It is a holiday, and I knew her school would be closed but hadn’t quite figured out in advance what to do. Five dollars an hour adds up quickly for the sitter. I hear the rain outside. Maybe when she comes home from spending the night at a friend’s, she can play inside quietly--very quietly.

An hour and a half later, she appears at the door with the friend and the friend’s mother, who is going to work. I imagine this woman is in the same boat; perhaps she thinks it’s my turn to watch the kids.

The mother asks if her daughter can stay at our house.

“No!!” I think. “OK,” I say, “but they have to be quiet. I mean it. Really, really quiet.”

The mother waves goodby, “If she’s a problem, just send her home.”

Perhaps an hour later, my daughter goes to get another girl, who has been left home alone while her mother is working, then a third, whose mother is also working at home.

This is how it is in my neighborhood, a quiet, middle-class suburb that reflects the national demographics: single mothers, dual-income families, children increasingly left alone.

The girls listen to the radio and play Clue in the living room. An hour to deadline, I venture out, a vision of a role model, my hair not yet combed, my voice higher and thinner than usual. “Listen,” I say, “you are not, under any circumstances, to talk to me for the next hour. Unless of course you have to go to emergency.”

“We’re hungry,” my daughter says. I ask her, “Can you fix them something? Please?” She goes to the kitchen; I go back to work.

*

The phone rings. Late calls come in. Seconds count. There is a knock on the door.

“Mommy, I cut myself. I’m bleeding.”

I kiss my daughter on the head as she squirts Bactine on the cut which--oh relief!--is smallish.

“We’re bored,” she says as I push her out the door. “What can we do?”

“Find a movie,” I say. “Quick.”

I file the story and round up the girls for a movie. I tell them to call their mothers to let them know where they will be. We race to the money machine. I drop them off at “Aladdin.” I race home. I call one of the mothers to tell her when to pick them up.

The phone rings. It is Felice Schwartz, the author of “Women and Work: the New Facts of Life.”

“The child-care situation in this country is deplorable,” she is saying. “The reason it’s not being discussed is that women don’t want to appear different from men. They don’t want to bring up a, quote, women’s issue. Employers don’t want to talk out it. They’re afraid of litigation.

“Think how valuable it would be if they did. In my generation, our husbands left in the morning, kissed the kids goodby and forgot about them because the woman who loved them the most was caring for them.

“Today, parents are forced to leave their children in tenuous situations. How can you as a parent come to work and focus your energy if your child is in an arrangement that’s so unsatisfactory?”

A few hours later, in early evening, I hear my daughter on the phone: “My mom had a humongous deadline today.” Later, she hears me on the phone: “Can you believe they all came to my house?”

Then she gives me a I-wish-you-wouldn’t-talk-like-that look. “Mom,” she says consolingly, “It’s over now.”