Universal Childcare Would Have Changed My Mom's Life

Once, I had to pee so bad I thought I’d explode, which would undoubtedly get me in an incomprehensible amount of trouble with my mom. My siblings were asleep, so I snuck up to the condo she was showing to a young couple, prepared to make a mad dash to the closest bathroom I could find. When I cracked the front door, the squeak it made immediately alerted my mom and the couple. The woman stood there, eyes wide. “I had no idea you had children!” My mom smiled, and grabbed me by the hand. The couple couldn’t tell that she was squeezing it just enough to let me know I’d made a mistake.

In the car ride home, my mom told me that we were not supposed to intrude on her clients. As the well-behaved one, I should have known this, but still I was confused. Her reasoning comes back to me, some 15 years later: “Nobody will hire me if they think I can’t handle my kids.”

And so we learned to sit quietly and smile widely when clients would ring our doorbell, asking after my mom. She trained us to always answer the phone the same way, in case there was new business on the phone. And on the rare chances we dropped in on her open houses with my dad, I would have to leave the Gameboy in the car, lest I look too roguish or ill-behaved. When she had to work from her office, she’d sneak us through a backdoor, and we’d hide under her desk, licking stamps and folding slips of paper we’d later pass around to neighbors on the weekend.

Too young to understand the world my mom was struggling to navigate as a 30-year-old woman with three kids, I often resented these strictures that guided my childhood, these arcane rules and rituals. Now, she sometimes cries on the phone when we talk and asks if she had been a bad mom.

I often resented these strictures that guided my childhood, these arcane rules and rituals

Some time into the recession, around 2009, my siblings and I were almost teenagers, and old enough to work odd jobs around the neighborhood. Together, we mowed lawns or cleaned homes or wiped down windows. (People in our suburb cared greatly about these things, as the world around them fell into disrepair.) Eventually, my enterprising 8th-grade self saved up enough to buy a small laptop of my own, which I used to help my mom handle the data entry. It had eventually swallowed her real estate business as her primary source of income, taking up almost 20 hours of her day. My siblings and I knew the toll it took on her, and I wanted to do what I could to help. Before I’d even do my homework, I’d sit down at the kitchen table with her, plugging numbers I did not understand into spreadsheets I could barely read.

Sometimes she’d put on the radio, and we’d sing especially loud to Natasha Bedingfield’s “Unwritten,” still her favorite song. When she’d get too tired, or find herself falling asleep at the computer, she’d drag me out of my seat and dance around, doing what she could to make our lives fun. When the sun began to set, I’d head to my room, and lay my homework out on my bed. Eventually, my dad would get back from whatever new job he was interviewing for or temp-ing at. Before long it was dinner, then sleep, then school, and then we’d all together do it again.

After my mom divulged to me her secret, grocery shopping for Amazon customers in a wealthy neighborhood in the Bay Area, I couldn’t understand her reasoning that “This is just what I have to do.” In the six years since I lived at home, her real estate business has picked up enough for her and my dad, once more working as an engineer, to live with some comfort in the rural suburb where we grew up. But she told me about the fears that have persisted in her for almost 20 years: fear of not being able to provide for her family, fear of being seen as a failure, fear that she had damaged her kids because of all the work she’d done. She’d never spoken so candidly before. Of course, I’d pieced together some of this already, navigating my own feelings about the childhood my siblings and I went through. But hearing it out loud, with the decades of stress and heartbreak in my mom’s voice—no amount of therapy could have prepared me for that.

Universal childcare, undoubtedly, would have changed my mother’s life. With Elizabeth Warren out of the race, working mothers like her who stood behind Warren for her progressive policies—especially on childcare—now find themselves with eyes fixed on Bernie Sanders, who has long talked up his policies for safeguarding and uplifting the working people of America. But it was only last week, amidst national speculation that Warren would drop out, that his campaign announced a concrete plan for universal childcare. It includes a budget of $1.5 trillion dollars, which would fund national child care centers adhering to strict federal standards, as well as bolstering organizations like YMCA and home-based daycare providers.

While my political affiliations reside—rather nakedly—with Bernie Sanders, I’m finding myself demoralized by Warren’s absence from the race. I am not here to make the case for who had the more progressive policies, or who deserved the nomination more. But I am firmly of the belief that this race should have always come down to Warren and Sanders. Warren leaving the race removes her focus on the plight of working mothers, who still—like my own mom—find themselves trapped by the lack of affordable childcare, left to choose from a variety of bad options.

Joe Biden, around whom a perplexing number of Warren supporters are planting their flags, has yet to offer up a plan for universal childcare at all, his only proposal to date being for pre-kindergarten. It is not promising that Biden has continually reminded his base that his presidency will be “business as usual” for the Democrats; as he told rich donors last year, “nothing will fundamentally change” were he elected.

I believe Bernie Sanders when he says he will fight for universal access to safe and free childcare. But unlike Warren, who has pushed for this since the very first day of her campaign, I’m disheartened by how long it took for his campaign to roll out anything concrete, coming after his only other progressive rival had decisively lost her shot at the nomination. Maybe if childcare had been incorporated into his wide gestures at the working class—of whom mothers and young children are often the most vulnerable—the results of Super Tuesday would have been different. It’s important that Sanders not let the nuances of the lives of working-class people get collapsed to the point the commitment is just a campaign gesture.

Even though my mom could probably survive without dragging herself from bed at 4am to buy luxury granola for uncaring Amazon customers, she believes this is what she must do. She is still haunted, and shaped, by the life she has lived since she was 23, wondering how she would possibly provide for the children she was bringing into such an uncertain world. Like so many other women across this country, some part of my mom knows that there yet to be an elected official who delivers on their promises to women. Warren, for many, looked to be that person. And now she is out.