Remember doing your job?
Let me rephrase—remember just doing your job?
If you’re at all like me, there’s a period in your life—maybe not even that long ago—when you would wake up, think about working out, sleep in a little bit longer, then get ready and go to work. You’d do your job, head home, maybe make dinner, do the dishes.
And most days, that was about it.
I worked so hard, was so busy, and felt so tired.
Or so I thought.
When my partner and I had our first child about 4 years ago, we experienced a sudden, massive shift in how we viewed the activities described in the previous section.
Now, our non-work hours belong to a tiny human. Work felt almost relaxing, and a train delay or longer commute became our most luxurious form of “self-care.”
Realizing that relying on extra time on public transit for self-care was probably not sustainable, we decided on a simple solution: find child care for our daughter.
In all of the free, clear-headed time we didn’t have, we now focused on finding suitable care for our darling bundle of never-ending demands.
Emailing, calling, message-board reading, searching, setting up visits, deciding we could see our child with this person/organization, filling out an application, finding out there’s a waitlist, and starting all over again.
Amidst that cycle, we’d try to fit in the emotional work of preparing to release our daughter into someone else’s care.
Eventually, we resorted to a shortcut I cannot recommend highly enough. We found a more responsible friend—one who makes most people’s “exhaustive research” look downright negligent. A friend who lived close by, and who just so happened to have a child a few years older than ours. This friend—Jane—navigated each parenting stage slightly before we did, and we were thrilled to follow her lead.
Our child care “plan” quickly shortened to a handful of easy steps:
- Realize you need a (new) form of child care in a few months (or days—funny story about that time…)
- Bumble about with our own research for a bit
- Wrack our brains for someone better at this process than us. Enter: Jane.
- Do whatever our friend Jane did
Fours years in, we’ve still had to scramble and find child care options not-vetted by Jane multiple times. Within one 12-month span, our daughter stayed with: a friend who was a stay-at-home parent, an in-home daycare, a sporadic mix of babysitters, and a professional daycare/preschool. (One of these transitions included that fun time we had 4 days’ notice to find alternate arrangements.)
And that doesn’t even account for the 6 months we had no child care at all during the early stages of the pandemic.
So, if you can, find yourself a friend like Jane.
And, if someone like Jane is nowhere to be found, look for other ways to simplify your search. For almost every family, the question boils down to: “What are some quality, convenient child care solutions for us?” This is by no means an easy question. But it’s much, much less daunting than “What is the best possible child care option for my child?”
We considered whole-family factors when filtering child care—location, timing, whether food is provided, how it impacted our commutes. Ultimately, the solution should fit your family and your context. When you’re thriving, your child has the best chance of thriving, too.
Even then, it’s safe to expect plenty of bumps along the way in your child care journey— ours has been far from smooth, to say the least.
But, having lived much of last year without any child care, we’re willing to navigate a few bumps here and there.
We miss our children when we’re not with them.
And we love getting to miss them.
Luke Chitwood is a writer, non-profit professional, and education advocate based in Chicago. A beginner-level husband and father, you can find him wrangling words and images, in perpetual pursuit of his next cup of coffee.
