I Used to Hide My Kids From Colleagues. Now They’re Fully in the Zoom

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It’s my impossible but joyful job to be on top of culture, to be consuming everything and anything, to be out there in the world, engaged! It’s also my job to keep three small humans (ages six, four, and two) alive, to look after their social and emotional development, to make sure I don’t mess them up worse than Philip Larkin has already informed me I will. The latter makes the former very hard. So when I haven’t had time to read the latest novel or see the latest play, I turn to my kids for inspiration and material. I figure people can relate.

But as much as I write about my kids, I also hide them. I try to avoid telling any of my colleagues who don’t need to know that meetings before 9 a.m. are tricky for me because I’m doing school drop-off. If I have to leave the office before 6 p.m., I whisper my goodbyes and issue a few furtive waves to the people who know I’m headed home to relieve the babysitter. I’m honest with my parent colleagues, especially those with similarly aged kids, but even with them, I’m conscious not to inform them too regularly that I’m stepping out for a parent-teacher conference or a kid’s doctor’s appointment.

Of course, I’m not stepping out at all any more. None of us are! It’s all, in the immortal utterings of Amy Schumer, canceled. All, that is, except the childcare responsibilities, which have, for many of us who relied on school or day care centers that are no longer in session or babysitters who are no longer working, exponentially increased.

So it’s been comforting these past days to see images of the struggle—not just to parent and work, but to keep these loud little tyrants silent, to elide the impact they have on the professional day-to-day. (That’s not snot on the shoulder of my blazer, of course it’s not!) Jimmy Fallon’s daughters have become “late night” (the show seems to be now filmed in the afternoon) stars in their own right. MSNBC host Chris Hayes concluded a show last week with a cameo from his kids, acknowledging that one of the hidden gifts of the crisis was the time it allowed him to spend with his family.

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Even our beloved Robert Kelly, whose children practically invented kiddo conference call crashing in 2017 when they wandered into their father’s interview with the BBC, has been back in the spotlight.

It’s not lost on me that these are (at least somewhat) famous men who, if the fatherhood bonus is to be believed, have little to lose from this kind of interruption from their kids. But there are also examples of women embracing a new kind of transparency around parenting as well.

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When I asked my circle of (male and female) acquaintances if they had spent less time and energy “hiding” their kids, the answer was a quick and emphatic yes. “I introduced my kids to my students at the end of class yesterday,” CUNY law professor Sofia Yakren says. “And have mentioned the complex juggle in conversations with deans and colleagues. Whatever shame there was in the struggle before seems to be gone.” Yale Law School professor David Schleicher is taking a similar tack: “I gave my kids and the difficulties of work-life a pretty prominent place when talking to students before this. But now I’ve had them join each lecture for a few minutes, and students have been thrilled. It goes a long way towards letting them know that this is complicated for everyone.”

“Every Zoom meeting I’ve had with a network exec, I’ve started by mentioning that I made lots of script-writing goals, but, in fact, I’m spending every day playing Fisher-Price basketball,” says Katie Locke O’Brien, a director and writer in Los Angeles. “Normally, I do talk about being a mom a lot, but there’s more of a tendency to try to seem like a superhero who is ultimately able to balance things. Now, I’m just like, ‘Nope.’” Chelsey Christensen, an arts administrator based in Washington, D.C., conveys a variation on this message even when she’s not at her desk. In the afternoon her email is set to an auto-response that reads: “As a result of COVID-19, I am working remotely and sharing childcare responsibilities with my spouse for the foreseeable future. I will be unavailable in the afternoon, beginning at 1:30 p.m., and my response will be delayed.”

So might we be at a turning point, when we all feel a bit more liberated to be more transparent about the multifaceted demands placed on working parents? The coronavirus crisis has ushered in policies that were liberal pipe dreams not long ago: large-scale federally mandated paid sick leave, expanded paid parental leave that in theory applies to anyone who has to give up working hours in order to take care of their kids. And at least at the moment, in response to the crisis, those policies are overwhelmingly popular. According to a study by Lean In, 76% of Americans think the new paid leave legislation does not go far enough.

“I do think this crisis could be a turning point for paid family and medical leave,” says Katie Bethell, the founder and executive director of PL+US, an organization that strives to promote paid leave in the U.S. “Coronavirus makes it clear that paid leave broadly is miscast as a women’s issue—it’s a tool for public health, for families’ health, for working people to use when they need it.” She points out that while paid leave or paid sick leave might seem most pressing in certain stages of life—childbearing years or when caring for an aging parent—now, everyone is acutely aware that issues of health can affect families at any point. The country needs “a system that provides economic security for everybody,” Bethell says. “We have underinvested in our social safety net, and this crisis has made the consequences of that clear.”

It might seem overly optimistic to think that those policies will stick around once we’ve returned to some kind of normal. But if we don’t reap any long-term policy-oriented benefits from this horrific nightmare, we at least might start changing the way we think about the personal issues that affect the social and political ones.

When I became a parent, I expected that the pressures weighing on me would change. Emotionally, financially, socially—I knew (vaguely!) the consequences that were about to descend. What I anticipated less was the secondary, related pressure: that I’d feel I’d need to hide all the minor and major struggles, and that this battle would be daily and constant. Today, while I feel countless new pressures related to the coronavirus crisis, I’m shedding that old one.

Read more from Vogue’s coronavirus coverage:

What to know about the coronavirus pandemic today

How to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, from experts

Why social distancing is good for you and your community

How designers are sharing messages of hope

The best at-home workouts for the age of the coronavirus