Oh child care.

Child care is fucking expensive. I swear because it is so fucking, amazingly expensive that there is just no better way to say it. As most parents know, quality child care costs upwards of $1,000 per month, per child. That's like one or two additional mortgage payments per month, and sometimes you have to send lunch. And sometimes you have to go through, like, eight providers over the course of two children because child care is low-paying and difficult work with long, potentially unrewarding  hours, tantrums, and poop. People who do child care well, who truly enjoy it and help us parents raise mindful, happy children, deserve so much more. So that families like ours can avoid the saga has has befallen us these past five years.

Would you like to hear our sob story? Of course you would. Schadenfreude, right?

Jupiter had the good sense to be born right after (like 10 days after) I successfully proposed my dissertation in grad school. Thanks for waiting, buddy! When he was eight weeks old, I took my comprehensive exams (for which I deserve some sort of medal for sleep-deprived awesomeness), and was then able to hang back and do the mom thing while my work waited for me to begin the next phase. When he was five months old, we hired a sitter for just fifteen hours per week so that I could go to Jay's studio and pump work on getting my research started. When he turned one, we hired a part-time nanny, Kristy, who we loved. She was awesome. We had her for 30 hours a week and it cost us a lot of money. But she was great! But she was bored and stressed with personal issues.

So she quit at 3am one fine night. Via text message.

We were stuck, but through a friend we located an awesome woman, Jen, to take over. But Jen is a graduate-degreed professional woman, in between jobs in a very difficult economy, so we had her for a little while but only until she could find a real job. Jen hung on with us until Jupiter started preschool, which has been ah-mazing! Whew.

Then came George. I had the pleasure of staying home with George until he was eight months old. (While this was the best situation for little G, by the time I finally landed a job I ran out of the house that first morning like my hair was on fire. I'm FREE!! I'm a person!) After an exhaustive and exhausting search for the right person (i.e. someone who would work for about $22,000 per year and was ok with not paying taxes and had enough experience with babies, a car, and a college education, and I'm sure at least five other things we wanted), we found Nikki, who stayed with us for six months before her financial woes forced her to move back home to California at the end of her week of vacation. We had two days notice. And this time, I had a real jobby job that I had to get to.

After two weeks of fill-in care and poor Jay taking time away from his work to cover the uncovered times, we decided to hire Elsah, who we later found out was recently employed as a Hooter Girl. She quit after one week because she decided she would rather go back to school. Again, the scramble.

We found the Secret Garden, an awesome home daycare run by two awesome ladies. We LOVE them. George adores them. But now they are closing, as one of the two owners is moving to another city. So now we search. Again.

This is perhaps a familiar cautionary tale for some of you. For others, you might think we have terrible children or we're terrible employers or terrible at finding the right care situations. But I can tell you: this shit is endemic.

In this country we do not pay our child care workers sufficiently. The average wage for full-time child care workers in 2012 was $10.25/hour. That's well below the federal poverty guidelines for a family of four, and barely above the poverty guidelines for a family of three. (And nevermind how low and unrealistic federal poverty guidelines are to begin with.) Those who do get paid middle-class wages work for the truly outrageously-priced centers ($1600/month, per child), which really is more expensive than some college tuition. We need to work toward some government subsidies, parents. Either subsidies to providers or subsidies to workers or tax-deductible child care for parents, because this shit is crazy. Everyone wants quality care for their children, but that care is difficult to sustain because child care providers aren't happy when they aren't making good money. And parents who can't afford to pay the high cost of child care have to put their children in lesser-quality, unlicensed, potentially hazardous care situations and ill-equipped "pre-schools" that accept meager state subsidies, perpetuating social inequalities as their children emerge less school-ready than their middle- and upper-middle class peers.

But this isn't just a class issue. It's about valuing the work of all women, including the overwhelmingly-female child care workforce. We had a federal child care system at one point. Its dismantling was one of the earliest victories of the modern-day family values movement and its strict policing of gender roles. Our current climate of small government and low taxation would never support another similar federal program, but damn. Something has to change.

If you'd like to learn more, read the Child Care Aware report that was released in November 2013.

(Photo by Darren Braun)