LYNN — Ashley Murray planned on being a stay-at-home mom when her oldest daughter, Layla, was born. What she hadn’t planned on was COVID-19.
“When I was home before, I could take the kids to do things and be with friends and have outside time,” Murray said. “They don’t prepare you for this. There’s nothing in any of the parenting books that says you’ll be stuck at home in a global pandemic.”
Murray spends her days going up and down the stairs of her Lynn home, alternating between helping Layla with her first grade remote learning in the basement and keeping her two other children, Delilah, 4, who was supposed to start pre-K this year, and Milo, 2, occupied and away from their big sister. Her husband works 24-hour shifts as a firefighter, so on days when he is home, she runs errands. She said that she never thought she would make so many meals for her hungry kids, and feels like she spends all day every day cooking and cleaning.
“It’s just like “Groundhog Day,” she said. “Every day is the same.”
Murray isn’t alone. The burden of taking care of children of all ages who have been relegated to learning from a computer screen has largely fallen to the mothers of the world, who now have to juggle daily childcare and their other responsibilities on their own.
According to a survey of women who were pregnant or had recently given birth published in the journal Frontiers in Global Women’s Health, while 15 percent of those women had shown symptoms of depression before the pandemic and 29 percent had experienced moderate to high anxiety, those numbers had tripled during the crisis, to 40.7 percent and 72 percent, respectively.
Tiffany Magnolia, another Lynn mother who works as a professor at North Shore Community College, said that even though both she and her husband work from home, she is almost always the one who is there when her 8-year-old daughter, Ruth, needs something.
“If I say I have a very important meeting or if I have to teach a class, we can make sure he’s on deck,” Magnolia said. “But I work around his schedule, not the other way around.”
Magnolia said that she has to find space to work in the dining room or living room depending on the day, while her husband uses their bedroom as a home office, so she is more accessible to Ruth.
The burden on single moms can be even heavier. A study released by the Brookings Institution in October revealed that 10 million women, or 17 percent of working women, rely on childcare and schools to take care of their children during the day, compared to 12 percent of working men. In May and June, one out of four women who became unemployed lost their job due to a lack of childcare, twice the rate for men. And many more women have lost their jobs during the pandemic; according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in December 2020, approximately 275,000 women left the workforce, compared to 71,000 men.
Kathryn Cohen, director of the North Shore Labor Council, said that this trend has been apparent in this area, as many women hold jobs that were hard-hit by the pandemic, such as in restaurants and hotels. Many of these workers have had to take sick leave if they, or someone they care for, is infected or exposed, threatening their employment.
“People were having challenges with childcare before the pandemic,” Cohen said. “The pandemic has only exacerbated the challenges they were seeing already.”
Sarah Lewey, a divorced single mom of twin daughters who lives in Lynn, said that she felt lucky that she had a support system to help her when she isn’t home. Her daughters, who are in eighth grade, are also older, and for the most part are able to handle their education on their own.
“When all of this started last March, immediately not only was I trying to get my children set up with this new learning system, I was also learning to do my profession in a new way overnight,” said Lewey, who is a behavioral specialist at Head Start and returned to in-person work in July. “I honestly don’t know what I would do if I had younger children, because I have to work.”
Murray said that one of the worst parts of the pandemic has been the guilt over not being able to allow her children to see their friends or extended family, but they try to get outside every day, and were able to see their in-laws with masks and from a distance on Christmas Eve.
“Everyone’s just trying to maintain some normalcy,” she said.