“You just keep showing up.” My mother, Margaret

It’s six in the morning, and I’m standing in a grocery store aisle turning over a box of cookies, looking for the words “peanut free” because of allergies. I’m buying two things at once: snacks for a client meeting and a birthday treat for day care. I’m wracked with guilt about the second one, because I was supposed to make something myself. I’ve slept maybe four hours, in pieces, between feedings with my eight-month-old. Tonight I’m flying a red-eye to New York for a client, and payroll is due today. My nerves are on the rocks.

My mother never called it a rule, but she lived by one: you just keep showing up. She was always on time, she usually came with a little gift, and she was the best gift-wrapper ever. A single mother who dropped out of Stanford to marry my Dad, Margaret was a force of nature. After returning to school, earning 3 degrees, and a long career as a nurse leader, she retired and went to work as a gardener at a guest ranch in rural Wyoming.

Standing in that aisle with my peanut-free cookies and bloodshot eyes, I was doing my best version of her.

I carried a lot of my "working mother years" alone. Not because no one loved me, but because the work world I moved through ran as if I didn’t have a life outside it. The unspoken deal was simple. Be grateful for the work. Don’t make your kids anyone else’s problem. Smile at 8:00 a.m. like you slept.

Now I’m a grandmother, and I’m watching my grown children do the same math I did, with worse numbers. Child care for a child under five now averages more than $13,000 a year. For them, two working parents isn’t a lifestyle choice. It’s how they stay above the waterline, and unless they’re extremely fortunate, the care that makes that possible is out of reach.

So I do what so many grandmothers do. I give them what care I can, and nearly half of parents with young kids lean on unpaid care like mine, usually from a grandparent. But I’m still running a full practice, and I can’t be their whole plan. A generation of women is still quietly holding the system up, just from the other end of it now.

Mothers of children under six are in the workforce at about 68%, compared with about 95% of fathers. That gap isn’t about who loves their work more. More fathers are primary carers than ever, so the tide is changing, but old myths persist.

I can’t fix child care policy from my laptop. But if you lead people, you control more than you think: when meetings start, whether a sick kid costs someone a day, and whether the person who leaves at 4:30 for pickup still gets a shot at the big project. Notice who’s carrying what, and then change one thing you control.

So here’s what I’m sitting with at this window. What did (do) you carry alone at work that you wish someone had seen? Write back and tell me. I’d really like to know.

Stay human,

Moe