text: As provinces and territories began to close school doors in March, many parents—and particularly mothers—felt their days fracture. Unexpectedly and unwillingly they became math and English teachers, task managers, cafeteria cooks, classroom peacemakers, tech support, and home-school principals, all rolled into one ill-equipped package. Child care, already notoriously expensive and inaccessible, became obsolete. Mothers who worked at home were forced to teeter between staff Zoom calls, homework questions, meltdowns, work crises, laundry, lunch, the laughability of nine to five. Mothers who still worked outside the home were forced to make impossible decisions, beg favours, place heavy responsibility and the burden of grow-up-fast on their children, change shifts, quit jobs. Other mothers found themselves newly without income, navigating it all with one eye on their bank accounts.
  
  Many parents, no matter their gender, felt the bruising pressure of the pandemic. There's no doubt fathers, and particularly single fathers, felt the pain, too. There's also little argument that, as is often the case, mothers felt it more. It should also be underscored that some mothers, including single mothers, racialized mothers, low-income mothers, and mothers parenting children with disabilities, experienced an even deeper strain. But few mothers had it easy. One in-depth May 2020 study by the U.K.-based Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) found that mothers were 23 per cent more likely than fathers to have lost their jobs during the pandemic. And, adding to the sting, mothers in the U.K. were also nearly 50 per cent more likely to have permanently lost employment, or to have quit. Throughout all this, they were looking after their children for an average of 10.3 hours every day, about 2.3 hours more than fathers. Mothers also, perhaps unsurprisingly, did about two hours more housework every day. If you're keeping track, that's twelve hours of non-paid work; now (try to) add to that a 7.5-hour workday, plus time to eat, sleep, go to the washroom, get dressed, breathe deeply, cry silently.
  
  Then there's the labour that's more difficult to gauge in hours and percentage points: the emotional management of a home swiftly changed by worldwide trauma, illness, fear. Worrying about how to make everything all right when nothing is all right. Explaining to your four-year-old why they can't see their friends or hug their grandparents. Trying to reassure your ten-year-old that their grandparents won't die, even when you're anxious about that same thing, even when it seems like everyone might. Telling your sixteen-year-old they're not invincible, even though you desperately wish they were. Attempting to console your partner, live with their anger, love them, protect yourself, confront your constant proximity to each other. Wiping tears from chubby faces, properly oohing and aahing over Play-Doh masterpieces, gluing googly eyes, finding that one episode of that one show where the character does "the thing," chasing away nightmares, mediating sibling battles, baking the good cookies, giving a hug.
  
  None of this work can be fully measured, not really, but there are ways in which we've tried. One couple working from home charted the number of interruptions from their eight-and twelve-year-old daughters on a random Thursday morning during lockdown. They later published the results in a Washington Post article: "The average length of an uninterrupted stretch of work time was three minutes, 24 seconds. The longest uninterrupted period was 19 minutes, 35 seconds. The shortest was mere seconds." They counted interruptions as anything intentional: requests for homework help, questions about chores and snacks, check-in hugs, tech support. Distractions, like "cello practice and shrieks of laughter," weren't included, but, the couple added, they did take their toll. And as the IFS noted, that toll was felt more often by mothers, who, on average, were only able to do one-third of the paid, uninterrupted work hours of fathers.
  
  "Mothering right now is an essential service," York University professor Andrea O'Reilly told me several months into the pandemic. "Mothers are doing this work at a huge cost to their sanity, their leisure, their time, and their careers." O'Reilly has studied mothering for over three decades and has the c.v. to prove it: she is a professor at York's School of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies, was the founder and director of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement from 1997–2020, and also the founder of Demeter Press, which publishes feminist work on mothering, reproduction, sexuality, and family. Which is all to say that while she was frustrated by the ways in which mothers were forgotten, unsupported, and failed during the pandemic, she wasn't exactly surprised. Like in so many other cases that exposed poor social support, the pandemic only magnified what was already there—a lack of good, affordable child care, a titled division of domestic labour, a seemingly impossible-to-breach wage gap. This is not an equal-opportunity pandemic, O'Reilly thought, watching it all unfold, her own children now adults. Whenever people said women were suffering more, she still liked to correct them. "Mothers are suffering more," she told people, "because they are the ones doing the care work."
  
  O'Reilly felt galvanized to act against this normalization of so-called "women's work" after she stumbled across a post on Facebook that detailed one single mother's experience in the Maritimes. The mom described being belittled and bullied at a Costco after being forced to take her young kids with her to get groceries, which was against the store's recommended rules. She needed supplies, most of her delivery had been cancelled because everything was out of stock, and the only person available to watch her four-and eight-year-old kids was her. She'd arrived at the store on April 2, tears streaming down her face after discovering she'd have to add home-schooling to the mix for who knows how long, only to have employee after employee berate her—as if she'd wanted to bring her kids to the store. It was the first time she'd left her house since the lockdown had begun weeks earlier. After reading the post, O'Reilly created a hashtag and splashed it everywhere she could, making an uncomfortable point: "#MothersAreFrontlineWorkers." Then she created a Facebook support group for mothers dealing with the pandemic. She wanted them to have a safe space to vent, to feel validated, to find resources; a place where they could say they were not okay and that, sometimes, neither were their kids. Within twenty-four hours, more than 250 moms had joined the group. By the time I spoke to O'Reilly a few months later, that number sat at 1,200.
  
  Perhaps what most dismayed her, and many other mothers, was that, outside of their friend groups and Facebook pages, nobody seemed initially inclined to talk about the extra burden put on mothers. Not when governments shut down the economy, and not when they slowly started to reopen it before finding solutions for school and child care. The idea that moms will "take care of it"—whatever "it" may be, whether it's a scraped knee or a global pandemic—is deeply ingrained into our social psyche. Those in power seemed to assume women would, quite simply, figure it out. Too few were talking about how unsustainable it all was. In O'Reilly's Facebook group, mothers talked about having to look after kids and also their elderly, sometimes terminally ill, parents; about having to do all the cooking, while others in the family didn't recognize the energy it took; about being the only one relegated to washing every single fruit and vegetable before it went into the fridge; about falling behind at work; about guilt and children who felt neglected; and about mental and emotional breakdowns and their inevitability. One woman described it thus: "I hadn't realized marriage instantly meant that one person miraculously loses most of their cognitive functions and the other attains even more miraculous superpowers such as psychically knowing what is needed by every member of the household on two or four legs." Another said simply: "WTF just happened?"
  
  Elsewhere, media slowly began to cover the domestic implosion—even if only to ask, as one late April Today's Parent article did, "Why is nobody talking about how unsustainable this is for working parents?" Some media cautioned of a "patriarchal pandemic" if governments didn't intercede to offer women more financial support and child care solutions—if, essentially, it didn't treat them like the essential workers O'Reilly, and eventually others, argued they were. The Atlantic got it right when it stated, early on, "The Coronavirus is a Disaster for Feminism." Enough with the arrogance and painful positivity, its author stated. Let's get real. Past pandemics foretold of everything that would come to pass: not only would women take the brunt of home responsibilities and lose out on work, they would feel these repercussions and distortions far into the future as men's income returned faster to pre-outbreak levels and more women spent more and more time caretaking. "All this looking after—this unpaid caring labor—will fall more heavily on women, because of the existing structure of the workforce," author Helen Lewis warned. She didn't exactly need a crystal ball, but for months the crisis buzzed underneath the news cycle, like background noise.
  
  In June, the New York Times warned again that the "Pandemic Could Scar a Generation of Working Mothers." By July, it had declared, "In the COVID-19 Economy, You Can Have a Kid or Job. You Can't Have Both." The author, Deb Perelman, also bemoaned the muted alarm. "The consensus is that everyone agrees this is a catastrophe, but we are too bone-tired to raise our voices above a groan, let alone scream through a megaphone," she wrote. "Every single person confesses burnout, despair, feeling like they are losing their minds, knowing in their guts that this is untenable." Around that same time, a viral story emerged about one San Diego woman who'd been fired from her job because her boss could hear her young kids in the background on video calls. She decided to sue. For other women, the balance wasn't only untenable or unfair; it was also dangerous. Across the world, countries began to report rising domestic violence rates. In the U.K., suspected domestic homicides tripled during the first month of lockdown, with sixteen women and girls murdered. In Canada, domestic violence workers noted a surge in both the prevalence and severity of violence. Women reported that their abusers used the isolation of the pandemic to increase control, bending information about both the rules and the virus to limit their ability to seek help. Others legitimately feared increased contact at a shelter. Plans to leave abusive situations were abruptly curtailed. Many shelters found themselves in urgent need of new volunteers. "When COVID-19 hit back in March we scaled up our crisis line to be 24/7," said Angela Marie MacDougall, executive director of B.C.-based Battered Women's Support Services, at the end of August. "Since then, calls to our crisis line have increased by up to 300 per cent." She needed another twenty new volunteers to keep up with all the calls. For far too many women, nowhere felt comfortable. Nowhere felt safe.