text: Mandi Freeman didn't want to quit her job. She'd tried running a home daycare; she'd tried hosting Tupperware parties; she'd tried online entrepreneurship. She'd tried just about everything, and loved none of it. But this job was different. In December 2019, she'd started work as a home care aide—her first full-time gig after more than a decade of mothering her five kids. It immediately clicked. The days were long and often hard, spent bouncing around Cranbrook, B.C., in and out of clients' homes from morning to night. She was good at it, though. Clients told her she brought something special to the job, and Freeman felt it too: she'd found her purpose. "I was damn good at my job," she recalled. "This was it for me." She'd always wanted to help people, and now she could see the difference she made in their lives every day. Plus, she was in a good groove. She had energy, a schedule, a meal prepping system, and she was wearing clothes that were neither pyjamas nor tank tops stained and stretched from nursing. She was being herself, finding her identity. Things were going so great that she'd planned to attend school in September 2020 to get accredited. Then, over the course of January and February, she became the sickest she'd ever been in her life.
  
  Today, Freeman is convinced she had COVID-19, probably caught from one of her clients. Officially, she has no answers. Whatever it was, doctors misdiagnosed it as pneumonia three times. No antibiotic seemed to help. At one point, she was put on doxycycline, a powerful drug that treats a variety of serious bugs and that, in this case, left Freeman with a nasty side effect—permanent acid reflux disease. The illness cascaded through her house, and soon everybody was sick. It took most of February for them all to recover and go back to school and work. A couple of weeks later, the world declared a pandemic. Freeman's children are all under the age of twelve. The oldest is eleven and the youngest is three. Her partner's job at a metal fabrication plant was deemed essential. So too was Freeman's. It hardly mattered. With no school and no child care, she didn't see how they could both possibly continue working full-time. Now, she thinks of her gut reaction as selfish; there was a lot more at stake than her job. At the time, though, all she could think was: How am I going to keep working? She was—rightfully—angry at the virus for interrupting her budding career. That anger blanketed her emotions, turning to numbness. Leaving her new job felt inevitable, no matter what angle Freeman examined the problem from.
  
  After schools confirmed classes would resume online following March break, Freeman knew she'd have to phase herself out of her job in April. During a pandemic, however, that was easier said than done; demand for home help was high and desperate. Freeman told her employer she could only work three hours a day. In return, her supervisor asked if she could get someone down the street to look after her children—a move that would, of course, break lockdown rules. At first, her work commitment only increased; she worked thirty-seven days with no break. Freeman stuck to her guns, though, and slowly, regretfully began to reduce both her client numbers and hours. In the Before Times, she'd work from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., sometimes longer, and come home for a break or two in between clients. In COVID Times, she equipped her oldest daughter with a cellphone and left her in charge after breakfast. Her significantly cut hours also meant she wouldn't be out of their house for too long. Freeman said she often justified it to herself: they were okay, the client's house was only a few minutes away, she wasn't leaving town, the children had eaten breakfast and started their school work. Everything was fine. "Yeah," she said, "that didn't last long either."
  
  In June, she'd emailed her boss to say that she'd need a leave of absence. Her husband had, at that point, been laid off and could stay with the kids. It was all breaking down, anyway. She felt filled and overflowing with guilt, anxiety. There was too much screen time for her kids; some of them were struggling with school. Her eldest daughter was having constant nightmares that her friends were contracting COVID and dying. When her partner was still working, she felt like she was in survival mode: If you want to eat seven granola bars, sure, just have an apple somewhere in between. Twenty minutes of schoolwork is enough, congratulations. Can I go to the bathroom alone, please? They were spending more than they could afford on fast food because everybody was too sad and too tired to cook. Even after her partner was forced home to help, the exhaustion continued. Her kids were crying all the time; she was crying all the time. They hadn't seen their friends in ages; she hadn't seen her friends in ages. Nobody was sleeping properly. Freeman felt stuck, and she knew her family did, too. "From mid-March to the May long weekend," she said, "was hell and depression and darkness and too much TV and laziness."
  
  While she'd been loath to quit her job at first, in the end it felt like taking back her power—grabbing some control in the chaos. She knew her energy would be better spent at home; she needed to hold on to her kids, both literally and figuratively. She also wanted to be home so she could talk to them about what was happening, guide them through the pandemic. Freeman knew the self-quarantine months would feel like a defining moment of their childhood once they were adults. She wanted them to come out of it as unscathed as possible. To do any of that, she needed to be present. And to help explain the pandemic and the skewed world it created, the way that everything had changed, she needed to first take the time to explain it to herself. She needed to pause, process, and herself grasp what the heck was going on. To her, trying to explain and soothe while lost in a bog of stress and misinformation felt impossible. "I think," she joked, "I can talk about sex more comfortably with them than the pandemic." At least with sex, there were books, facts, shows, finite knowledge; she'd experienced it herself. "But to talk to them about surviving a pandemic and what their lives are going to look like afterwards—I don't have those answers yet."
  
  She decided to do something radical to interrupt the fear. Freeman loaded up as much as she could fit into her motor home and drove her family out to the bush—no place special in particular. As she put it: you don't have to drive far from Cranbrook in any direction to hit a dirt road, and then you keep going until you find a creek or a lake. Out there, she helped the kids keep up with school work as much as she could, but mostly she put her emphasis on a different kind of education: safety, comfort, love. Her youngest learned how to swim. Her oldest learned how to read maps. All that bubbling stress began to leak out, evaporate. Soon, her kids were calling it The Best Summer Ever. To Freeman, it wasn't throwing in the towel so much as it was choosing how her family could best make it through. Frankly, living in the motor home was also drastically cheaper—a big plus after Freeman resigned and stopped driving into town every day for her shifts. Having lost his job, her partner was relying on employment insurance (EI), and once she later went on leave, Freeman's income was reduced to CERB. In the bush, she wasn't buying fast food, running showers and baths for seven people, doing endless loads of dishes and laundry. Even in the summer, her hydro bill was $150 every month; now it was $9.
  
  And if she sometimes missed her budding career, and dreaded thinking about September, well, she hoped things happened for a reason. "I can see that I'm going to look back at our time in the bush ten years from now and think, 'Damn, this is exactly what I needed,'" she said. "This is exactly what my children needed."
  
  ⁂
  
  [ THE SHE-CESSION ]
  
   "Oh my God. What am I going to do?"
  
  —Alèthe Kaboré, entrepreneur
  
  Alèthe Kaboré had planned 2020 down to the last loonie. In October 2019, she'd officially launched her dream business, KYN Apparel, with a splashy runway show in Calgary. Watching the models strut the spotlight wearing her designs—Canadian-weather cuts mixed with bold African prints—had given her the best feeling ever. It had been a risk to start her business and follow a passion so far outside her formal education, but now she allowed herself to think it would pay off. The business loan, tumbling into debt, putting herself out there, everything else she had done to get where she was—it might just work out after all. Kaboré had moved to Edmonton in 2006 from Burkina Faso to study biological sciences at university. Later on, she earned a master of science in public health. Since graduating, though, she had struggled to find permanent work in her field and had been thinking a lot in 2019 about what else she could do—if it was worth it to take the leap. Not seeing many other Black, immigrant women in Alberta's fashion industry, and having few mentors who looked like her, had caused her to doubt herself more than once. It didn't help that ever since she was a kid growing up in Burkina Faso, she, like most of her peers, had planned to study science, pursue a stable career, become a doctor or a researcher. "Everybody's kind of going the same direction," she said, of the persistent doubt. "And you're trying to go in a different one."
  
  Kaboré had always adored fashion, but she didn't learn to sew until shortly after moving to Alberta, at which point she began to teach herself. She had missed the colourful and vibrant clothes of her birth country and, unable to find anything like them where she now lived, decided to make her own. At first, whenever she wore dresses and blouses with African patterns to school and work, people would ask her if she was heading out to a party after; baffled, she'd respond, "No, this is what I usually wear." Kaboré wasn't about to ditch her bright aesthetic, but the ignorant comments got her thinking. She began to imagine a fusion of office wear and African style, and also started experimenting with merging the sunny, dynamic fabric that felt like home with designs that better matched Canada's frigid climate. Pretty soon, she'd show up to places and people would beg her to make them one of whatever she was wearing. Their reactions gave her the confidence to start taking clothing samples to community events and African Fashion Week shows. The enthusiasm she received there, in turn, built the confidence she needed to try making her budding business her full-time job. People kept asking her for expanded styles, added sizes. They kept saying, more. After the October kickoff, Kaboré got another major boost. In early 2020, she won the African Fashion and Arts Movement's designer of the year award. Okay, she thought, I can do this. There's hope there.
  
  Over the next few months, Kaboré cemented her expansion plans. She booked fashion shows across the country, filling in the entire calendar year. She snapped up bundles of fabric and began growing her inventory. She even hired another seamstress to help meet demand and took first steps toward finding manufacturers in China. Closer to home, she signed up for a booth at the local farmers' market, determined to bring both her culture and her style into the usually homogeneous space. She put out press releases and began to connect with others in her community. She had a strategy to drive traffic to her website, to transition out of her day job in 2021, and to begin paying herself a salary from her business by the end of the year. She would pay back her small business loan months ahead of time. By March, her ducks were in a neat, ambitious row, and Kaboré was excited about the months ahead. "And then, everything happened," she said. "I was like, 'Oh my God. What am I going to do?' " Initially, she allowed herself to believe it would be a momentary setback—a month at most—and then reality would reassert itself. A month hadn't passed, though, before all her carefully booked events began to cancel. "And now I'm just freaking out," she said. The world had scrubbed a giant-sized eraser over her plans.
  
  She had extra machines, fabric, supplies, and enough clothes to take to her next several scheduled shows and stock her website. She had bills. At least she also still had her job at the library. As that moved to work-from-home, however, Kaboré's space started to feel decidedly un-Marie-Kondo-like. Both her home office and her home inventory had to be shoved inside one space. She was often physically in the middle, trying to traverse through—a metaphor for her possible career paths, frustrations, and fears brought to life. Kaboré's first step, after the shock, was to try and cater to demand. Drawing on her public health expertise, she started sewing cheerful face masks and selling them on the KYN Apparel website. It helped bring in sales, but not as much cash flow as she needed. She reluctantly explored further loan options, but—at least intially—ultimately decided she didn't want to become one of the many small businesses that sank further into the red during the pandemic. In July, the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB) estimated that three-quarters of small businesses had taken on extra debt to keep afloat, totalling a depressing $117 billion. On average, each business added $135,000 to its debt, with business owners relying on personal savings, credit cards, bank loans, and retirement savings (in that order). By mid-September, only 18 per cent of businesses in Alberta were at or above normal revenues, though 65 per cent of them had reopened.
  
  Even if she had decided to incur more debt during the early months of the pandemic, Kaboré isn't sure she would have been successful at doing so. She didn't have much luck finding grants or other funding, either, despite dedicated searching. There just wasn't anything out there—or if there was, she didn't have access to it. "In the business world, there is segregation," she said. "The men are getting the most of the pie, and when it comes to women, the white women are getting more than the Black women." (In fact, in recognition of this, Justin Trudeau announced a $221 million funding program in September 2020 to help Black business owners and entrepreneurs access funding and capital, as well as loans and other services.) Kaboré also worried that closing her business would be the equivalent of staking a flashing neon WARNING! sign, complete with not-so-fine print: Don't Try. How many other Black women who'd been thinking about starting a business would see that she'd shut down and decide not to take the risk themselves? She worried the answer might be "a lot," and that unknowable number weighed on her. She knew failure wasn't singular; it rippled out. But planning seemed impossible when the future was edged in ambiguity. The only thing she could do, she decided, was take it day by day—and hope the pandemic would fade before she tripped over the precipice.