The cost of staying home

(artist: George Redhawk)

I’m trying my best to stay focused, but this election cycle is so compelling.

I allow myself a 20 minute Bernie break, and then I shut my laptop and walk away.

But the world is conspiring.
SHE is conspiring.
To give birth.
To something new.

My Pandora shuffle of classical music is interrupted by a commercial. About daycare. How it hurts Vermont businesses when parents can’t work.

I woke with thoughts like this. About how the system is rigged.

I hate that expression of Bernie’s. The implication of victimhood.
Empowerment is my preference. (I’m a woman.)

The commercial thrusts me back to the blue arm chair in the small farm house where I nursed my first baby. Daycare so costly. Work barely profitable. His chubby hand twisting my hair. The thought of leaving him, unbearable.

I loved work.

It was then that I discovered how other…