[00:00:02] Hi, I'm Ayesha, and I'm a former host of Mocha's single mothers by choice, or smcs like you. As an SMC, I decided to become a mother knowing I'd be the sole care provider and parent of my children. At least at the outset, the mocha stood for black. So I'm using the word black, and I'll be discussing being a single mother by choice from a black woman's lens. You'll connect with all the interesting and fun things about this non traditional path like this, discussing which sperm to use and some hard truths about fertility and the realities of dating. As a single mother who doesn't have a co parent to rely on occasionally, and what it's actually like to parent as an SMC. This is the black single Mothers by Choice podcast.
[00:00:50] Let me take a step back and tell you, I think history will ask us, where were you when the pandemic hit, right? And so I recall distinctly that I was outside. It was a cold march morning, the sun was shining, and the realization hit that, oh, sugar. We're in a sugar, right? We're in a pandemic. And so I could feel the air rushing into my ears. It was almost like the world fell away and tumbleweeds started rolling down the street. And I remember having a distinctly visceral reaction to, oh, my God. Goodness. When it really set in, this was nothing that you could really prepare for. And it was really like the calm before the storm. I think for a while I was in denial. So once they first announced that schools were closing for two weeks, I was just like, there's no way that we can do this for two weeks. And then it was like, we're going to the end of the school year. I'm like, there's no way we could do this to the end of the school year. And then they're like, we're going. I'm like, wait a minute. That means we're going to summer. Summer is canceled. Halloween got canceled. Christmas, as we knew it, got canceled. And I was just like, not once did I think that we would be doing this for a full year. At the beginning of the pandemic, there was no childcare option, right? Because they were shutting down and only essential workers were getting spots, which is understandable. I'm extremely grateful that I had a flexible job situation, but it didn't relieve the stress of having to birth both work full time, homeschool. And at the time that the pandemic hit, I had an eight month old who was just becoming mobile and so there's the safety aspect as well. And so I'm in a two bedroom apartment, and so we're having to navigate space for where school is going to happen, where daycare is going to happen, where work is going to happen. And so I will say I did not handle the beginning of the pandemic very well. I was all over the place with trying to figure out my work hours and put boundaries in place. And every one of my managers and my HR team, they earned their money last year, probably off of me alone, because half the employees were really hurting. My company has a really good work life balance culture, but that collapsed. And so I would be online trying to get my work done, and I would be high fiving moms at 02:00 in the morning, because while we were able to flex our work hours, the workload did not change. So we were juggling it all. And then as a single mother by choice, you are juggling everything. And I remember having to take a pediatric appointment, and the pediatrician was like, how are you doing? I'm like, fine. And she was just like, hopefully the kids are okay. Meanwhile, I'm at a desk in the living room, and the baby is behind me in a play pen. And I just looked at her, like, just blank stare. Like, what the hell? Like, way to load on the mama guilt. Like, I'm trying to keep this little child alive and stop eating everything. And you're here, like, oh, hopefully you have help, and what kind of reality are you living in? We're in the middle of a pandemic.
[00:04:08] I had a family member ghost me when I was just like, look, you're not working.
[00:04:13] I don't have any childcare. Can I pay you to come here and take care of my kids? And nothing. Yeah. I really had to lower my expectations for myself. And I was just like, you're in survival mode. Like, just survived this pandemic with the roof over your head, with your bills paid. I didn't have the extensive leave that some of the other companies, I work in tech that some of the other tech companies had. And so I really had to string together and monitor my usage of time because there were some times where I just needed a break and coming off of a maternity leave. And so I had to really try to balance on how much time I took when I really hit the wall and needed the time. So it was really stressful.
[00:05:01] So my school situation is, as soon as the world opened back up a little bit where daycares were allowed to accept children at reduced numbers, I sent my kids back to daycare. One, I have to keep working. And I had done the risk analysis and realized I was one person, the degree of risk that I was willing to take. And so we just rolled with daycare once school started. I initially thought that when the school year started, I would do a hybrid. So I was already set up at my daycare to do the two days a week, whatever it was, the two every other day at daycare. And then once they decided that the school can't open, I never changed our daycare situation. I just added on extra days as I could afford. So the way we have it, she goes to daycare four days out of the week, and she's home on Fridays with me. And that really works because it allows me to offload the day to day supervision of her schooling while also still being connected to what her school day is on that Friday. Because I can hear in the teachers know that I'm available on Fridays. And what this has also made me do was to really up my communication game with her school. I have two situations to navigate her school situation and then the daycare, and I am the intermediary between both of those. So I have to communicate and still be on call Monday through Thursday, but just let them know. All right, here's what's happening. These are the times that she needs her one on ones and facilitating that communication. How about you?
[00:06:38] Yeah. I will tell you, I will never forget the time I heard my daughter say, mute yourself. And I was just like, we have arrived. I think since both of us work in tech, I think we can appreciate the silver lining in this. Right. So what are the kids learning? And I want to take a moment to put some of this in perspective. Right. So what are the kids learning? They're probably not going to be as where we want them to be with writing and all of the traditional milestones we use to mark education. But what they are gaining in terms of technology, I am clearly making the assumption. I know our kids have a particular type of privilege, and so that they have technology accessible. And so what they're learning in terms of technology, they're learning to troubleshoot computer issues on their own. They're learning to communicate via web conferencing with their teachers and peers. They are learning how to reconnect and disconnect to a classroom. They're learning how to converse as people. And so I want to take a step back, because professionally, I teach for tech company, and I am an instructor in a classroom, and we do have virtual classroom situations. And to understand the ask that we have made of our children, our teachers, and our parents. Okay, so when we ramp a new instructor, it takes a new instructor three to six months to ramp on the virtual classroom environment, and then they have to sit for a four hour certification examined to give them their credentials. Once that is accomplished, when the instructor gets in the classroom, they spend about a good 15 minutes orienting adults to the virtual learning environment. How do you mute yourself? How do you find the chat? How do you turn off your webcam? And in the case of our children, we're asking them to turn on and off their webcam, turn on and off their mic at multiple times during the day. And then we're also asking the teachers to do the curriculum prep to facilitate that classroom and the dynamics and the conversation. These are things that we have asked grown people to do, and they spend months preparing. We have asked our teachers and our children to drop everything in a drop of a hat and get quickly up to speed and do this. And then also what we have in my professional environment is we have a producer running interference behind the scenes. So if the instructor gets dropped, what do we do? If we have to reconnect and disconnect, what do we do? They're pretty much paid to troubleshoot that classroom. So the reasons we should be applauding our teachers, our little people, and our parents is because this is a full time job that we're asking them to ramp up quickly to do. So I applaud them. Yeah, I would say I have felt my anxiety ramp up. I've always been pretty good at channeling my anxiety through humor and talking with friends and family, virtually even before the pandemic hit. But this type of chronic anxiety, because we've been dealing with it for so long, I've actually had to limit my virus tracking on television, like, really limit the amount of regular tv that I watch because of news reports. It was so triggering. And then I also had to get creative with other endeavors for how to channel that energy. And then, most recently, I think I hit the point in the pandemic where I can no longer get by on talking to friends and talking with family members, where I've actually had to seek out paid therapy, paid talk therapy to talk through the anxiety just to make sure that I'm in better mental emotional shape for my kids and interacting with the different hiccups that can happen during the day without spazzing out. I am still struggling with that. I think some weeks are better than others in terms of trying to balance it. What I've done now, I think since I mentioned that my daughter is home with me on Fridays for schooling, I have pushed all of my really important meetings to earlier in the week. Monday through Thursday, I'm doing that ad hoc email response, holding my meetings. I'm checking in on my projects, and then on Friday, that's my cleanup day to go through all of the other emails, try to schedule things out for Monday through Thursday of next week. But it really varies by the week. Like, right now, we're in snow season and I feel my anxiety starting to rise again because I just got through six months of a pandemic with the kids being home while I'm trying to work, and we're about to come up on snow season. So snow days are making me anxious because I don't have enough vacation time to say, okay, I'm taking this as a vacation day because I can't do the mommying and the working. So I'm really anxious again. So it varies week to put those boundaries in place, but whenever the kids are in daycare, it is so much easier.
[00:11:41] So, yeah, so I took a step back prior to the pandemic when I knew I was returning back from attorney leave. I used that as an opportunity to make a position switch, and I stepped out of leadership to become an individual contributor. So when the pandemic hit, I was about four months into a new role, four to six months into a new role where I was trying to establish myself. And I can distinctly remember the point in the pandemic where I had the lowest point I felt in my career, where I felt like, oh, wow. And I had always been a top performer. And so I was given a project where I was working with my manager, working with some higher up legal folks or what have you. And I had a really important presentation to give on the afternoon that the George Floyd murder video hit. And I was like, oh, wow. And then 30 minutes. I had to transition quickly into giving this presentation. The presentation did not go well. And I think at the time, what my manager told me was like, she didn't know how to tell me that it did not go as they expected with the quality that they expected. She did tell me two weeks later that was the case. And so that was a pretty low point for me because I was already feeling overwhelmed and anxious and to just have this be confirmed where I was just like, oh, my gosh, is my professional reputation at stake at my job? And so at this point, she was just like, I'm going to have to take you off this project. Are you okay with me reassigning it to somebody? And I was just like, yeah, do what you need to do. I don't want to be on anything high profile at this point until the pandemic is over, until I figure out my work life balance. And so that was just a really tough week for me. Do I feel like my reputation took an overall hit? No, I've been with the company for long enough and I have a really good reputation, but that was a particular low point where I was just like, wow, this could impact my career.
[00:13:43] Well Pod, thank you so much for taking the time to listen. If you like what you heard, please share this podcast with your girlfriends and I'd love to hear your thoughts about the topics covered in this episode. So email
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