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I'm an engineer, and in heavy industry most machines and infrastructure are generously overdesigned in order to handle unforeseen stresses. From a bean-counting point of view, this is "wasteful," but it's common practice. It's a shame that workforces can't be put together in the same way, with an intentional "overhire factor" on top of the theoretical bare minimum staff headcount. (We should treat employees at least as well as we treat our machines!)

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We just recently had (I'm nervous using the past tense, it might not be over) a very stressful month mostly with kid related things. I'm really grateful for my husband's job flexibility, grandparents who made themselves available and are overall helpful people (not meddling, overbearing, judgmental, etc), and local friends who volunteered to help. I know a lot of moms don't have the advantages that I have - many of my friends have husbands who work at the office 8-5 pretty strictly, or who travel a lot, or have parents or in laws who aren't able or willing to help or are too nosy, or they are new to their area and haven't made local friends.

Many of my local friends are stay at home moms and, except for nap time, tend to have a lot of flexibility when they can bring their kids. One of them has my toddler and her own son at the local park right now. Another took my toddler and her toddler to the library a week ago so I could go to the hospital to see my son (who is, we think, fine now). I work/study part time and because of that I end up declining requests for help more often than I would like. Being part of the SAHM help economy is a wonderful thing (largely because it's informal and unregulated) and I wish I could contribute to it more.

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I have lots of thoughts about this as I start my work day two hours earlier than usual to cover for a coworker on vacation! I will try to be concise . . .

My father owned a small business in a tourist town when I was growing up, and he hired teenagers as summer help (including eventually all of his kids, though this was not required of us). Our standard workweek was 30ish hours, usually 4 8s or 5 7s. I think this was for a lot of reasons, but one of the outcomes was slack in the system; if someone wanted to make more money that week or that month there was usually a shift to pick up while someone was at football camp or on vacation or whatnot.

Regular readers of Other Feminisms will know I am always banging on about part-time work (because I am myself a part-time worker) and while I don't think part time work is always the solution and I fully acknowledge the way corporations have used it to deny people things like health insurance, I'm always curious as to why, when labor laws make it so easy to deny people benefits for part time work, it isn't a more frequently adopted option for building slack into systems where slack is needed? My own employer benefits tremendously from the ability to pay me hourly and zero benefits except for 401(k) contribution. I'm quite confident that I'm about as profitable to their bottom line as my salaried coworkers whose health insurance they are buying, AND on days like today I am literally the slack in the system; it's much easier sell to get me to work an extra 10 hours this week on top of a base of 25 than someone who already regularly works 40. In many labor markets (though perhaps not the current one) there are people who, for a variety of reasons, can accept a more variable income and are willing to buy their own health insurance on the exchanges.

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This exact argument has been my pitch for why I should be valuable to my law firm even though I want a reduced schedule. My practice area is periodically very busy, and when my normal workweek is 32 hours, I can pick up 10-12 additional hours much more easily than someone who is already working 50 hours, and then I am happy to be "slow" in the slow periods and not bill unnecessarily just to keep my hours up. Or I can work full time for a quarter to help cover for someone on maternity leave, and then I'm happy to hand off the work when they come back.

(As you might expect in the world of big law firms, who do think someone working 50 hours should easily be able to work 10 (or 30) more, this is not an argument that gets a lot of traction at the institutional level... but the attorneys for whom I can pick up a project at the end of the quarter are very grateful).

Notably, my ability to be the slack in the system at work is made possible by redundancy at home as well. My husband is primarily a stay-at-home dad (with some very part-time/self-employed work when he wants), and we also have a part-time nanny. So I have lots of backup when I'm very busy at work, and when I'm home more, it's "extra" time to spend with my kids, do projects, etc. over and above the day-to-day housework and parenting.

The slack at home means that my nanny has flexibility - when she wants extra hours, we are happy for her to work extra; she basically lets us know when she's free and then we'll plan to go on a date or schedule appointments for that time. And when she's sick or needs extra time to study for exams at school, the time off is fine for us because we don't *need* her every hour she's scheduled.

So I think the benefits of some slack in the system are very wide-ranging!

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I love that - the benefits of slack in a system ripple outward. Rigidity & overwork are not compartmentalized problems for one employee, one employer, one caregiver, one spouse/family. This is a great example!

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OOooo yes, that last paragraph is so good. There are people who want to work part-time... and it would probably benefit companies to have more such workers... but the supply of job postings I'm guessing doesn't align! I wonder if this is *part* of the reason for so many women creating their own side-gigs/small businesses/self-marketing for skills that could otherwise find a place in a part-time-friendly workforce (like some European countries). Granted, some women do love that kind of self-starting work — for others it's perhaps more of a mindset of "if I can't work flexibly part-time elsewhere, I guess I have to make it happen working for myself".

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You're absolutely right that the supply of part time jobs isn't sufficient, and I agree with you that women create their own opportunities where employers don't value them. I know a lot of women who self identify as stay at home moms and with exactly two exceptions, they all have something between a side hustle and a part time job. They have Etsy shops, they are freelance writers/editors, they teach piano in their living rooms, etc. When I learned this it made me feel a lot less bad about my part time job!

Also I think part of the problem vis-a-vis creating more part time jobs is how employers view them and the people who occupy them. I recently saw a former employer post a position with responsibilities that I used to have years ago, namely managing regulatory compliance on behalf of one of their larger/legacy clients. This work is important to the client, it has to be done year-round on a regular basis so it's certainly profitable for the company doing the hiring, and unless they were dividing the responsibilities between two people it could certainly be full-time. But it's steady work, not sexy work; there will always be plenty to do but you're never going to get a conference presentation or a promotion out of it. In this context posting the position as part time to me felt like a way to hire someone who would primarily value the flexibility and was less likely to want to trade that work for something with more opportunity. (I personally think this is the same attitude that says baristas or grocery store employees or truck drivers should be kept to 29 hour workweeks to avoid paying them benefits because their labor is "unskilled.")

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Homeschooling mom here who teaches piano and tutors math! :)

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Im on a five month sabbatical that required years of planning for slack. 1. I share a job with another woman and we legitimately co direct an organization 2. Over the past two years we created manuals for everything 3. We had frank discussions before i left about what balls would and could drop 5. We increased the length of our internship program from 1-2 years before i left so my intern would be in her second year 4. We raised enough money in advance to be sure my fundraising responsibility could go on auto pilot.

I felt good about this because, i argued, sabbatical is biblical. The land had to lay follow to regenerate but presumably God wasnt asking people to starve. I've been trying to mentor other organizations in creating sabbaticals and also im seeing them show up in corporations

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I love how specific and concrete the planning was to make it possible. (the two year intern was particularly smart).

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Answering the direct question before adding an ancillary comment: Have I ever worked somewhere that deliberately built up slack? No. I'm almost 37 years old and I've worked at schools, publishers, restaurants (both sit down and fast food, front and back of the house) and offices. I did work a government job where there was slack, but it didn't feel like it was a deliberate choice on the part of management, it just felt like a sort of neglect had allowed inefficiency to build up. In a parallel job for the same branch of government, there was zero slack and overtime was just expected.

All of this puts me in mind of Marilynne Robinson's essay on the sabbath as a form of inefficiency. She points out that in a world of mostly subsistence living, giving all your workers a sabbath day meant paying them 7 days worth of food for only 6 days of labor.

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I really appreciate you putting "wasteful" in quotes! The rail companies - and American companies generally - are sacrificing people (and families!) at the altar of short term profit. These companies wouldn't feel any 'pain' if they reintroduced slack. The only 'pain' would be investors seeing slightly smaller returns.

As far as an example, I work for a small never-for-profit company that sustains itself by building technology through partnerships with organizations who might otherwise spend more money building a custom tool in house. We then provide what we build at cost to mission aligned organizations. Like the company you described, we work to document everything, cross train folks, and otherwise introduce (even more) slack. We also have unlimited PTO & a minimum requirement, plus family medical, dental & vision. I don't think this would be possible without our sustainable model! Not because I don't think the money is out there, but because in for profit world investors are out for the highest possible return (and don't generally care about the human cost) and in the nonprofit world there are entrenched ideas that 'overhead' is 'bad'.

I generally think we've become too used to the idea that our pleasant day to day is predicated on greed and exploitation. Like in LeGuin's Those Who Walk Away from Omelas we *know* there is misery somewhere responsible for our joy. But it absolutely doesn't need to be that way - it's a fixable problem. I think pushing back on these systems (like you do!) is a vital part of the fix. I also think that workers leveraging their power is the quickest & most effective path to a solution. Strikes! Unionizing! Pickets! Boycotts! Imo that's how we get the future we need.

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It’s interesting that you mention “highest possible return” because many of the capital-owners would not be satisfied with, say, a steady 1% return year over year across all their investments. It always has to be more. The railroads would still make money, just a bit less. The edtech venture capitalists would probably still make money. What is a person really going to do with a billion dollars? Sandra over here is getting a 10% return, so I must get 11%, etc etc.

And we’ve become so accustomed to/dependent on exploitation in care work I have trouble seeing a path forward that doesn’t involve the wholesale collapse of the industry because we’ve baked so much comfort (and subsistence) into underpaying and understaffing.

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I don't have any examples; I just want to say I really appreciate you drawing out this idea because I feel like "flexibility" has become the end-all-be-all of family-friendliness at work, where "flexibility" means "it's okay, we will generously allow you to work from 8-11pm." (Before we got actual parental leave, my employer put out a 74-page handbook on "workplace flexibilities" for having a baby, like the flexibility to beg your fellow workers to donate their vacation time to you and the flexibility to take leave without pay.)

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The closest I've experienced was actually working in international development, in an org that had a fairly predictable busy/slow pattern (driven by the agricultural cycle). We actually wrote it into our performance metrics, that being able to "ramp down quickly" and recharge a bit during slow periods was a key skill

Which is good on an individual level but doesn't address the sick kid problem -- pretty sure you can't order your kids to stay healthy until planting's done

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The best approach to this problem is, of course, to have moms do what they are made for and actually want to do, namely stay home and care for their children. It is our consumption culture that drives the "moms must work" mindset, and an almost total, if implicit, bias against seeing value in this most valuable of all "professions".

I do understand the difficulty of trying to do this in our society that expects both parents to work and as such the economic society is predicated on that, but I've also seen moms go to amazing lengths to stay home, and I've seen the rewards in the children who are raised by an at-home mom.

Why anyone would want to turn over the care and raising of their children to another is beyond me. Only a parent truly wants and strives to provide for what is best for her child. Only a parent can instill her values into her children, and only if she is intimately involved in their every day, all day, care. We have voluntarily returned to using orphanages, with the exception that the children go home to sleep each night! Orphanages that were rightly seen as a very inferior, insufficient way to raise children.

Our society has lost the idea that adults are supposed to sacrifice their desires to the needs of their children. This is reflected in everything from abortion to divorce, gay "marriage" to in vitro designer created children.

It is a sad world we live in.

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Stay at home moms, historically, were also working moms. They spun, wove, cared for animals, took in piecework or borders, etc. What's particularly hard today is that a great deal of work is all outside the home, which makes it hard for moms to straddle. I work part time from home; not on weaving but for a non-profit, and that makes the balance easier, but not trivial for me.

I'm hoping some of the shift to remote work might make it more doable for parents who want to be at home more to do part time bookkeeping or other more flexible work.

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So a stay-at-home mother in the 21st century isn't also working at home? I didn't (now a grandmother) have to spin and weave, but I washed and folded, even ironed. I shopped for food and cooked and baked. I cleaned. I made beds. I put things away. Then I walked the half mile to pick up my kids at school (city life) after having walked the mile there and back when I dropped them off in the morning. And I wasn't working?

I always made sure never to refer to myself as a stay-at-home mother. The phrase implies that I'm home doing nothing while the "working" mothers are out slaying dragons and building castles. Meanwhile, most of these "working" mothers were sitting in an office that looked like a castle, all dressed up nice and barely sweating. But, they were "working."

Other Feminisms certainly has an odd view of the situation. The term "stay-at-home mother" is loathsome. It is demeaning to mothers and divisive as well.

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We’re just talking about work done for those outside the home, and if or how it should be done by mothers. I don’t think anyone is denying the work done by moms for those inside the home.

I’m curious, what term do you use instead of “stay-at-home mom”? I always just called myself a mom, like when filling out a form asking for occupation. I think, actually, that probably distinguishes a full time mom (do you like that term?) from a working-outside-the-home mom.

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Perhaps I misunderstood the nature of the thread. Regardless, the term stay-at -home mom is loathsome, and motherhood and being a homemaker are highly undervalued in our culture. From what I get from this site and other articles I read written by educated, younger (20s-40s) women, it seems they, too, devalue their roles as mothers and struggle with being mothers as opposed to being professionals in the area in which they were educated.

I do think some women can handle both. I’ve known a few. These were women who freely acknowledged that they had made a choice to work outside the home. They relied heavily on help from babysitters/nannies and they recognized that. They were women who were honest about the choice they had made and suffered no illusions or angst. They were generally women who were confident parents. Or, they had grown to be that by the time I met them.

Regarding your question, if I had to fill out a form, I’d say “homemaker”. If people asked, I’d say “I’m at home” or “I don’t work outside the home” and sometimes I’d just say I was a housewife. People usually quickly lost interest in talking to me!😆

The feeling was often mutual. But, I had friends who also “stayed home” and we didn’t have to explain ourselves to each other.

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Amy, I'm with you in that observation. I'm honestly searching, after years of wondering, if "feminism" - of any stripe, has actually been a net advantage to my life as a woman. What I've seen is the most ardent defenders of the term "feminism" - even with modifiers attached to it - are highly educated women who apparently need a reason to justify their desire to work outside the home in their field of education. But privileged women, even those who didn't work for pay outside the home, have always been able to make use of childcare and domestic helps because they can - without guilt.

The problem that I've seen is that the privileged lay a burden on those under them. In arguing for a reason to work, work has become the greatest good. Women ask for more flexibility for childcare, but it's ultimately at the service of the job, not the family. It becomes working the family around maintaining the job. Because women CAN work they have become EXPECTED to, often in order to keep up a certain level of lifestyle or their husbands/partners seriously balk. And this ultimately necessitates limiting one's family. Having been blessed with hyper fertility and a husband willing to sacrifice materially so I don't have to work outside the home (though I do all the money management and keep us in financial order), I've received many unsolicited comments, even by strangers over the years. The number one thing has been: "I wish I had had more children, but...reason, reason, reason", followed by "I couldn't handle staying at home with my kids."

In Dorothy Sayers' essay, "Are Women Human?" she highlights the very human desire for women to be productive and contribute value to their households and society. But it seems, culturally, that has translated into "only paid work gives that meaning and value to the household."

We have simply lost the cultural ability, both men and women, to value the contributions to society of motherhood itself and, almost worse... women seem to have lost the art of mothering/motherhood. I had a good mother, and I still had to learn to value my own motherhood along with the practical sacrifices mothering entails. It was not something that came naturally to me, which I found disorienting. But given the fact that I spent all the years up to that point essentially following my own fancies and developing my own talents...I had a lot of self-centeredness to work out. It's not fully gone but I have learned better how to set myself aside for the good of my children.. sometimes even joyfully, haha!

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Bernadette, you have articulated so many excellent points here that I’m going to copy and save your comments. You should write an article on this topic. I did, but I didn’t really pursue publication. You must!

Women don’t need to be “feminists”whether they are first wave, second wave or other. Women are already feminine. Women need to be women. Alice Hildebrand writes on this topic.

A lot of what I read from various “conservative” women strikes me as mostly intellectualizing about, as you put it, working the family around the job. Again, great comments. Thanks!

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Yes, but it was all work in the home with kids nearby, under the mither’s care. That’s what’s missing today. Even the desire for it, or acknowledging that that is their desire, has been trained out of women. For a long time now. Even when I was young. It’s just become worse, so much worse since then.

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Interesting, but a little more complicated than your statement would seem to indicate.

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This thread raises a pretty fundamental question for this substack: what doesn’t fall under the umbrella of “other feminisms”? There was recently a resurgence in the “take away women’s right to vote” position that some defended from a “feminist” perspective. Like this comment, many echoed the idea that a mother’s place is in the home, exclusively, and that is the *only* moral and ‘natural’ position.

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If you turn your thinking around and think of the children rather than the mother, you can see why the home is the moral place for a mother—children deserve a full time mom’s attention and care. If you consider the physical attributes and normative disposition, i.e. loving and caring, of a woman, then yes, rearing children is also her natural role. If you think of the mess that our world is in, it should be obvious that parents should want to be the only influencers of their children's moral development.

There is a difference between a woman and a mother, and there is no correlation whatsoever between the idea that a mother should be in the home and with taking away women’s right to vote.

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I actually agree that children (particularly very young children) deserve the option of full time in home care from a dedicated, stable caregiver, in that it’s a sign of injustice when both parents have to be in the labor force out of financial necessity. However, I recently read something that bumped the cited book to the top of my library request list. It talked about how we’ve emphasized getting women into STEM but not men getting into care, and that we are all (men & society generally) missing out because of it. Men don’t get to experience the good of caregiving and care-ees miss out on being cared for by the men in their lives. My children deserve more time with my husband and he deserves more time caring for them than our current system allows.

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Agree completely! My dad stayed at home with my sister and I when we were kids, and we benefited tremendously. And my kiddos' dad stayed home with him for the first 14 months. We were in many ways so lucky to be able to make it work - it should be an easier option for *everyone*.

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Which book? Was it Reeves?

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Thank you, except “full time in home care from a dedicated, stable caregiver”should be mom, and it shouldn’t be optional. Yes, it’s an injustice economically and to the children. Children have a right to their married mother and father caring for them, and a right to full time care from their mother. And not just when they’re “very young”; have you met teenagers? 😄 They are most in need of full time motherly and fatherly care. Speaking of fathers, yes, children deserve time with them, too, of course! But most fathers are not the natural caregivers that mothers are. Do know exceptions, but in the main, women are more nurturing than men. So, substituting fathers for mothers doesn’t address the problem for most almost all children.

Our society thinks that men and women are interchangeable, but they’re not. They bring different skills, different attitudes, different styles, different everything to the table and children need both, but they need mom for her caringness. (Like that word? 😄)

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Some of the arguments in favor of repealing the 19th go something like this: women’s nature is to be mothers, and we need society to encourage this womanly nature > taking away women’s right to vote enforces that a woman’s 'natural' place is keeper of the home rather than a person in the public sphere.

I hear you that’s not what you intend - that you simply believe women should not work outside the home when they become mothers, for the good of their children. I love my son dearly, and am glad he got to experience high quality daycare and sees me do work that I find meaningful and difference-making. I also am very much in favor of making it easier for parents to stay at home with their kids full time! But I do not think that is the only path that should be available for mothers, based on our 'natures'. And I don't think it is the only way to raise wonderful deeply loved kiddos.

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It’s always struck me as quite wrongheaded that being a caretaker of a home would mean someone didn’t need to vote. I vote, in many ways, out of an effort to get more societal support for my motherhood!

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“Glad he got to experience high quality daycare”. Seriously, what good could he have possibly received from daycare that wouldn’t have been a thousand times better coming from you and being home and doing things with you?

“And sees me do work that I find meaningful and difference-making” could not possibly outweigh the good that would have come from his being home with you and knowing that he was/is more important than any “meaningful work” you may have done.

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I absolutely do not want my husband and me to be our children's only moral influencers! I want them to have good friends and go to church and visit their grandparents and godparents and aunts and uncles and cousins, and in fact we have arranged most of the rest of our lives around that goal.

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I find this a very odd thing to say. Don’t you trust your morals? Don’t you think they’re the right ones to have? Aren’t you sort of defeating the definition of morality, i.e. that which someone ought to do? So, you’re saying that what you think people ought to do, isn’t necessarily what they ought to do? I don’t get it.

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Can you explain specifically what time period, location, and class you're describing here?

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If you’re asking me, I was responding to Leah, “Stay at home moms, historically, were also working moms. They spun, wove, cared for animals, took in piecework or borders, etc.”

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I'm curious about your specific claim about mothers doing "all work in the home with kids nearby."

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Well said.

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Sorry I’m late to the replies, but I wanted to chime in because this resonates with me deeply, in a way I didn’t expect. When I first read this post (and when I’ve read related threads/discussions in the past), I thought of it as largely a problem of extreme capitalism treating workers as faceless cogs in a machine. I assumed it would be an issue primarily for large, for-profit entities.

But then I remembered an experience I had earlier this Fall. I lead a cultural/religious organization, and Fall 2022 was our first semester offering actual programming. (The first person plural in that last sentence is fictive/aspirational, as you’ll see in a moment.) My organization is part of a larger organization that has been around for a while, but I am the only person focusing on and responsible for my “branch,” so to speak.

One day early in the semester, I was feeling pretty sick, but one of our weekly programs was scheduled to meet that day. There was literally no one else I could ask to lead the program that day: not one of my coworkers with the larger organization, and not one of the participants. But because the group had just started meeting, I also didn’t want to cancel the meeting and lose what little momentum we’d started to build.

That experience helped me solidify a goal of working toward having a second staff member at my organization, so that it doesn’t all rest on my shoulders. But in order to make another hire, I need to have enough financial support coming in to be able to promise them a reasonable salary. So even at a small organization driven by ideals rather than profit, the ability to build in redundancy comes down to - surprise - money.

(Worth noting that in this example, I was the one who was sick, not a child needing my care. I’d be curious to hear others’ thoughts on how this changes when the sick individual is the worker, who can perhaps work through their sickness, vs. another loved one who needs the worker’s care. Another reason I’ve set a goal of hiring another staff member is to make it more viable for me to have children someday.)

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