ADAPTING ROLES: What toll has the pandemic taken on gender and family issues?
Time kind of stands still and it's hard to disconnect. This response from one of the people who answered the Business Record’s survey on family and gender issues amid the coronavirus pandemic is one almost all of us can certainly relate to. But we may be feeling this in different ways depending on our profession, family status and gender identity.
Research and news coverage of work-life balance across the United States are showing time and again that the pandemic is causing an increased strain on individuals, and creating new challenges for family units and relationships. While not scientific, our survey gives us a glimpse of some of the key family and gender issues facing our region and state in this time of crisis. Some of the biggest challenges our respondents indicated were:
Feeling strain on relationships from too much time with those you live with.
Having to be apart from loved ones you would normally see.
Mental health challenges.
Imbalanced emotional labor.
Imbalance of gender in leadership.
Along with Business Record associate editor Emily Barske, I told the personal stories of five Central Iowans about how they were handling the effects of the pandemic. Each story is told in their own words.
KATE GARNER
Kate Garner works at the Des Moines Radio Group as the news director and special projects director. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
By title that I share publicly, I am news director and special projects director for the Des Moines Radio Group, but I have about 20 other titles. I do a couple of air shifts a day. Beyond that, I keep an eye on what’s going on in the community and try to keep people connected. Without the pandemic, I work about 45 hours, six days a week. Usually Saturdays are only a couple of hours.
Because I was paying attention to the news, in late January, early February I saw that there was this thing coming out of China. By the beginning of March, I was adding a couple of hours in the evening reading extra stuff about this. On top of all my other responsibilities, I was writing a full-on news report every day and twice a day recording news updates that would run throughout the day. Once, I actually wrote 1 million words in a week. By March 12, that’s where it really kicked in and I started working 70 hours a week. (I worked 70 hours a week until the end of May.) My goal was to be out by 8 p.m. so that I only did a 12-hour day. There were days when so much was coming in so fast, I was still there for 10 hours on Saturday and Sunday. Now it’s continuing to be along the lines of 55 or 60 hours a week.
Just because somebody seems — and I hate this word and nobody should ever use it as a description of a local TV, radio or newsperson — like a celebrity doesn’t mean that they’re making Brad Pitt money. None of us are. Local news people do it for the passion and because they care about our community. I do it because I want Des Moines and the surrounding area to be safe. I want people to be knowledgeable and I want the facts out there.
I’m not an hourly worker. I make radio money. The average person in radio maybe makes a salary similar to someone who is a manager at QuikTrip, or even a little less. I mentor multiple kids a year and I have an intern that comes in every summer. I make it clear to them that you don’t get into radio for the money.
Financially, it’s always been living paycheck to paycheck. It became even more so with the changes that happened. It was tight.
My roommate is my cousin. We’ve lived together for 20 years. Most of the people that don’t know us think we’re a couple, and we just let that roll. We don’t care what people think about that. We own our house. Well, the bank owns the house but we like to pretend that we do.
We’ve both had times of unemployment and the other one has always just picked up the slack. We’ve lived hand-to-mouth and eaten very cheap rice and beans. This time around isn’t that hard because we’ve learned to do it better and plan for it. It’s an uncomfortable conversation to have. Money is hard to talk about, but it’s important to have those discussions. If crap hits the fan, what can we sacrifice? What should be cut?
She was working one part-time job and another part-time job, the second part-time job being at Penzeys Spices. She quit the other job because she got hired by the U.S. Census Bureau to be the follow-up person that goes door to door. They were paying $20 an hour or something like that. Then the pandemic hit. Penzeys paid their employees for a few weeks and then they had to furlough. So here she is, unemployed. It’s great that the federal government kicked out an extra $600, but it’s still not a living wage. Luckily by her being unemployed, a lot of companies were making adjustments in payment schedules. But there were still bills that you had to pay. You don’t want to get too far behind.
You make all the fiscal adjustments and you don’t go anywhere. You don’t eat out. We cut streaming services, a music service and I dropped a national newspaper subscription. The cats have got to eat, and one got sick in the middle of all of it so there was that extra expense. But because I had been paying attention to what was going on, I had very quietly been putting together a nice pantry at home with the expectation that a partial lockdown situation was likely. So we were fully stocked and prepared. But you still have to have fresh vegetables every once in a while. We put in a garden this year, knowing that there’s a possibility that there could be another spike in cases and businesses would shut down again. If that’s the case, we didn’t want to be where fresh vegetables were something we needed to debate on whether or not we could have.
Our shower has been broken for eight months. The city had found something that was broken on our street. They repaired it and broke a pipe to our house. They repaired that and then turned the water back on. But they didn’t warn us, so everything in our 90-year-old house broke free with the additional water pressure and pushed all of the lime into the fixtures and had frozen them. We had to pay out-of-pocket to replace the hot water heater. But it only works in the basement. There’s no water in the shower. There’s enough water that comes out of the sink to wash your hands. The toilet flushes. We get cold water in the sink in the kitchen and the water works for the dishwasher. That’s it. We were already trying to save up to fix the shower, but then that money set aside for that is gone, because that little bit of savings had to go into the everyday survival fund. I’ve been washing my hair in a bucket.
But I look back at people who have had to make real, long-term sacrifices. I think of the people that are out there living every day, dime-to-dime that they find on the street. I don’t like how little money I make, but I’m certainly not going to gripe because compared to other people, I’m doing OK. I’m not trying to feed three kids. I’m blessed. I try to keep it in perspective.
KRISTEN COREY
Kristen Corey’s work centers on women’s equity. Her perspective is on the behalf of herself and not her employer. She and her husband, Shawn, have two kids, ages 6 and 7. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
There is a phrase I have often repeated to myself throughout my years of state employment. Working for the state, sometimes we have more resources, other times we have less. And so I find myself repeating, do what you can with what you have at the time it can happen. I think that’s been true throughout this pandemic.
After we switched to teleworking full time, my husband was also scheduled to work from home. And so we were lucky in that way, where we have both of us at home helping and trying to coordinate schedules. I’ve worked with my boss and we basically agreed that I would work from 4 a.m. to noon every day. My husband has typically taken over with home-schooling duties in the morning. He’d start home-schooling them around 10 a.m., work until about noon. When I get off we have lunch. He has work meetings in the afternoon. We switch on and off that way.
But the situation right now is that he has been in quarantine for the last 2½ weeks in our basement because he’s had some COVID symptoms. That’s changed things quite a bit for our family. He wasn’t able to qualify to get testing initially because he didn’t have bad enough symptoms. Then this last Friday he had spiked to a higher fever and started having some trouble breathing and therefore qualified to have testing. We’re waiting for the results to come back.
For the last 2½ weeks, it’s just been me. It’s waking up at 4 a.m. to get all of the work that I can get done squished into that four-hour period before my kids wake up. Then I get everybody breakfast when they wake up. I have to get my husband breakfast too, so I set that outside his door and knock to let him know he’s got food. And then I go back to work.
The age my kids are at, they don’t understand what’s going on. They don’t get it. They don’t get why their dad is in the spare bedroom and why he can’t come up to them at night and give them a hug. My youngest has been really struggling with that. That’s been hard to explain. I definitely think my kids are going to have some pretty real memories of this time.
My daughter has an anxiety disorder. Through this process, my son has also presented a lot of similar symptoms with anxiety. Trying to maintain my own sanity around work, and just being level and not show my worry in front of them and then explaining to them in very real terms of what a pandemic is, and what this means for not just them, but most of the other kids in the country are going through the same thing — I try to explain to them that they’re not alone.
Before the pandemic we were like, we are not getting our kids tablets. They are way too young. And then quickly we were like, maybe we’ll relax that a little bit. We didn’t really have the money to do it. But we said you know what, this is going to go on a credit card and we’re going to buy tablets because otherwise we have no idea what we’re going to do. We didn’t have any materials from the schools at first. So we ordered a bunch of workbooks that we could find online. We were trying to figure out what was age-appropriate and what they should be learning at this point in time as a kindergartener and first grader. Pretty much from 8 a.m. to noon the kids eat their breakfast and they’re on some sort of electronic device. They watch some sort of educational TV or YouTube or Netflix. I feel bad saying that, but I don’t really have any other options. We’ve been going to a local park to feed the ducks. They look forward to it, but outside of that they really haven’t been anywhere since early March.
Before my husband went into quarantine it was getting a little bit easier. It was becoming more normal and we had a schedule figured out. With my kids’ anxiety, they do better with a schedule. They like to know what we’re going to do at 9 a.m. and how long we’re going to do it. We had kind of gotten into a groove. Now it’s very different. I basically crumpled up that schedule and threw it away because it’s really hard to have any kind of schedule right now.
I’m responsible for absolutely everything. The emotional stability of the family, trying to keep them in the loop about what’s going on. The education of the kids, keeping up with school. Now they send us Google Slides to do a lesson plan from, so I’m figuring how to make all of that work. Plus cleaning, sanitizing everything I can think of. Working eight hours a day, sometimes more. Doctors’ appointments. Taking care of our cats. The yardwork. We’ve had several appliances break down, so fixing that. I’ve become really handy. My husband generally does a really good job helping around the house. Doing laundry is pretty even. He’s a much better cook than I am, so this has been an interesting time for everybody. I would say I probably took on about 60% of the work and he would do 40%. Now it truly is me about 99% of the time just because of our situation.
It’s been very stressful. Thankfully, I’m an introvert and so the transition away from people has been in some ways more relaxing because I’ve had time to process a lot of things. But the massive amount of stuff that I am now solely responsible for and then also trying to be present at work and present for my kids and now emotional support for everybody here in the house has been really stressful. I’ve dealt with anxiety throughout most of my life, so I definitely have a lot of anxiety right now about everything. Finding ways to cope has helped. I love to write. I’ve been writing poetry. There isn’t a lot of free time in the day, but when I do have five minutes where a thought comes into my head, I just write it out. My brother’s wife lost her dad throughout this and I’ve had friends that have lost loved ones. Normally I would go to those funerals or be able to comfort a loved one, but it all looks so different now. Getting that sadness out on paper is what I’m really writing about.
When I think about a typical workweek, it’s easy to see that there will be a Friday and there will be a weekend and you’ll be able to do something a little bit different then. In all of this, the days blend together in a lot of ways. Even though I may not be logged in on my computer on the weekend, there’s really not a lot of change in what we do. We are doing the same thing every day. We’re going to feed the ducks every day. At this point, I’ve had enough with the ducks.
Getting up in the morning and knowing that today’s very likely going to be no different, you’ve just got to take it one day at a time. But that does require some mental strain to coach yourself. It’s hard. There are days when I wake up and I think, I do not want to do this. Trying to be strong for everybody, keeping my spirits up for the kids, it’s draining. I know I’m not the only one going through that and there are people in much worse circumstances. At this point I’m happy to have a house, food, a job and that my kids are healthy. In a lot of ways I am very privileged and I’m thankful for what we have. In a two-parent family, I feel extremely privileged. There are many people that are not in that boat and are trying to figure out how to make this work with one parent. I can’t even imagine how stressful that is.
We’re all in this together in some ways. We’re all facing similar struggles. To get through hard things we have to advance together and do things for the collective good. The realities for working parents are very real and child care is a huge issue. Without these supports, it’s borderline impossible for parents to work and not only take care of their kids but make sure that they’re educated and engaged.
Editor’s note: This interview was conducted while the Coreys were awaiting COVID-19 test results. The test came back negative.
MELISSA BUTLER
Melissa Butler is the communications director at Progress Industries in Newton. Her husband, Matt, lives and works in Denver. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
The first two weeks after Progress Industries shut down, I was in tears every night when I would go home. Not because of work but because when I would go home, there was no one to talk to. There was no one to vent to. There’s no “How was your day?” I’d walk in and there’s my three dogs and I’d have to go take them for a walk. It just hit me hard.
My husband took a new job with his company in the fall and moved out to Denver, Colo., in January. Ever since, he’s made two trips back home and I have not been out there.
A lot of my friends and co-workers have said, “You have the best of both worlds. You get to see him on the weekends and then when he’s gone, you can live your life.” While that all sounds good in theory, in the end, it’s difficult. I went through every emotion possible over the last eight weeks. It was a grieving process because I couldn’t see him. I knew he couldn’t come home. Before the pandemic hit, I thought he’d come home every other weekend. So when this hit and he couldn’t come home, that changed things. I thought about all the people who are locked up in their homes with their kids and their spouse and they can’t leave. And then you’ve got this other side of life where there’s a lot of people in my situation where they are living alone. It’s a lonely existence. It’s hard.
He calls me every morning on his way to work and just checks in. We do FaceTime and we both have Instagram. Basically that’s how we keep in touch. We’ll get on the phone and our conversations will go, “Hi, how are you? How was work? What’s the weather like? Do you have any cases at work? Are you guys locked down?” And that takes four minutes, and then we’d have silence. We’d say, “I love you, but I don’t have anything else to say.” And so that’s where we’re at, which is a good thing. Our relationship is solid and we’re committed to each other, so that eases the burden.
On the flip side, I’m here taking care of the house and the dogs and the bills. I said to him over the weekend laughing, “Just so you know, and I don’t mean this to be negative, but you have an apartment so you don’t have any maintenance. You drive to work, you work all day, come home and then you play your guitar.” I don’t begrudge it by any means, but I feel like my days are just filled nonstop. I don’t have a minute to breathe sometimes. So that’s where we’re different. We had an agreement when we got married. I said you cook, I’ll clean. Now that he’s gone, I have to cook. But I don’t cook, so I just get something quick from a drive-thru or something like that. Basically I have to take care of everything. Snow removal, mowing the lawn, calling a service person to do something.
He said, “Don’t ever think for a minute that I don’t realize what you’re doing back in Iowa. I don’t ever take that for granted.” And once I heard that, I’m like OK, that’s all I needed to hear. It’s my kind of personality to take charge. And then I had to think about him. He left our house here in Iowa. Our backyard, deck, our three dogs. He’s living in a one-bedroom apartment and has relatively no freedom so I thought that’s not perfect either. And I think his days are long and lonely. He doesn’t have a lot of connections. He has his work people, and that’s it.
I don’t have any close family here in Iowa, so I have always relied on the kindness of strangers. My friends and my neighbors have really become my family. I am surrounded by good neighbors who take good care of me and they look out for me. If I can’t get home, they let my dogs out. If it wasn’t for one of my closest friends who does live close, talking to her every day for the last eight weeks, I don’t know what I would have done.
HOWARD TEMPERO
Howard Tempero is an experience architect manager at Accenture. He and his wife, Megan, have four kids. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Luckily, our organization is already set up to work remotely. So this has been an easy transition to work. But mentally, it is a challenging place to be. My official home office is our laundry room.
The model of work-life balance has shifted on its head and turned over sideways. It has completely changed, simply because we’re almost leaning more on the life and family side. We’re in a situation where even though we’re with our family, we also need our personal space. Before, you found that space in commuting to work. You had time to mentally think through your day and the challenges you might have had that morning or frustrations with your boss, whatever that might be. There were those pockets of time where we were able to meditate. That has completely flipped over. Now, there’s so much family time.
We have four kids ranging from fifth grade to a senior in high school. We have a graduating senior who’s not having those senior moments. I have two other kids who are in transition years. My youngest one is moving from fifth to sixth grade. And then my eighth grader is moving from junior high to high school.
I’m trying to be empathetic. I say I feel for you, but it’s hard to relate. I can’t say I’ve gone through this. I don’t want to say get over it. I tend to be that nagging parent who says, Hey, bring your dishes upstairs, because I feel like that’s part of my role to help. I’ve definitely let up on the gas on that a lot. I’ve changed that to be trying to get more hugs, and saying I know this is hard. I’m sorry. My interactions with them are much less about, Please do this to more of Hey, how are you feeling. All I can say is that soon it will get better. Sometimes I just have to say that this really sucks for you. Being there for the kids is sometimes very difficult. The challenge is getting them to talk back. I do try to ask open-ended questions. If I get them at a good time, I might get a decent conversation. Other times, I’ll get I’m playing my Xbox, leave me alone.
My wife’s exhaustion has also started to hit me, especially with her mentally having to be there for the kids when they all leaned on her a lot more. They were all feeling very lost. I began to realize how much she was in the kitchen. Before, everyone would do their own thing for breakfast and no one was really around for lunch. Now, everyone wants something three times a day. I began noticing a lot of dirty dishes on the counter, so I started doing those. I sat down with her and I said, Maybe we can work out a schedule where I do some of the meals and you don’t have to worry about it. We’ve balanced that better. Since I work in the laundry room, I said that I’ll do all the laundry. Ironically, though, there isn’t as much because everyone’s wearing pajama pants and they’re wearing the same pair multiple times so the laundry load isn’t as big. Before, I would say I gave maybe five or six hours a week to typical housework. Now that I’m home, I’d say it’s doubled.
The other thing that’s been really interesting about this is that my wife doesn’t really understand totally what I do. She has said to me multiple times, You’re on the phone all day. I thought you were kidding when you said that. I can hear you downstairs and you’re on calls nonstop from 9 to 5. I said, I know, that’s what I do. It’s exhausting.
My own mental health ebbs and flows. I’m a pattern guy. I love patterns. I drive the same way to work every day. I have the same coffee. I live by some of those pieces, and all of that has been disrupted. This is a period of broken patterns. Patterns of familiarity are completely inconsistent. That drains me mentally. There’s also all these additional mental struggles and pressures on top of everyone. My parents are in their 80s and don’t live here. I’m concerned about them going out. I always have that in the back of my head. My in-laws live a stone’s throw away from where we live. Every Sunday we go to Gateway Market to get them stuff. I think it’s more the mental concern of infecting someone. It can be really exhausting.
I have a lot of worries. With work, it’s if we experience layoffs. I’m a regional lead for our team. There are struggles right now with finding consulting work. Losing a job in this environment is a very scary idea to even think about because what else is there? I worry about what these kids have lost and how far they’re going to be behind when it comes to learning. I worry about how this is going to impact our greater community as a whole. I don’t believe the norm will be what it was. I have good days and bad days. On bad days I try and find something else to work on.
We had a really old woodshed that we tore down on my birthday a few weeks ago. I brought all the kids out and said, You’re going to love the concept of demolition. You’re going to go in there and kick the walls. They loved it. My fifth grader said, Dad, this is your best birthday ever. A couple of weeks ago, my older two sons and I constructed the new shed. One of the things that really helps with these mental frustrations is to find something physically tangible you can work on. I think that’s why a lot of people are doing housing projects or fixing things. You feel like you’re doing something else.
ERIN OLSON-DOUGLAS
Erin Olson-Douglas is the economic development director for the city of Des Moines. She and her husband have three kids, ages 6, 8 and 10. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
I think for working parents, it always has been a very tailored and carefully crafted balance of doing a lot of things, every single day. The pandemic conditions that so many of us have found ourselves in unravel that so suddenly. Working motherhood has always been sort of guilt-ridden. And this condition puts that under a microscope, minute to minute.
Our kids have put the connections together between what they’re feeling and what’s happening in the outside world. There haven't been a lot of questions, but there have been moments where it has sunk in that this is unprecedented. They’ve gone through stages of accepting what’s going on. Our oldest really felt it. He’s at a social age but he’s not at an age where he can really engage in social media. So he really felt like something had been taken away from him in not going back to school and not being around his friends. I think it was really a sense of loss. It was frightening for our middle daughter because I think she understood enough about what was going on. She was worried and afraid. And our youngest is our rebel rabble-rouser, and I think it just brought out the worst in her, not having the schedule and understanding of what was next. It affected all of them differently.
They each have their own teachers and their own circle of friends. They each had coaches for recreational activities. They had a piano teacher. They had a nanny that picked them up from school every day. We figured it out one time several weeks ago when we were feeling especially spread thin, that there was somewhere between 60 and 75 hours’ worth of time each week that our kids spent with other people. So I guess that makes more sense as to why we feel pulled in a lot of different directions.
Our kids are kind of on their own. I don’t consider myself to be a helicopter parent. But at the same time, they’re young kids and they need not only love and attention, but supervision. It’s really challenging to try and conduct the balance of work and parenting right now.
Really, there isn’t a balance. Our solution right now has been really, really, really long days that start at 5 a.m. some days and go to midnight because the work hasn’t slowed. I work from about 5:30 a.m. to 8 or 8:30 a.m. The kids are getting up between 8 and 8:30 a.m. My husband or I will help them with breakfast. Meetings are from 8:30 a.m. to noon-ish. Whichever one of us is off of a call or a meeting, we try to help our kids with school assignments, finding something productive to do or course-correcting on mischief. Generally we’ve been able to one-off, one-on. In a family of five, we each have a day of the week where we decide on who prepares lunch. There’s been a lot of peanut butter and jelly. Then its cleanup and maybe a little outside time. We go back to work until 5 or 6 p.m. depending on the day. One of us tries to peel off by 4:30 or 5 p.m. and do something with our kids. Then we make dinner, hang out with the kiddos. Our kids are generally in bed around 9 p.m. and then we catch up on emails, the news and work stuff that’s unfinished.
Every experience is so real for the person and for the family that is dealing with it. From extreme loneliness, to boredom, to just an overwhelming onslaught of demands. For working families for whom the work has not stopped, I think generally work has either sped up or slowed down. It has not remained constant. The work that my colleagues and I do with the city, it’s sped up and the demands are just unbelievable. That’s the only way to put it. I don’t mean it as a complaint, that’s just the reality.
I’m really overwhelmed. It’s the uncertainty that just kills me. Going back to the notion of carefully crafted arrangements, I don’t know how to craft those anymore in a way that is safe and helpful and makes the most of our precious time with young children. I don’t know where this is all headed. I really miss the collegiality of my work environment. I have great work colleagues, and I really miss that. I miss looking forward to soccer games on the weekend, gatherings with my extended family and summer vacation. I miss looking forward to all of the everyday things of life.
Yet there are silver linings about this. As much as it has been a real struggle to balance the work and the family, it has also been a time for reacquainting with family. It’s my hope that doesn’t get lost in a new normal.