Secret Lives of Oilsands Families
Notes on family life in the wild, wild Alberta north
Childcare crunch
But Fort McMurray’s 17,000 children swirl with their parents in the vortex of work. As a freelancer working from home with one of my young sons on my lap at all times, I once spent an entire year hiding from the woman across the street. She was a good neighbour, a friend, and my Avon lady right up until she approached me with a plan.
“It’d be perfect,” she beamed. She was convinced that what my crowded mobile home needed was one more child – her child, a 5-year-old boy she very diplomatically described as “a going concern.” While she browned cheese toast in a restaurant downtown, I could work caring for her son.
In truth, my neighbour didn’t have many childcare options. The dominant daycare centres in Fort McMurray operate through the YMCA. For years, they’ve been operating at full capacity and parents without subsidies may pay over $1000 a month per child.
Other children are cared for in day-homes run by women already looking after their own children. Good day-homes charge up to $700 a month per child. But nothing – not charging $10,000 a month with a $100 premium for every diaper change – could have persuaded me to start a childcare business.
It’s a familiar bit of awkwardness between full-time working mothers and full-time childrearing mothers in any city. Some working mothers, desperate for high quality childcare, hopefully but mistakenly assume women staying home to care for their own children are available to care for all children. Of course, that’s not the case. I should have simply explained this to my neighbour. We might have suffered an uncomfortable moment but we would have moved on and chatted about our flowerbeds or how much our property had appreciated. Instead, I hid. It wasn’t just my neighbour I was dodging. I didn’t want to face the guilt of refusing to leap to the aid of the overextended workforce. Could it be true that because I wouldn’t tend my neighbour’s son a restaurant would lose a sous chef, its customers wouldn’t get lunch on time, they’d return to work late, oilsands development would slow down, and the entire economy would suffer?
When we left the neighbourhood, I hoped to leave childcare guilt behind. But I noticed posters near our new house pleading for someone to watch two elementary students after school. The address on the posters was that of the house next to mine. I didn’t answer the ad. In time, the posters vanished but no babysitter appeared next door. Instead, a nine-year-old girl was given the key to the house. Every day, she and her brother fended for themselves until their mother came tearing home from work. A year later, the latchkey kids’ family grew frustrated enough with the lack of social support to return to an uncertain job future in Atlantic Canada…
Jennifer Quist is a freelance writer, researcher, and amateur general construction contractor newly departed from Fort McMurray to Lacombe, Alberta.
Related Posts
Drug Testing Confessional • October, 2007
Entries