On International Women’s Day (IWD) 2020, I launched this website and embarked on a journey of blogging and curating empowering content for my readers. This post also marks a one-year milestone of life under lockdown during the Covid-19 pandemic. I’ve experienced lockdown first-hand from different US-geographical and international perspectives. I happened to be unexpectedly based Berlin this year’s IWD (a best-that-I-can-do-under-the-circumstances kind of decision). I was so pleased to see IWD valued as an official holiday here. But somehow, I didn’t get the memo! I showed up at my usual grocery store and found it closed. I hadn’t even bothered to check the holiday calendar. Why would I notice a public holiday when it has been one extended lockdown after another?

A year into the pandemic and my inner pendulum continues to swing from “I’m so grateful to be alive” to berating myself for “why I haven’t done more during this time at home.” Surprisingly, some employers still hold the opinion that remote workers have had it easier during the pandemic. Another unexpected viewpoint I encountered was from an essential worker in Germany who continues to commute to work. Her resentment of the work-from-homers is high: “It’s as if they get paid to have pedicures.” Upon reflection, I find it a wonder how I’ve continued to be a productive employee, a mom, homeschool teacher, chef-in-residence, mental health advisor, and recreation manager attempting to providing alternatives to a screen for two teenagers who are tired of being under lockdown.

Sometime in February, the weight of online-schooling and the prolonged uncertainty of the pandemic had really caught up with me. It was as if the NY Times article How Society Has Turned Its Back on Mothers – The New York Times (nytimes.com) was articulating my exact experiences. I quickly realized, I am not alone. There are other women like me, who are not immune to the exhaustion or the feeling of being at the breaking point. If you are feeling chaotic, I do too. If you have decision fatigue, I do too. Angry? Tired? Not feeling seen, valued, or appreciated? Same here.

One quote in particular stood out to me from the NY Times piece: “This isn’t burnout–this is societal choice. It’s driving mothers to make decisions that nobody should have to make for their kids.” In 2021, women shouldn’t have to choose between the work and raising a family. Women, and especially career moms have been pushed out of the workplace in unimaginable numbers. Alarmingly, more than 30 years of progress of women in the workforce was erased by nine months of the pandemic. Women disproportionally lost more jobs, and a substantial number of those jobs aren’t coming back as the economy reopens.

Where do we go from here? The recent establishment of the Gender Policy Council at the federal level is a welcomed step forward. But, we still don’t have a national paid leave policy. We still don’t have universal childcare. And we still have not passed the Equal Rights Amendment. As Reshma Saujani, CEO of Girls Who Code and the activist behind the Marshall Plan for Moms movement advocates, we need a plan to get moms back into the workforce. A retrain women for new opportunities plan. A reopen schools plan. Saujaini explains, “Mom’s have been historically undervalued, and the acute job loss issue disproportionately affects mothers….We need to name it otherwise we will never fix it.”

A challenged world is an alert world and from challenge comes change. My choice today in support of this year’s IWD theme is to call out the mom penalty! Let’s keep choosing to challenge and calling out structural and societal constructs that disproportionately penalize and negatively affect moms. I support #MarshallPlanForMoms.