Hit by a Pitch

You guys, I need to vent for a minute on the topic “How in the Hell Do People Afford Kids?”

The internet tells me that you’re supposed to figure out what you’re going to do for child care during the second trimester. I don’t know if this is less of a big deal in a place like Denver than it would be in, say, NYC, but I’ve started (trying) to research what’s available in my area. I’m pretty strongly in favor of a daycare center, as opposed to a nanny, nanny share, or anything that takes place in someone’s home. I obviously need something that takes infants. I’d like something that provides a part-time option, because I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to work from home a couple days a week, and this should help with the cost.

Holy hell, the cost. How do normal, not-super-rich people do this?

I knew having a kid would be expensive. I knew daycare would be expensive. I had no idea how absolutely batshit insane it actually is.

There’s a daycare center near our house that, at least from outside, looks decent (for whatever that’s worth). I looked it up online and found out that it costs more than our mortgage. It’s more than half of what I make in a month, just a little less than B makes in a month. It’s, quite simply, way more than we can afford.

It sucks because we, like many people I’m sure, aren’t so poor that we qualify for any kind of assistance with anything. However, we’re too poor to actually pay for this stuff. My internet research reveals that the people who bring their kids to this daycare center are either from our neighborhood and receiving assistance or from other, fancy neighborhoods and paying the full cost. If you’re an average, middle-class person just getting by who lives in the neighborhood, you can’t get assistance or afford this place. It sucks.

I’d like to find a nice, safe daycare center that is a reasonable distance from our house, that is affordable, that offers a part-time option, and that is not religious. So far, the only things I’ve found are too expensive and don’t offer part time, even for infants (I fail to see how it’s better for a 10-week-old to be in “school” 5 days a week than to be in school 3 days a week and home for the other 2).

Unfortunately, it seems that my bored, retired parents are not willing to relocate to Denver, live somewhere near us, and provide free childcare (not that I’d expect them to actually do this, but it would be really freaking awesome).

We don’t really know people who have little kids here, so there’s nobody to ask. We don’t live in a neighborhood where we know people who have kids and take their kids to daycare. The internet isn’t much help. Nobody in Denver writes reviews of daycare centers online. Many daycare centers don’t even have websites, so I can’t get a feel for what they’re about without calling them (and I hate calling people). I found one message board where people were discussing daycare costs, and it ended up in a mild flame war about how people who don’t want to pay enough for daycare are assholes. That doesn’t help. I do want to pay enough and I want the people who will be caring for my kid to be adequately compensated and have good working conditions. The problem is that we just don’t have that much money.

In my extended family, most people who have had kids have had a mom who stays home to take care of the kids. The other day I tried to explain to my mom that most people, as far as I can tell, don’t have this luxury. We really couldn’t afford to get by on only one income (which in some ways is good, because at least that means we both make at least a little more than daycare costs).

Even if we could afford it, I don’t think we’d want to give up our jobs. B has a decent, stable (which I think is hugely important in the current state of our economy), quasi-government job, where he makes shit money now but there’s an opportunity for that to get better in the future. He also has awesome insurance (and we’ll be able to add a kid to it for less than $1 million a year).

I love my job and want to keep it for the foreseeable future, possibly for the rest of my working life. I currently make more than B but it isn’t much, especially for someone with a JD (I don’t want to get into details, but I make about the same as I made as a first-year federal judicial clerk and slightly more than I made as a public defender in a heavily Republican, tax-adverse suburb of Chicago). My insurance sucks and it costs a fortune to add a kid or anyone else to it.

Aside from the money, we both have great jobs for having a kid — no long hours, no drama, no big stress, no long commutes — nothing that would make us grumpy and exhausted when we get home at the end of the day. So we’ll be awesome (I hope) but poor parents. Sure, it would’ve been nice to wait to have a kid until we were better off financially, but shit, I’m kind of old (at least for the purpose of reproducing). I hope that with age comes some kind of wisdom that helps me figure this shit out sometime soon.