American parents have been stretched to the max for months (regardless of whether they've had to pull double-duty as homeschoolers). But although the current health situation has challenged moms and dads in a hundred different ways, it's pushed working mothers in particular to the brink. No one knows that better than Gretchen Goldman, an environmental engineer who recently went viral for posting a brutally honest behind-the-scenes photo of what a day in the life of a working mom really looks like — pandemic-style.
Goldman has a pretty important day job.
Goldman has served as the research director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union for Concerned Scientists for the last 10 years, where she specializes in climate change and air pollution, according to Today. It's for this reason that CNN recently invited her on an episode of its Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer to discuss the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration's newest leadership appointment.
During the segment, Goldman laid out exactly why she feels David Legates — who is a known climate denier — is "dangerous" for the NOAA, as well as the future of federal climate change leadership in general.
In short, she was a model interviewee.
But here's the other thing that's worth noting about Goldman: She is also a mom of two young boys. That means that in between her important scientific work, she's also wrangling two rambunctious kiddos. Like most moms of young children, her living room is littered with toys on a near-constant basis, and in the moment she was interviewed on CNN last week, it was in peak disaster mode.
The world knows this now because Goldman took it upon herself Wednesday to tweet a "behind-the-scenes" photo of her CNN interview, and it was hilarious and enlightening, all at once.
"Just so I'm being honest," Goldman captioned the post, which showed two side-by-side photos: one of her talking head on CNN and the other showing everything else going on in the scene around her.
In it, Goldman sits perched on a chair in her living room.
A laptop sits open in front of her, on top of another chair that rests atop a coffee table. It's a makeshift studio of sorts, from which Goldman confidently conducted her CNN interview. But little did viewers know that as she weighed in on the state of affairs at the NOAA, the room around her looked as though a bomb went off. (Not to mention the fact that she wasn't wearing any pants.)
This, her tweet seemed to imply, is the reality of working motherhood.
Or at least it's working motherhood as it looks during a pandemic.
Juggling the rigors of child rearing and a professional career is never without stress, but the coronavirus seems to have thrown US parents about five curveballs at once. Doing it all from home creates a unique kind of chaos many just haven't been prepared for — and even though they're making it work, it sure ain't easy.
A lot of moms appreciated Goldman's candor.
Her tweet, which has since been shared more than 34,000 times, earned some major thumbs up from working mothers who are right there in the trenches with her.
"Love this," tweeted one mom. "You are all of us, except that I'm surrounded by knitting and dog toys these days."
"Yes!" added someone else. "I just felt a little better just from seeing this pic! Thank you for the honesty!"
In fact, a lot of people found the snapshot pretty major.
Mostly because of what it says about modern motherhood.
"This unfiltered glimpse into your reality is so important for the mental health of working moms in a pandemic," one person tweeted. "If they only see the left image it can be very disheartening. The right image allows them to have a knowing laugh and cut themselves some slack."
"This is an historical document of how women are holding this shit together like duct tape," tweeted another person. "I've been feeling like I'm doing a shitty job at parenting and at work, but this picture makes me realize how strong and badass I am. We are running this shit."
AMEN!
Plenty of moms shared their own personal "behind-the-scenes" stories as well.
"I had a job interview the other day on Zoom," tweeted one mother. "Immacculate from the shoulders up in a shirt: pjs, hoody tied around my [waist] and flip-flops down below. Had to re-charge my laptop half way through, stood up and went to get the lead across the room … no-one-said-a single-word."
Others shared their own candid photos of what their "home office" really looks like:
And then there were those who shared some insider pro-tips — such as this woman, who apparently rests her laptop on an ironing board as a makeshift desk:
There were, of course, many men who refuted this claim.
"Men are 'running this shit,' too,'" one man said in response to that particular tweet. "My wife works at the office; I'm a man at home trying to hold together the job, parenting, and on-line schooling. Not to mention house-training the puppy, and tripping on the Thomas trains. Badass is gender neutral."
The thing is, that last part is certainly true. But you can't really deny that mothers have been bearing the brunt of the mental load since the pandemic began. In addition, more women than men have been impacted professionally as the economy continues to take a hit.
According to the US Census Bureau, 23.5 million working women in the US have children at home younger than 18 — and two-thirds of them work full time. At the same time, nearly half of US households have two parents working full time. Other data has found that only 1 in 5 US households consists of a stay-at-home parent. But regardless of whether a mother works, she is still more likely to be the "default" parent — meaning working mothers tend to have more on their shoulders than working dads at the end of the day, like it or not.
It's perhaps no wonder then why mothers have struggled to advance in their careers more than fathers have or why working moms took the biggest hit during the pandemic. (A recent study published in the journal Gender, Work & Organization found that since March, mothers have reduced their work hours four to five times more than working fathers.)
Ultimately, the tweet drew a lot of applause — and solidarity.
That is precisely what Goldman was hoping for. She told Today that she wanted to share the image to be open and honest about "this impossible, ridiculous situation" that working parents have found themselves in since the pandemic started.
Regardless of gender, she said it's all just a little too out of control. "This is so laughably infeasible. I just think we should admit that."
She also knows all too well that people often see "experts" or celebrities on TV and automatically think they have their lives together, but the tiny square image we see on our screens is merely a glimpse into another person's life and not nearly the whole picture.
"The reality, of course, is that we're all just struggling to make ends meet, and then it feels like failing to me on both ends," she admitted. "I feel like I'm not getting all the work done that I need to get done, and I feel like I'm neglecting the kids."
We're willing to bet 99% of other working parents would say the exact same thing.
