Bree LeMay and her two kids, Imaan, 3, and Niah, 10 Since last March, one sentence has been looping endlessly on the ticker tape in Bree LeMay s brain:
What the fuck is going on right now. It s not really a question but a mantra, an all-purpose reaction to a year of being marooned in a 1,200-square-foot apartment with a toddler, a prepubescent boy and no dishwasher. The mothers, in general, are not all right, and single working mothers such as Bree have disproportionately borne the psychic and economic brunt of the pandemic. Overnight, she and many of the roughly 15 million other single mothers in the U.S. watched their already precarious safety nets disappear their childcare routines, their incomes, any sense they might have had of being in control of their lives.