The Foreign Service Journal, April 2021

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | APRIL 2021 45 breaking point, and with the vaccine still far from guaranteed to arrive at post, there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight. When the FSJ asked Foreign Service parents to tell us how the pan- demic had affected their families and careers, numerous parents responded with their own stories from the trenches—and 100 percent of those responses were from working women. “Stay Home and Watch Netflix” “I’ve forgotten what downtime is,” says Jessica, an FS family member who works as a lawyer outside the embassy. Her hus- band’s job hasn’t slowed down—he’s at the embassy five days a week, 12 hours at a stretch—so she’s at home “juggling not only all of the regular child care duties, but also the virtual school responsibilities, all while trying to work from home at the same time.” When people joked at the onset of the pandemic that all we had to do to beat COVID-19 was stay home and watch Netflix, she says it felt like a dagger in the chest. “The idea of being in my pajamas all day, eating chocolate chip cookies and watching Netflix is so luxurious, I have dreams about it. But instead, I'm running frommy laptop to the kids, getting lunch on the table, keeping track of three different school schedules, plus my work calls. And trying to do all the regular stuff in between. No time for Netflix. I spend all of my time on work/kids/housework.” An FSO based in Europe, whose husband has stayed home with the kids this tour, says: “He’s great at it, but we have two special needs kids and another with mental health struggles. He can’t do it all himself when they aren’t in school.” Since the start of the pandemic, she’s taken on more parenting duties, but she says her work has suffered as a result. “It’s incredibly hard to focus,” she explains. “I’m normally pretty good about being ‘work-me’ at the office and ‘mom-me’ at home, but it’s been hard to keep them separate.” Senior-level FSOs aren’t immune. “The biggest change in terms of performance for me, as a relatively senior-level woman, leader and mother at an overseas post, is that I am no longer able to carry the emotional or social burden at work,” explains an FSO mom based at a post in South America. “Women at all levels often maintain the emotional and social intangibles that make an office a place where people feel connected, supported and recognized.” Now, she says, “I can gauge how focused I am on work by the relative increase in the number of notifications that the children are missing Zoom classes, assignments or online group meetings.” Is it harder for parents serving overseas? Janet Moreth, a social worker with State’s Employee Consultation Services, says that Foreign Service parents “are facing many of the same pressures (i.e., virtual learning, lack of reliable child care and MILOLABRADOR/SHUTTERSTOCK