I’m in $100,000 of child-care and medical debt. For moms like me, it’s a win.

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Ever since my father passed away, leaving me the breadwinner for my family at age 15, I’ve balanced multiple jobs and lived frugally. Since my teenage job at McDonald’s, 25 years ago, I’ve worked dozens of gigs. I’ve been employed in every position in casual and fine-dining restaurants. I’ve been a nanny, a tile installer, a freelance journalist, a ghostwriter, a creative writing teacher, and a speech-language pathologist. I’ve always been terrified of wasting money. I spent my teens and 20s budgeting to pay off any credit card debt before the end of each month and taking extra shifts to pay off car loans within a year of purchase. Once I had children, I came up with a strategy: Instead of forking out loads of cash for day care, I found jobs I could do with my babies in tow. And for all my careful planning and sacrifice, as of this writing, I carry $100,000 in child-care and medical debt. It’s a sum that once represented my dad’s dream salary. To me, it feels both insurmountable and, strangely, thrilling.

Let me explain.

I started a family in my early 20s, after working my way through college. I got a job as a full-time nanny, for which bringing my own young children along was a bonus for my employers. While all the kids sat together socializing, I zoomed around, cleaning and preparing food. At the same time, I was writing a column on sustainable food and farms for a local paper. I strapped my first child into a baby sling and traipsed through the wet dirt beside rows of vegetables, berries, and oats or into huge barns filled with dairy cows to interview farmers. Visiting local farms helped me with my grocery bills: I could buy produce, milk, and meat on the cheap by sourcing it directly after my interviews wrapped.

At the time, my then husband was in the Navy. Even though neither of us made a lot of money, we stayed out of debt for the first five years of our children’s lives. But medical bills started to mount after our second child was born with a genetic condition that required surgeries and multiple weekly visits to specialists in bursts throughout her childhood. Because I couldn’t afford additional help at home, overseeing my child’s medical care, appointment management, and at-home therapies was like working a double shift every day. Still, as the cost of raising kids was rising both for my family and across the country, I kept my job working remotely as a freelance writer and started taking prerequisites for a graduate degree.

By the time my third child was a year old, I had finished school and become a single parent. My kids had been in day care on and off for two years while I completed my degree and transitioned into two careers at the same time: a college instructor and speech-language pathologist. While I was able to cobble together child care from family members and friends for at least half of my working hours, I still incurred monthly expenses that ran twice my rent. Luckily, I often did my college teaching remotely or taught night classes after my kids went to bed. I also worked in public schools so I could make family memories during the holidays and summer vacation.

“What you do with your time tells a story,” one of my stay-at-home-mom friends told me. “If you’re at work all the time, it sends a message to your children that money is your first love and they are your second.”

The shame came from all directions, and I spent years trying to find ways to both earn enough money to pay for my children’s bills and engage with them wholeheartedly. Forget about dating, going out for coffee with a friend, self-care. My life was the slim, sharp space between a rock and a hard place. I often asked myself, Right now, am I being a good worker or a bad mother, a bad worker or a good mother?

Is it better to work tirelessly to pay off their medical and child-care debt and therefore ensure my children’s future financial freedom? Or should I just give in, quit my side gigs, and let the ominous pile of owed money grow so I don’t miss their childhood?

Every day, I answer those questions differently.

Twenty-five years ago, I woke up at 4 a.m. to open the coffee shop across the street from my high school before heading to class. Now, as a single mother of three, I wake up at the same time to do paperwork, prep breakfast for my kids, and turn over a load of laundry before alarms go off and our dogs clatter down the stairs.

I go to work at my first job as a speech therapist while they catch the bus. When we all come home, we cook and eat dinner, do chores, and do homework. Then, I start my next job, teaching college classes, on the clock until bedtime. I take off work so I never miss my children’s extracurriculars and events. I watch my spending and teach my kids how to balance their checking accounts, save, and invest.

Every month, I tick away at the debt, but I don’t let it swallow me or define the family I’ve worked so hard to build. Over the years, I’ve tried dozens of budgeting systems. Most were successful, but they all fell short when they slammed into the reality of math: We live in one of the most expensive countries for child care.

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The cost of my family’s health care was greatly improved by the Affordable Care Act, but even with those supports, when kids have diagnoses, the bills add up. (And now that the subsidies are set to expire, prices will become astronomical for millions of families.) So while $100,000 might sound monstrous, I’ve paid off four times that over the past 10 years all by myself. When I started speaking up and actually saying that number out loud—a hugely impolite no-no in the family where I was raised—I found out that many of my friends are in similar positions. In 2021, 40 percent of American parents reported that they had gone into debt to pay for child care, and 28 percent said they had had to choose between paying for child care or paying their rent or mortgage on time.

My mom friend was more right than she realized, but the failure was more systemic than personal. In some ways, the story of parenting in the United States has become a story of tired, lonely people hustling from work to home and back again each day with a hidden mountain strapped to our backs.

Until something shifts and we can collectively agree that raising the next generation of the human race is as important as flipping burgers, cleaning bedpans, or answering phones at a dental office, I’m committed to focusing on the wins. So far, my kids have never been homeless, wrecked by profound grief, or hungry, so in that way, their childhood is a huge improvement on both mine and my dad’s. Plus, $100,000 is way better than half a million.

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