If universal public childcare haunted feminism pre-pandemic, its spectre has been more than revived by the pandemic. Despite the public expressions of support and empathy for some childcare workers and teachers from working parents, the pandemic context made observing the trials and failures of practising maternal worker solidarity more poignant. The narratives around the intensification of working parents’ lives during lockdown showed little to no awareness of its (dis)similarities with the triple shifts that low-paid mothers have long endured outside of pandemic conditions. The hypervisibility of childcare in public discourse during the pandemic is partly explained by the middle and upper classes experiencing a ‘real’ care crisis for the first time with little option to outsource this labour. As much as I was listening to childcare workers’ accounts of the pandemic, as a full-time working mother, the writing of this book is embedded in these hierarchized definitions of care crisis and in the social relations of stratified reproductive labour. As I wrote the last chapter of this book, a second UK lockdown was announced on 7 January 2021, meaning that my daughter would be home for the next eight weeks while my partner and I tried and failed to work full-time. I pondered whether it was ethical to send her to school under a provision that oddly listed university staff as ‘essential workers’, and hesitatingly applied for three days of school, which were granted.