Welcome to the Childcare Thunderdome
  June 2, 2026 Salutations, Meteor readers, Wishing everyone a joyful Pride, except for Sam Levinson. I hope that man gets a series of really bad paper cuts that never fully heal because his skin keeps coming into contact with painful and stinging irritants.  In today’s newsletter, Nona tries to understand why it is so incredibly difficult to navigate American childcare. Plus, Rebecca Carroll on which movie you absolutely need to see next. Shannon Melero  WHAT’S GOING ONDispatch from a childcare desert: I am a working mother of two, not at all a stranger to the red tape and wheel-squeaking required to secure affordable childcare. I learned the hard way that, at least in the small upstate New York city where I live, you often have to sign up your first-trimester fetus for daycare if you hope to have a spot by the time your baby is crawling. Yet I recently had a day that would make even the most psychotically organized parent’s blood pressure rise to unsustainable levels. Here’s what went down: I had long looked forward to the financial relief that would come when my four-year-old was eligible for my district’s Universal Pre-K program, which is free and has enough spots for every kid who wants one. But there’s an infuriating catch: The school only goes until 2 pm, so securing an aftercare spot (which does cost money, but less than the alternatives) is absolutely essential. I’d heard horror stories about how the aftercare’s capacity is woefully insufficient due to “staffing difficulties,” and gotten warnings that it’s first come, first served and your finger better be on the trigger come enrollment day. There are 40 aftercare spots available this fall for an estimated 120 children in UPK—an improvement, I was told, from last year. So I marked the date and time of signup on my calendar. And at the appointed hour, I hurried a venerated historian I happened to be interviewing off the phone so I could be available to hit that button. I made triply sure I had a pdf of my daughter’s vaccination form; the week before, I’d made a special in-person trip to my pediatrician’s office, heeding the warnings on the pre-registration materials that, without the correct form, my application would “BE CONSIDERED INCOMPLETE AND UNPROCESSED.” All-caps mine (technically; it felt like they were yelling).  A SNIPPET OF MONDAY’S GROUP CHAT And when the clock struck noon, my husband and I refreshed the registration portal until the link appeared, then filled out a seven-page form as quickly as humanly possible. Then came the texts from moms (and only moms) who were scrambling: “I didn’t even get the Brightwheel message” or “I don’t have that stupid fucking form they’re asking for” or “I have the right form, but it’s from 2024” or “Is it this form or the other one?” Some moms blamed themselves—“Eh, it’s my own lack of foresight!!”—but my boiled blood was directed at the system: Why was securing childcare during working hours harder than scoring Beyoncé tickets? Why did we need to all be Type-A Virgos for the privilege of PAID aftercare? What was enrollment like for people even busier than me, or parents who don’t work from home, or for the 12% of my city who are immigrants, who have to navigate this process in their second language? Should we move back to the city just because of the Mamdanicare?? (Haha, just kidding, I am not paying $4,500 a month for a two-bedroom apartment!) I tell this extremely detailed story not just to vent, but because it so painfully illustrates just how many ways our childcare system is broken. It is broken in the way that, even in a blue state that has made preschool a budgetary priority, the limited hours for UPK programs do not nearly reflect the obligations of working parents. It is broken in the way that the aftercare program, meant to fill this gap, is having trouble hiring staff because jobs at places like Target and Starbucks pay more than those offered by early childhood education. It is broken because, like nearly half of young children in the United States, my kids live in a childcare desert, where parents need to be ruthless ninjas in order to finagle care, or even find it. It is broken because, according to numerous studies, in the vast majority of cases it’s the mother who handles childcare logistics, taking time out of their workdays to put out fires such as these. It is broken because despite all these problems, and despite what they cost us, the question of how to fix childcare is still too rarely asked in political campaigns and debates. While I wait to find out whether my enrollment has been approved, I will say this again for the cheap seats in the back, and the moms in my group chats: It does not have to be this way, and we deserve far better than a series of small heart attacks on random workdays. —Nona Willis Aronowitz AND:
A Film Made Straight From the Gut of a Black Woman ArtistWhy you absolutely must go see “Is God Is”BY REBECCA CARROLL  DIRECTOR ALESHEA HARRIS WITH TWO OF THE FILM’S STARS, ERIKA ALEXANDER AND VIVICA A. FOX. (VIA GETTY IMAGES) Aleshea Harris did not come to play. With her utterly dauntless directorial debut, “Is God Is,” she dares the film’s audience, along with all of Hollywood, to fuck around and find out what would happen if God really was a Black woman. The film, which Harris adapted from her own same-titled play after a successful off-Broadway run in 2017, follows twin sisters Racine (Kara Young) and Anaia (Mallori Johnson) as they embark on a very Black Homeric journey through the American South. The mission is to carry out the dying wish of their estranged mother (Vivica A. Fox): “Make your daddy dead. Real dead.” The twins, now 21, grew up in the foster care system thinking their mother had died in a tub full of flames, where their father, called “Man” (a brilliantly against-type Sterling K. Brown), left her after he knocked her out, poured alcohol over her body, and then, with an eerie nonchalance that we see in sepia-toned flashbacks, lit a match and dropped it onto her body. But somehow she survived, if you can call the life she has since lived in a body maimed beyond recognition “survival.” Outside the small care center where the sisters have now been summoned, Racine, the take-no-prisoners twin, anoints their mother, whose real name is Ruby, as “God” because, “She made us, didn’t she?” We first meet Ruby laid up in bed, draped with a lime-green satin counterpane, as several young Black women stand on either side braiding her long micro braids. Through the holes of a compression mask worn to cover her burns, Ruby’s eyes conjure a deep and etheric beauty. Like, that might actually be God sitting up in that bed. Anaia, the we’re-not-killers twin, was also badly disfigured in the fire: Ruby tells her after they meet that it’s because Anaia had tried the hardest to save her. She has spent her whole life being called ugly, which Racine, her protector, has avenged on Anaia’s behalf without hesitation. The dynamic between Anaia and Racine, who often speak through telepathy conveyed with typed-out words on the screen, is in turns magnetic, tender, and unnerving. On its face, “Is God Is” is a revenge film, with clear nods to Southern Gothic and spaghetti western genres. There are also several moments that pay tribute to the canon of Black women filmmakers, like “Daughters of the Dust” by Julie Dash and “Eve’s Bayou” by Kasi Lemmons. It’s also extremely gruesome and violent at parts (although I would refrain from the Tarantino comparisons, because I think Harris has more vision). But at its core, this is a film that was made straight from the gut of a Black woman artist. Somewhere between a fever dreamscape, an ancestor’s love letter to Black girls everywhere, and a Salt-n-Pepa video from the ‘90s, “Is God Is” is a miraculously pure piece of art, and a welcome antidote in a moment when technology is bullying creatives, exploiting Black women and our likeness, and pushing an agenda of inevitability. AI, you could never.  FOLLOW THE METEOR     Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
