ORking eight, the phone rings, insistently: either it’s the mother or it’s the daughter. In any case, “emergency”. She is the daughter, heartbroken tone. “Mom the babysitter has the flu. I’ll bring the girls to you.”. Ok, let’s get organized: there’s the little son at home who has just handed in his thesis and can lend a hand, the housekeeper who adores children, and there’s me, the working mother who has also become a working grandmother who doesn’t she still left the house (working grandmothers give themselves the right to get up late).
The daughter arrives out of breath because she has a pressing call, the work jacket pulls them in all directions because the shoulder strap is too heavy, the hand on the stroller where the little one munches on a biscuit while the older one on the step checks suspiciously where it will be placed. The daughter comes in, gives up, thanks and runs away (I know the technique). We have bottles, spare diapers too.
I would like to say “but how are these girls put together, they look like they’re in pajamas”, but I know there’s no point in raising questions of style. Why I remember well what life was like, thirty years ago. Meanwhile the big one doesn’t stop talking, the little one doesn’t stop touching, if you follow one you lose the other.
Danda Santini, director of iO Donna (photo by Carlo Furgeri Gilbert).
God bless smart working, today I’m taking advantage of it too. But when the first work calls arrive (strictly without video), the audio betrays me: the two start arguing over who has the right to the Barbie, the older one is bossy, the little one bites.
Like thirty years ago, when I did interviews locked in the bedroom while the little children banged on the door and I covered the receiver (yes, the old receiver) so they wouldn’t be heard. And I felt lucky to be allowed to work from home when they were sick (often, in fact).
What has happened out there in these thirty years? Nothing: there were no nursery schools and there aren’t any. For years we have published investigations on the need and urgency of supporting mothers, then fathers and now also working grandmothers. That they are no longer Sandwich Generation, but they have done the pike and they earned the rosette from Generazione Club Sandwich, still at work and always in the trenches to help the elderly, their children and now also their children’s children.
This is why today we are publishing a long email from a young couple about the first 36 months of a child. At the moment the issue concerns Istat data1 million 182 thousand children under three years of age: for them, the places available in nursery schools are just over 350 thousand (48 percent in the public).
Working grandmothers are the new Club Sandwich Generation: always in the trenches to help the elderly, their children and now also their children’s children (illustration by Cinzia Zenocchini).
Because of this we monitored the shares of Pnrr intended for new nursery schools: we have been feeling the cold wind of demographic winter for at least thirty years.
But never anyone who has seriously listened to the voice, the fatigue and the loneliness of mothers first and now also of fathers, who share the stress of management without support, as in the email received by the editorial staff. Tired and dejected as a couple. Not what we expected.
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