Patricia: I like my job but my kids come first
Patricia is a Latinx woman in her early thirties. A mother of two young boys, she has been working for over 14 years in the reservations department of a large hotel in Boston.
Patricia and her two older siblings grew up in Boston. Her parents were immigrants from Colombia who worked in hotels, in cleaning and maintenance. By the time she was in high school Patricia had decided she wanted to work in the hotel industry as well. “In high school you had to pick an elective. All my friends did early childhood but I did hospitality. I just knew that I was going to work at a hotel.”
After high school, Patricia took a hospitality course at a community college and applied for a job at the hotel where her mother was working at the time. She took a job as a host at the hotel restaurant and then moved to a position in reception. She found the constant interaction with guests at the front desk stressful, and requested a transfer. This time she was placed in the customer communications room. As she settled into the job, she found that she enjoyed working behind the scenes and talking to customers on the phone.
For the past fourteen years, Patricia has been working in the reservations department of a large downtown hotel. Much of her time is spent on the phone handling booking requests and inquiries. When she began the job, she worked evenings but for the past ten years she has had the day (7:30 to 4) shift which has allowed her to be at home with her children in the evenings. It has been a struggle though to hold onto this schedule, which is the preferred one among staff. “Whenever I’ve gone on maternity leave, the managers try to give the morning slot to someone else. I have to fight to keep it. With my second baby, I had to return to work before my three months leave was up just to make sure I kept the morning slot.”
Patricia met her husband while working at the hotel. He is an HVAC technician who works on temperature control and air quality in buildings. When Patricia became pregnant with their first child, the couple first rented and then bought a small home in the working-class immigrant neighborhood where Patricia’s parents and older sister lived. Patricia wanted to be close to her family as she raised her son.
Soon after his birth, Patricia noticed that her son wasn’t saying words and that he was playing in odd and repetitive ways, lining his toy cars up in a row over and over again. He began receiving services from Early Intervention (EI), a program for children up to three years who have or are at risk of developmental delays. The EI therapists who came to work with him recommended that he get a battery of medical tests. By eighteen months, Patricia’s son had been diagnosed with autism.
Patricia describes the period that followed the diagnosis as the most difficult one in her life. She responded to the news by frantically working to make sure her son got the services he needed as quickly as possible. The doctors recommended 32 hours of ABA (Applied Behavioral Analysis) services a week for him. Trained therapists were to deliver these services during home visits when they would work with her son in the presence of a family member.
Patricia struggled to keep up with her job in the face of these caretaking demands. She reduced her work time from 40 to 32 hours a week but still found it difficult to cope. She had no choice but to take phone calls from service providers when she was at her job, or leave work in the middle of the day to go to important appointments. These flexible practices were not part of the work culture. “That was the hardest time. I didn’t know how I was going to manage. My head was spinning. I had to arrange the services, talk with people, be there for the therapy. And then I had my job and I had to keep telling the manager, Oh, I have to leave work early, I have to do this, to do that.”
During this time, Patricia relied heavily on her mother, always a pillar of support in her life. Her mother came with her to appointments and hosted the multitude of therapists coming in and out of the home to work with Patricia’s son. At the time her husband was in denial about the diagnosis, and thought their son would naturally catch up with others over time without the intervention of therapists. He provided little support to Patricia as she frantically tried to organize the recommended services.
A few months before her son’s diagnosis, Patricia had started attending a training program at her job that would put her in line for a promotion to a position with greater responsibility and a higher salary. But as the crisis at home unfolded, she dropped out of the program, knowing that she could not handle its demands. Some years later, just before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Patricia once again signed up for the program thinking that she was finally in a good place to undertake it. Her son with autism, now 7, was doing well and in a school program for much of the day. She also had a younger son who had entered preschool and would be starting kindergarten soon. Once again, however, her plans were de-railed by unforeseen events.
In March 2020 Patricia was furloughed from her job at the hotel. She immediately lost the health insurance and other benefits that she received through her job. Fortunately, both of her children were already on MassHealth, a health safety net program that provides coverage to vulnerable populations, including the children of low-income families. Patricia herself was able to switch into her husband’s health insurance plan. She was grateful that his job remained stable and in fact picked up as the pandemic increased demand for air quality services. Between her husband’s income and the unemployment checks that she received, the family managed to get by although not without some hardship. Towards the end of each month, Patricia found herself going to local food banks. It was helpful that both of her children had P-EBT (Pandemic Electronic Benefit Transfer) cards, which provided food for their lunches. P-EBT is a federal government program that provides school meals to eligible students in remote or hybrid learning environments during the COVID-19 public health emergency.
Besides the financial worries, Patricia felt stressed by the challenges of supervising her children during the pandemic. “It’s been like a full-time job and even more stressful than a full-time job. I have to been on the computer with my older son all day. I can’t leave, because he will just stop doing what he needs to do. Everything is remote, his classes and therapy sessions. And then my four-year old, he has some online classes but he’s mostly running around, yelling, wanting attention.”
In April 2021, as pandemic restrictions began to ease with the availability of COVID-19 vaccines, her sons have returned to school. Patricia had expected to be back at work by this time as well, but she had not yet been called back by the hotel. She wondered if she would be fired or hired back under conditions not acceptable to her. The management of the hotel had changed and they had informed all furloughed employees by mail that it would be a different work environment when they returned. Among other things, schedules were going to change and they were not under any obligation to honor any special or individual arrangements that had existed before. Patricia worried about what to do if she was no longer given the day schedule. “I like my job but my kids come first.”