I still remember looking at our first-ever nursery invoice and doing a double-take. Surely there had been a mistake? It looked less like childcare and more like a second mortgage.
We were both working, earning decent money, and there we were at the kitchen table doing the sum every couple with small children knows by heart: what is left of the second salary once the nursery has taken its share?
Jasmine and I hadn’t done that sum before, and the number shocked us. We had to work harder to find the Montessori childcare we wanted, and in the end handed most of one salary straight to the nursery.
We could only do that because we were lucky: two decent jobs and staying in work still made sense – but only once we factored in the lost pension and pay rises that come from one person stopping work.
When we were growing up, my mum never had to do those numbers. That’s not because things were easy (she raised three of us on her own), but because she had a village: neighbours who watched us after school, aunties who weren’t really aunties picking us up, and a front door where we and our friends came and went freely.
