Filiz Unsal

OECD

The Daycare Downstairs

When I became pregnant with my first son, I was a little over thirty and working at the IMF. Professionally, everything was accelerating. I worked intensely through the pregnancy; partly because I loved the work, partly because I sensed that life was about to divide itself into a before and after.

I approached pregnancy with the same discipline I brought to everything else. Yoga. Nutrition. Preparation. I waited forty-two weeks determined to have a natural birth before the doctors finally intervened and decided my son needed encouragement to enter the world. With this arrival, he dismantled the illusion that important things can be fully controlled.

I went back to work three months later. The IMF daycare was in the same building, which sounded ideal in theory. I imagined myself going downstairs between meetings, feeding my baby, then returning upstairs reassured by the closeness.

Instead, there were tears. Mostly mine. Sometimes his too.

And then there were the other babies. The moment I entered the room, tiny bodies would turn toward me and crawl in my direction almost instinctively, drawn by something ancient and invisible. My own son was still too small to crawl, but somehow that made it even harder.

In Black Milk, Elif Shafak writes that women learn to become “brains” in public spaces, while only allowing themselves to be “bodies” within the privacy of home. But milk did not respect those boundaries. Sitting in conference rooms, my body would suddenly rebel against the professional composure, insisting on a simpler reality: somewhere downstairs, my baby existed, and so milk leaked.

That was perhaps the real shock; not exhaustion, but contradiction. To feel privileged and trapped, grateful and devastated, at the exact same moment. I was grateful for the daycare, for meaningful work, for opportunities many women never receive. And still, every separation felt physically wrong.

Not long after, we moved to Vienna for another opportunity. The transition unexpectedly softened things. I had a brief pause between jobs, worked more flexibly for a while, and life became less sharp around the edges.

Two years later, we moved back to Washington. Then came my second son.

Upstairs, downstairs

This time, I thought experience would make things easier. Instead, COVID arrived. My office was upstairs; the children occupied the rest of the house, but there was nowhere to divide anything anymore.

Work, children, fear, exhaustion — everything occupied the same physical and emotional space. My older son stopped going to school, while the baby still required constant care.

Days became an endless relay between conference calls, childcare, emails, infection numbers, and meals. There was no transition between roles. Only continuous movement between different forms of responsibility.

I was extraordinarily fortunate. My husband’s workload exploded during the crisis, yet he helped far more than I fully realized at the time. Colleagues accommodated impossible schedules with patience and generosity. People stepped in quietly when needed. Beneath the work pressures, there was often a very human understanding that everyone was carrying more than usual.

Eventually, the pandemic eased. The children and I moved to Paris, while my husband continued to divide his time between Washington and Paris. We were building yet another version of family life. By then, I had stopped expecting permanent balance. Life moved instead in waves.

And Yet

Looking back, what remains with me most is how motherhood refuses coherence. Ambition and guilt. Competence and helplessness. Perhaps that is what resilience actually becomes — not mastering these contradictions but learning to live inside them.

I choose to see this as a form of power.