At this moment of crisis, one of the toughest decisions facing parents with young children is how long they can keep paying for day care they can no longer use. The current situation has revealed all the cracks in our country’s child care system.

Laura Boling, a single, working mother in Ballwin, Missouri, has been paying full tuition to her day care provider, despite keeping her son home since mid-March. Her mother lives with them, and Boling was worried about potentially exposing her to the coronavirus if she continued sending her 3-year-old son. Both she and her mom are working from home.

Her son has been going to the same in-home provider since he was 3 months old.

“I want to stay with (the provider) because we really love her,” Boling said. But she says if she is still unable to send her son by mid-May, she will stop paying and unenroll him. “I understand she is in a hard situation, but I can only do so much.”

Day care providers have to continue paying their fixed costs during the lockdown crisis, despite plunging attendance. While many contracts mandate that parents continue to pay tuition to retain a spot, it has become financially impossible for those who have lost their jobs. Other parents have had to continue to pay for day care even though the facilities have closed down.

Day care payments often rival a mortgage, and are one of the most significant parts of a family’s budget. Parents are weighing emotional and moral factors in their decisions.

Dawn Spell, a nurse practitioner in Lake Saint Louis, Missouri, still has to go to the urgent care facility where she works while her young children are at home. She has been adjusting her hours and taking some unpaid days off, and her husband also takes one day a week off from his job to help care for their children. They paid about 60% of their day care bill for April -- $600 -- in addition to paying a sitter who comes to their home.

“I’m feeling extremely stressed,” Spell said. They will have to stop paying for the unused day care going forward, she said. “I feel bad, and worry about (the provider) not being able to pay the full-time staff.”

Day care costs more than in-state college tuition in more than half the country. Parents pay an average of $9,600 annually for care for one young child, according to a report by Child Care Aware of America. In some states, the cost far exceeds that average, and families with more than one child are paying multiples of that amount.

For health care workers with kids, that financial pressure is coupled with their current hazardous work conditions.

Dr. Betsy Odom, an emergency medicine resident at Barnes Jewish Hospital, has two daughters, ages 4 years and 6 months. Her husband is a hospitalist, so they are both essential workers exposed to COVID-19 patients.

Their child care costs have skyrocketed to $800 a week because they are paying half of their day care tuition to hold their spots, in addition to paying for a sitter to be on call given their irregular hours, and paying extra wages for a sitter who comes to their home because of the heightened risk she faces.

Odom, who is still breastfeeding her baby, said she is trying to pump at work, but it has become increasingly difficult to go through the many layers of decontamination before and after each pumping session.

“I’m consumed by the worry” of getting sick or exposing her children to the virus, she said. Her preschooler is also scared. One of her friends at school told her, “Your mommy and daddy work at the hospital, so they will get coronavirus and die.”

Odom said they reassured her daughter that they are taking lots of precautions to stay healthy.

The ethical quagmire facing working parents has exposed the dire need for subsidized child care in this country. Providers operate on thin margins, workers make an average of $10 an hour and the entire financial burden is shouldered by parents. For a wealthy country that claims to value its children, we have the worst policies for families: no paid family leave, no paid sick leave and no universal child care.

Our government can bail out banks, but not the people who take care of babies. Instead, we tell financially stressed parents to figure it out.

I knew that our kids would not be back in school this year once they were out for spring break.

But hearing Missouri Gov. Mike Parson make it official recently still hit hard. Our schools will be closed for the rest of the year, and students will only have access to online learning.

Governors have made the same difficult decision in states across the country.

I knew this was coming, and I still wasn’t prepared for how crushing it felt. The emotions around it are multifold.

I’m worried about kids who won’t be getting the meals they need for months, especially since meal service provided by bus has been discontinued in several districts. Food pantries are trying to keep up with skyrocketing demand and dwindling reserves.

I’m scared for kids who live in abusive homes, who have no temporary escape. Parental stress and anxiety make abusive situations worse, and everyone is feeling the strain of being locked in.

I’m heartbroken for the high school seniors who won’t have a prom or graduation, or one last goodbye with all their teachers and friends. Their disappointment is completely valid.

I’m anxious about how far behind kids without access to internet, devices or parental supervision will fall. These months will widen the opportunity gaps children from underserved communities already face.

And I’m sad that all our children have lost part of their childhood. I had been warning my children for the past month that it was unlikely that they would go back to school. Secretly, though, I think we held a flicker of hope in our hearts that it might happen -- even if just for a day or two, to get some closure on the year.

I asked my son, a freshman in high school, what he thought about the news.

“I’m not really surprised,” he said. “I guess it’s good they are doing it.” He knows the importance of “flattening the curve” because we’ve been talking about it incessantly.

Of course, this was a necessary and critical decision to save people’s lives and prevent overwhelming the medical system. Our stiff-upper-lip child gets that. But his voice gave away the disappointment I knew he must be feeling. When his tennis season was canceled before it even began, we congratulated him on an undefeated season, and he actually smiled at the lame joke. But I wish I could have watched him play, even just once.

Then I asked my daughter, a junior, how she felt.

“I don’t think anyone is adjusting well to it,” she said. “I feel bad for our teachers because they had to switch to (online learning) so quickly. As a student, I really miss my friends and activities I do outside of school. I even miss just being in and learning in the classroom.”

That part -- just sitting in a classroom, learning from the people around you -- they know we can’t give them at home. I wonder what conversations, thoughts and ideas they won’t experience. Education is a life-enriching experience, and that learning happens from more than just assignments and reading. It happens in the interactions with teachers and coaches, between peers, and even in social settings with friends. The life experience of interacting with people in various roles and from different walks of life is how our children practice vital social and emotional skills and gain knowledge during these formative years.

I’m sure we will all get through this the best we can, and I hope school leaders will work hard to help children in the most difficult circumstances.

But I’m taking a moment to grieve the loss of these months of learning, friendship and memories for our children.

It’s a part of their childhood we can’t replace.

In the alternate-reality version of this weekend, my husband and I would be at an elaborate Indian-Nepalese wedding in Minneapolis.

A former colleague would be getting married. It would be my first visit to Minnesota, and I had planned to see a few lakes and sample a tater tot hot-dish. Before we left, I would have asked my daughter about the ACT she’d have taken.

Earlier in the week, our family would have joined in one of our favorite traditions: going to the Passover Seder at Sally and Dick’s home. When they were younger, my children would join the search for the hidden afikoman.

Some of you would be in special church services and gathered with your families for egg hunts and Easter dinners. I would admire the pictures you would post of your kids in their fancy clothes. My favorites are the ones in which the kid looks like he can’t wait to get out of his dress pants into a pair of shorts.

In our actual reality, more than a dozen people tested positive for COVID-19 at my husband’s workplace, where he still goes every day. A front-line doctor we know is on life support after getting infected. My brother, also a physician, treated a patient in an isolation ward.

Instead of talking about a summer trip we had planned to Yellowstone, we’ve talked about updating our wills.

Living through a catastrophe unlike anything we’ve experienced before is a strange roller coaster of feelings. We are hyper-aware and thankful for being alive, while scared of a lurking death, trying to sneak in on an airborne particle. We are dealing with stress that feels uniquely terrible, but is actually pretty universal right now. We all know someone who has lost a job or shuttered a business or gotten sick or is worried about the rent or buying groceries. And if we’re not among those in the most dire circumstances, we are grateful to be among the shut-ins. 

But it’s hard not to consider, however fleetingly, the alternate realities that have slipped away. For me, it’s the one in which I recently returned from New York City, where we premiered my new documentary film project, and I am planning the rest of the festival circuit. There’s another one in which we are discussing which colleges my daughter wants to visit this summer. Now, no one knows when schools might reopen or when New York City will heal and recover from the brutal attack of this pandemic.

How can a month feel like a lifetime ago?

If we’re lucky, we will get to do all the things again. We will get to hug our parents and grandparents, hang out with our friends, pray in congregations, dine in restaurants, travel without worry, shop in stocked grocery stores, attend weddings and funerals, and trust hospitals to have supplies to take care of us if we get critically sick. Even things that seemed mundane before, like sitting at my desk in an office surrounded by colleagues, will feel special for a while.

Maybe as we get further into this isolated new normal, we will forget the alternate realities that could have happened.

The dear family friend we had planned to ask to stay with our children while we attended this weekend’s wedding had taken care of them when they were babies, years ago. The wedding was canceled before we had a chance to ask her, but we reached out recently to see how she’s doing.

She had gone to the ER early in March with a severe backache. It turned out to be advanced stage breast cancer. There’s never a good time to get cancer, but this may be the worst time.

It’s a time when we want to hold the people we love tighter, but that same love forces us to keep them at a distance.

These days, I’m trying to think about the brighter spots ahead on this new timeline. The kids will be back in school in the fall. We will celebrate my friend’s wedding in Minnesota. I’ll take a meal to our friend recovering from cancer.

Everyone we love survives.

I’m praying for that reality.