'If it wasn’t for us, essential workers couldn’t go to work': a film on 24/7 daycare
There is rarely such a thing as a good night’s sleep for Deloris and Patrick Hogan, the operators of Dee’s Tots daycare in the NYC suburb of New Rochelle, New York. For nearly 30 years, the Hogans have transformed their home into a 24/7 childcare and community center, a relentless and wearying schedule that reflects the increasingly impossible choices faced by the parents, often single mothers of color, who entrust their children to Dee’s Tots.
Through the Night, a warmly attentive, tender documentary by the AfroDominican film-maker Loira Limbal, observes the critical and under-covered role of 24/7 daycare through the community-sustaining work – hugs and home for children and strained parents alike – at the Hogans’ perpetually brimming house. Women lauded during the pandemic as “essential workers”
– nurses, home health aides, grocery store clerks – power through graveyard shifts and benefits-less jobs to maintain a precarious stability in America’s eversuffocating economy; Deloris and Patrick, known as “Nunu” and “PopPop,” alternate sleeping shifts with attention, hugs and love for the children on brightly colored cots in their living room.
The loving scramble captured within and around Dee’s Tots is “the story of so many women – so many women of color in my life – but you don’t really see these stories anywhere,” Limbal, herself a single mother of two young children based in the Bronx, told the Guardian. With minimal flexibility from many employers, the expense of childcare and the volatility of shifting plans and babysitters, many women are increasingly forced to “choose between impossible choice #1 and impossible choice #2”.
Limbal’s mother faced such choices while raising her four children, relying on a patchwork net of daycare, Headstart programs, neighbors, and a young Limbal herself for childcare. Thirtysomething years later, the demand for off-hours childcare has only increased; even before the pandemic, a once-ina-generation cratering event for working mothers, almost two-thirds (64.2%) of women with children under age six worked, while nearly 40% of Americans worked non-traditional employment hours. The one in five women
who work low-wage jobs, with hours often capped to avoid paying healthcare or benefits, bear an especially cruel burden: to afford childcare, they must work more and stranger hours.
Such is the case for Marisol Valencia, a single mother followed by Limbal who relies on the Hogans’ community of care, ensconcing children from babies to tweens, as she hunts for sustainable employment while juggling three low-wage jobs. The toll of a barely tenable mental load weighs visibly on Shanona Tate, who blears through caring for her two children during the day after 12-hour overnight shifts as a nurse (“Eventually, I’ll sleep,” she says). Both find an anchor at Dee’s Tots and, in particular, in Deloris, its gravitational center and fount of empathetic support. For Deloris, providing a shoulder to lean on and reaching out to both toddlers and full-grown adults is less a balancing act than a consistent practice – “it’s the same love, the same care, it’s just different ages,” she told the Guardian. Everyone, she added, wants to feel seen and safe.
That micro-level attentiveness to work largely brushed aside guided both
Limbal’s camera and her single-daycare approach. Through the Night was intended as a “love letter” to caregivers, she said, especially single women of color whose “everyday can be really harsh”. Her audience was Nunu, Shanona, Marisol, a best friend who works as a nurse, another friend who is a single mother. “I wanted to reflect back to them just how sacred I believe what they do is, and how magical and important and absolutely essential their everyday lives are,” she said. “That is worthy of a patient, curious lens. Those small acts – that is how you make care visible, that’s what care looks like.”
Through the Night makes such care legible through the intimate moments one imagines would be cut from another film: the rubbing of lotion on a toddler’s feet, staff at Dee’s Tots braiding a child’s hair, Deloris bargaining with a young boy for his iPad (no screens in daycare) for a freeze pop and a hug, the landline phone used for goodnight calls to mothers at work.
Such close observations of care in the years 2016-2018, especially by and for single mothers, both presaged the Covid-era focus on so-called “essential workers” and inverts the often self-serving invocation of the people (healthcare workers, food-service workers, daycares) who keep the country functioning – celebrations that offer feelgood cover but do little to change a dearth of necessary resources and support. “The way we’re treating essential workers is beyond unconscionable, in my mind,” said Limbal. “We expect supermarket clerks to show up to work when daycares are closed, schools are closed, there’s no after-school programs, no summer programs, and no one is asking, what are you doing with your children?”
The staff and clientele were all essential workers before the pandemic, Patrick Hogan told the Guardian, “and now it’s glorified, so to speak, but not too much has changed”.
“And they didn’t glorify us as essential workers,” Deloris chimed in. “We’re never talked about. The daycare providers are never talked about. We’re not even listed as essential workers. And if it wasn’t for us, the essential workers couldn’t go to work.”
The women who depend on 24/7 home daycare programs like Dee’s Tots work at CVS, as overnight nurses, home health aides, in nursing homes and in janitorial services – they’re “the people who have been on the frontlines of the pandemic this whole time, who not only care for us but do the work that makes all other work possible,” said Limbal. “And we don’t even notice them. We talk about them, but we don’t fully behold who they are and what they need, and so we don’t then take care of them.”
Through the Night makes a radical argument for a restructuring of the American economy and a reprioritization of values toward oft-denigrated “women’s work” that’s all show, don’t tell. But the film was also intentioned to “alleviate some of the stigma and guilt that [Black and Latina mothers] do carry around in terms of the choices we have to make,” said Limbal. “Nobody wants to be away from their child for 14, 16 hours. You’re forced to do that, but then you’re judged, you’re criticized, you internalize all of that.”
Caregiving work, as Limbal sees it, is visionary – “there’s nothing small or safe about it, particularly in the context of being a Black person, an undocumented person, or a trans or queer person.” She pointed to a guiding quote by the African-American studies scholar Saidiya Hartman, that “care is the antidote to violence.” Tenderness served as Through the Night’s “north star”, said Limbal, both as a political value, “because I believe it to be radical when placed in the context of the lives of people of color”, and as an aesthetic mode, “because a lot of films on our communities, particularly in the documentary world, [focus] on the struggles and violence that we face. There are far fewer films just about everyday lives. And yes, we’re up against a lot, that’s important, but I think it’s equally important for us to see ourselves living.”
Living, and learning at its earliest, indisputably crucial stages. Homebased childcare is a potentially worldchanging operation, Through the Night argues, in how it centers, at an early age, tenderness, empathy, becoming oneself through community. Socialization, the basics of how to treat another human being, starts in Dee’s Tots. “ABCs, shapes and colors before they get into pre-K, that’s what we teach,” Deloris said. “Caring about each other, that starts right here.”
Through the Night is available digitally in the US now with a UK date to be announced