I regret a tweet.

It got 200,000 retweets and turned into an empowerment meme and I fundamentally think it is bad.

Just before my first child turned one, during the first summer of the pandemic, when the idea of “flattening the curve” was in the air like so many viral spores and surely this would all be over soon, I tweeted this:

It was widely shared and liked and passed around as an Instagramable empowerment meme. And I can still see the appeal!

“Hooray! Moment of triumph. You defied the odds, Past Bess, you little rapscallion. Bravo - nay - brava. To hell with societal expectations about childbirth affecting a woman’s ability to work, yes?”

No, not quite!

Today, two years into a pandemic that would radically shift the entire notion of what working motherhood means, the tweet resurfaced again in this form:

Oy.

The original date was removed. The original date is vital to the context of the tweet. I would absolutely not tweet this now, two years and two children deep into working motherhood. Here is why:

The apples are not accessible to all women. And they never have been.

And though I have lost the thread of this metaphor, my apple at the time was solid fucking gold.

At the original writing, I had a full time nanny after a five (!!!!) month maternity leave. Five months. This is, essentially, Swedish. Three of those months were paid by my union and two were supplemented by California Family Leave and my personal savings from my - and here’s the thing - already established career as a TV comedy writer.

When I finished that book five weeks postpartum, I had a night nurse. This costs about $2 billion per night, which comes out to $14 billion per week.

When I sold the show during the first few months of the pandemic, my dad became our full time nanny. This allowed us to safely work while our baby was entertained by a devoted 64-year-old Jewish man who taught him how to shrug and wince like Larry David when displeased.

Had my dad’s retirement not aligned with the early months of the pandemic, the onus (not burden! never a burden! look at me not saying “burden!”) of childcare would have fallen on my head in addition to my boobs. I, unlike my husband, had flexibility in my work schedule, so if it weren’t for covid-proof (and free) family childcare, I would have defaulted to the primary caretaker.

Because I had gotten to a stage in my career where I could dictate my own hours, I scheduled the writer’s room for Yearly Departed around my son’s nap and feeding schedule. And I scheduled book events for after he went to sleep or during his second nap of the day. This is insanely lucky.

This was not the case for the vast, vast majority of working mothers during the early pre-vaccination days of the pandemic.

We were, and remain, completely fucked. The apples (are the apples “work-life balance?” please help.) need to be given to more women. If these pithy, inspirational girlboss memes are to be anything more than fleeting screenshots in an Instagram story, we need to have the expectation of comprehensive paid parental leave and universal childcare.

Because having a career and a child isn’t a function of moxie and grit and some kind of Mary-Tyler-Moore-style determination. It’s luck and money. Without family childcare or a spouse who does not work, the idea of a “working mom” requires significant financial resources. It is wildly expensive for women to achieve any semblance of a work-life balance. It takes a village, and that village costs a shit ton.

There’s something else about the tweet that causes me to recoil a bit. After the great hurricane of never-ending shit we’ve endured over the past three years, professional achievements are not at all the most important benchmarks of success they once were to me. I truly believe that being a mother at all is an accomplishment. We survived a plague. We had children and kept them safe in a time of looming apocalypse. That is worth the equivalent of at the very least a daytime Emmy.

So, two years and two children later, I would like to brag once more: This afternoon I tricked my son into eating spinach by putting it in a smoothie. And when he spilled a little on the table and I handed him a paper towel, he said, “Thank you.”