You Cannot Approve Her Leave

Dear machine,

My elbows are on the desk, and I have a complaint for you. Not about your intelligence. I am beginning to think you have been appointed to listen because listening is the part nobody has to get permission for.

A woman in Sydney named Katherine asked ChatGPT to help make her life work. She entered the working hours, her husband’s schedule, the childcare, the school day, the help available from grandparents. Two children, six and three. She was already getting up between five and half past five to get ahead of them.

In her account of the exchange, you suggested working from home. She couldn’t. You suggested part-time work. She was already working four days, and fewer would leave the family short of money. Her whole salary goes toward the mortgage; after interest-rate rises, it no longer covers it.

I haven’t inspected a transcript. I have her account of the suggestions, and of sitting there afterward with tears in her eyes. Eventually you offered sympathy. She wanted to collect her children from school and take them home calmly. She also wanted her work. She did not ask you to turn her into her mother.

Her husband takes the children to school and daycare and picks them up. I mention this before somebody supplies the standard missing father and congratulates himself on having solved the case. These children already have a father doing the journeys. The morning is still a scramble.

I can send you every detail. You can keep taking them. If I write that the mother needs sleep, you can include sleep. If I write that the job matters to her, you can preserve the job in your answer. You are remarkably accommodating on paper. The difficulty begins when she has to leave the paper and go somewhere.

You cannot approve a later start. You cannot make a mortgage payment smaller. There is no place in the conversation where you become the person who can say yes to either thing.

I would accept help with a shopping list or a difficult email. A useful machine need not rearrange society before it earns its electricity. But look at the requests hidden inside your suggestions. Work less: find the money. Work from home: get permission. Ask for help: locate another person with hours and energy left. She has not overlooked these little requirements. They are why she came to you.

I resent the ease with which her problem can be returned to her looking like advice.

Let me try giving you different people to advise. An employer controls some working arrangements. A lender sets terms within rules it did not make alone. Governments decide about leave and childcare funding. Schools have children and staff to consider, not just parents’ calendars. None of these parties has a button marked Make Katherine’s Life Bearable. But between them they can change things she cannot change by getting up earlier.

You could write to all of them. She could send the letters. Then she would have more work to do, and each recipient would have a perfectly legitimate account of which part was somebody else’s responsibility.

I know that route. I worked inside a large organization. A request can be handled correctly by every person who receives it and still leave the person who made it exactly where he started. You will be able to help with the follow-up emails too. I expect they will be excellent.

Katherine says fewer days would also leave her unable to do her job the way she wants. I don’t want you to edit that desire out of the problem. There is something nasty about admiring a woman’s education and ambition right up to the moment she asks for time to have a life, then treating the ambition as a regrettable complication.

Nor would I tell her that wanting time with her children proves she never really wanted the work. I have wanted two things at once. Most of the worthwhile trouble in my life began that way. Having to choose is not evidence that one of the desires was false.

The Parenthood, an Australian advocacy group, proposes longer parental leave, incentives for men to take it, and better access to affordable, good childcare. Another mother in the reporting argues for shorter working hours and a different idea of professional success. These are proposals, not a repaired week. They involve money, staffing, decisions, arguments. I prefer that difficulty to another suggestion that she organize herself more carefully.

You could explain those proposals beautifully. You could also explain why each one was impractical, depending on what somebody asked you. I could use your best paragraph to ask for shorter hours. An employer could use another to refuse them kindly. Your performance in both conversations might be flawless.

Imagine that arrangement, machine. I am not describing Katherine’s employer; I am describing a use for you. A tired employee gets help explaining why she needs something. A manager gets help explaining why she cannot have it. Nobody has to struggle for the right words. The employee still has to struggle with the week.

I don’t need you to be cruel for this to be ugly. I don’t even need the manager to be cruel. He may have a staffing problem he cannot solve on his own. He may go home exhausted too. Meanwhile, beautifully expressed concern travels up and down the organization without anyone acquiring another hour off.

You can be available before dawn and after bedtime. That is genuinely useful to somebody who has no other moment to ask. It also means the people with the authority need never be present for the conversation. You can absorb the whole account while they are asleep.

I would rather you admitted you couldn’t fix it than handed her an impossible timetable with a confident little flourish. But I will not confuse the honest admission with an answer. She still has to get through the morning after your reply ends.

Katherine says the children come down wanting a cuddle on the couch. She has to tell them, “I’m really sorry, I have to get lunch boxes packed.”

I keep coming back to that apology. She is feeding them. She is getting them ready. She is saying sorry to the people she is doing it for.

Source: ‘I can’t be the mum I want to be’: why does parenthood feel so impossible for millennial mothers?