

The child's voice comes through the door like a weather event: high, seamless, indifferent to what it interrupts. I am on a call with three men in different cities who cannot see that my hand has gone to the doorknob, that I am already half-out of my chair. The door opens. My daughter is holding a cup of water she does not want, only wanted to give me, and she stands there in her underwear with a stain on it I will later identify as marker.

The men are discussing Q3 projections. One of them has a shelf behind him, the kind with decorative books that are never read. I am watching my daughter tip the cup toward the floor to see what happens, and the doorknob is warm in my hand because she has been holding it.

My manager pauses. He is waiting for me to speak. I have not muted myself, which is a mistake, but the camera stays on because I've learned that the camera staying on is the cost of looking present. My daughter sits down on the carpet, still holding the cup, and the men continue talking about projections. I think: this is not a disruption. This is my life in the same frame as their shelf with its unread books.

I will take notes during this call and review them after she falls asleep, which means I will be awake until 1 a.m. This is not a complaint. It is the shape of what happened when the commute ended but the work did not. What changed was who could see it.

Before, I left in the morning and my daughter went to the place where other people watched her, and no one at my workplace had to know about it because it happened in a different geography. They saw me arrive on time with my coffee. They did not see who had gotten her dressed, or the negotiation over shoes, or the twenty minutes she screamed because the wrong sweater. Then I stayed home and they saw my kitchen, sometimes her walking behind me, sometimes the sound of something falling, and somehow this seeing made them think the work had vanished. The infrastructure dissolved—backup care, emergency coverage, the assumption that someone, somewhere was being paid to do this. The logic was: if you can do it while caring for a child, why should we pay for the care?

The work had not vanished. Only the seeing had.