A few weeks ago, or maybe it was a few months ago, I decided to watch my two favorite ’80s movies about working mothers: “Baby Boom,” a rom-com starring Diane Keaton as an advertising executive turned work-from-home applesauce mogul; and “Aliens,” James Cameron’s thriller centered around a woman’s struggle to defeat a race of genocidal aliens. Both mother-protagonists struggle with what has come to be known as “work-life balance.”

In “Aliens,” Sigourney Weaver plays Ellen Ripley, a former warrant officer who protects a girl after missing out on her own daughter’s life because she was locked in cryogen sleep for 57 years and lost in space. In “Baby Boom,” Ms. Keaton plays J.C. Wiatt, a career woman who brags about her lack of a biological clock, then inherits an orphan toddler. Before motherhood, J.C.’s boss offered her a chance to make partner at her firm. But first he lays things out plainly. “A man can be a success and still have a personal life,” he tells her. “My wife is there for me whenever I need her. I mean, she raises the kids. … What I’m saying is, I’m lucky. I can have it all.”

It’s not the ’80s anymore, but one thing hasn’t changed: You still have to be Diane Keaton or an alien-slayer to make it as a working mother in America.

Unless you’re affluent enough to pay for the labor of less privileged women, you’re stuck with a patchwork of poorly funded and regulated and prohibitively expensive schools, child care centers and after-school programs. And yet it’s taboo for working mothers to talk too much about the costs, contradictions and compromises they face, often for fear such conversations will be used as fodder against us. Social conservatives are always eager to prove we were better off barefoot behind our white picket fences. The present feels unsustainable, but most women don’t want to go back, and so we charge forward, every mother for herself, each of us laser-focused on our own career and our own nuclear family’s security. Feminism meant cheering on women trying to gain status in this broken system. There was no way out, but if you worked hard enough, you could try to move up.

That was the thinking before Covid-19. That was the atmosphere in which I became a mother. This year it all came undone.

It was around the middle of May that I began to realize how disastrous the pandemic was going to be for mothers. I felt it myself and I saw it all around me, the mounting fear, the feeling of helplessness and isolation as we realized that the institutions we depended on were failing women and children, and that there was no backup system in place. Mothers themselves were the backup system.

Isolating women from larger social communities has historically been a surefire way to disempower them, and Covid-19 has imposed one of the longest periods in modern history of prolonged, social isolation. This is a necessary evil during a pandemic, but all the same, it’s proving to be a perfect social experiment in what happens to women, both single mothers and mothers living in traditional two-parent households, when the drawbridges are raised.

The first coronavirus vaccine has been approved, but the next months will still be dark ones. Of the more than one million workers aged 20 and over who exited the labor force in September, 865,000 were women. Many lost unemployment insurance benefits because they “chose” not to return to work, even if they had no real choice because they had no child care. Of those who remained, one in four were considering reducing hours, looking for less-demanding jobs or planning to leave.

Child care centers are shuttering around the country. According to a report from the Center for American Progress and the Century Foundation, the child care crisis could cost women $64.5 billion in lost wages per year. One study found that even mothers who have managed to keep their jobs have reduced their work hours four to five times more than fathers. Mothers are also more likely than fathers to work part-time, and only 43 percent of part-time workers have access to paid sick leave, 8 percent to paid family leave and 22 percent to health care benefits.

As any woman who’s ever tried to take more than a month or two of maternity leave knows, extended child-related lapses in employment are at best frowned upon and interpreted as a lack of professional dedication and at worst, for part-time or undocumented workers, grounds for termination. Leaving the work force, even under the most dire circumstances, tends to be a one-way street. What’s more, these exits reinforce the notion that mothers, as opposed to fathers, are the only appropriate primary caregivers for children, that there is something natural, universal and inevitable about this arrangement.

As a result, some suggest that a year of Covid-19 may undo decades worth of progress toward gender equity in America, that even after the pandemic is brought under control, a generation of working mothers will never recover what they lost.

It makes you wonder: How meaningful was the progress we’ve made in the last three decades, if it can be undone so quickly and so ferociously?

Pandemics make visible what’s been hidden; they illuminate the connections between us, the dependencies we’d rather not acknowledge. I thought of this word, “dependencies,” when, a few months ago, I stumbled upon another startling statistic related to family life under Covid-19. It turns out that in the United States, the survival rate of infants, the most dependent age group of all, has gone way up during the pandemic. There are reports that premature births, one leading cause of infant mortality, fell significantly in the early months of lockdowns, when women in their final trimester of pregnancy were able to do something many of them cannot afford to do in normal times: Stay home from work.

Additionally, some suggest there have been protective benefits to infants of more attentive, home-based child care, with less exposure to the viruses and infections that circulate in institutional settings.

This highlights what many mothers and child specialists have long sensed but aren’t supposed to say: that whether the primary care taker is a mother, a father, an extended family member or a close friend, newborns and infants do better in homes. We don’t talk about this, we barely acknowledge it, because if we did, we’d have a moral obligation to provide financial support to make it possible for all babies. We would have to acknowledge the social value of infant care and child rearing and empower parents to provide that care in the way they think is best for their children.

We might even have to reconsider our idealization of the nuclear family, which we’ve now seen cannot really function without the support of broken institutions, to make way for the notion that raising children is a communal obligation, of benefit not just to an individual woman or couple trying “to have it all,” but to society at large.

I’m not optimistic about these changes. They would require a new feminism, one that understands that the politics of motherhood are inherently intersectional for the simple reason that while not all women have or want children, those who do come from every race, sexual orientation and socioeconomic background. It would be a feminism grounded in solidarity as opposed to “success.”

Rather than a frantic return to normalcy when the pandemic ends, we would need to embrace more sustainable, inclusive models of women’s empowerment, buttressed by truly progressive policies like health care for all, paid leave for anyone caring for a baby and a universal basic income for anyone raising children in the home.

A friend of mine who has been un-schooling her daughter for years (un-schooling is a form of home-schooling that involves teaching children based on their interests rather than a set curriculum) pointed out that some of the people least psychologically affected by the pandemic are those who “don’t expect the systems to work or to protect them, and have gained other survival strategies and ways or organizing and thinking about existence: home-schoolers, for instance, but also people living in communal housing situations or with extended family, people who have figured out how to live without working the way a lot of us feel we have to work.”

Perhaps, she suggested, rather than hurrying back to normal life, “we should see what we can learn from those who have successfully resisted it.”

Another friend, a single mother who runs a gardening nursery and lives in a tiny house with her daughter, told me she wouldn’t have been able to survive this year without the support of her best friend. She lives nearby, is also a single mother, and the two of them instantly formed their own small bubble.

For her, the pandemic has crystallized her long-brewing feelings about the unworkability of the status quo. She has taken this year to further develop her plans for a woman-centered communal living project. She imagines a place where women in different ages and stages of life might come to live and share the work of child-rearing and care taking.

When I asked her why she thought more of these kinds of places didn’t already exist, she answered bluntly: “Because America and the world would collapse in 20 seconds if women were showing up for each other instead of being exploited for every form of labor.”

People sometimes accuse her of misandry, but the project has nothing to do with wanting to “escape men,” she told me. “I just want to live with and raise children with and be neighbors with people I can count on, people who have my back, people who take care of me when I need help and vice versa. In my own experience, that’s been women.”

She also added that the idea is hardly unprecedented: “It’s basically what a lot of women of color and women who are immigrants have been doing all along, because they’ve had no choice. They’ve learned how to support each other beyond the nuclear family in order to survive in an institutionally racist, xenophobic culture. White, middle-class women should be learning from these women. They shouldn’t be our babysitters. They should be our role models.”

By the time she gets her commune off the ground, my kids will be grown. But I still asked her to reserve me a spot. In fact it was right after talking to her, after imagining what life might be in this kind of community and how different it would be from the reality we live in, that I decided to curl up with a pint of ice cream, some newly legal, recreational marijuana, and spend the evening watching “Baby Boom” and “Aliens.” I recommend this double feature to any mother struggling to make sense of what’s happened to her life in the past nine months, or any parent trying to figure out how we got here and where we should go next.

Both movies tell a story about the anxieties of their era, a moment when mothers were abandoning the hearth for broader horizons while their country did nothing to support them or their children. “Baby Boom” seems like the more relatable movie, but really it’s a fairy tale — not because it’s about a woman who manages to “have it all,” but because she manages to do it on her own.

As we limp toward the end of this terrible year, “Aliens” feels more realistic. The film’s hero is a mother trapped in a hostile hell-scape that is fundamentally incompatible with the basic human urge to love and protect the young. It is beyond belief that she and her young charge manage to survive. Like most mothers, she is stronger and more resilient than anyone could have guessed.

Kim Brooks is the author of “Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear.”

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