My daughter works as a cashier at a food market. Back in March, shortly before Florida’s “safer-at-home order,” her boss handed her a letter identifying her as an essential worker.

“Keep it to show your grandkids,” I told her.

She’s 21. Cue the eye roll. Yet I could tell the thought tickled her. Essential worker. People have called her a lot of things but never that.

My daughter has struggled in school. All the well-meant accommodations and offers of extra help only made her feel worse about herself. It didn’t help that she belongs to a nerdy family, with a college instructor for a mother and an academic superstar for a younger brother. Later, she told me about some of her evasive maneuvers in high school, hanging out in a doctor’s waiting room across the street from campus while skipping classes. Days before her graduation, I wasn’t sure if she’d earned enough credits and crossed enough T’s to actually collect the diploma.

What a celebration when she joined the class of 2017!  Then what?

Her junior year she had started working part time at a fast-food joint because I couldn’t meet all her material expectations—ripped jeans, takeout, acrylic nails. After her manager got arrested for embezzling, I suggested the market.

As my daughter makes very clear to everyone around her, cashiering is a J-O-B, not a career. She just hasn’t figured out her path yet.

No rush, I said, but here’s the deal: 1) get more education or 2) pay some rent.

She started community college classes. She wants to be a college student, like her high-achieving friends. Like her brother. Trouble is, she still hates school.

And she hates her job. Mostly. She still enjoys the paycheck.

She’s honest, hard-working, a bit mischievous but a leader. Yet she turned down a promotion to assistant manager. J-O-B, remember?

How do you communicate to a child your faith in her boundless potential and your permission to fulfill it any way that makes her happy? I’ve told my daughter that college is an option, not an expectation, that plenty of people without bachelor’s degrees have financially rewarding and emotionally satisfying careers. She doesn’t believe me. Since kindergarten, her teachers and I—the whole culture really—have been talking up the wonders of higher education.

“It makes your life interesting,” I say. Since you’re going to rattle around in your head all your life, you should at least furnish it well, to paraphrase Lin-Manuel Miranda. But I’ve come to respect that my daughter appoints her inner rooms in other, non-bookish ways.

Her teachers made the economic argument. According to the Social Security Administration, women with college degrees outearn their peers with high-school diplomas by $630,000 over a lifetime. Although fuzzy on the calculations, my daughter finds this differential compelling.

But she’s still cashiering. Ever-anxious, she dislikes change.

“What about a job in hospitality?” I’ve suggested. Articulate, assertive, gregarious, with finely tuned human radar, she has soft skills in spades.

She was considering that move not very seriously when the novel coronavirus infiltrated.

All of a sudden, she was working extra hours while friends were losing their bartending and server jobs. Money!

People were thanking her for performing an essential service. Respect!

But also, every day, scores of hyperventilating strangers were handing her cash and credit cards. Danger!

So, she upped her self-care. Forget my unambitious meals: She started to use her employee discount to buy salmon, peppers, and endless avocados.

My little vector, I tease her. But she’s careful. She wore gloves long before her coworkers did, before the market put up plexiglass shields near the registers. Within hours, her gloves turn black from handling cash.

“You’re so lucky to have a job,” people often tell her. Which is true. But my daughter also confronts pandemic panic for 4 or 8 or 10 hours a shift. She knows most of the PLU codes by heart and moves people through her line fast—fastest in the store—to minimize everyone’s exposure.

Except when customers ask, “Can you scan my food without touching it?” My daughter answered by trying to pick up a tomato with her elbows.

What stuns her, and me, is the selfishness fear breeds. In March one customer offered the manager $100 for the canister of disinfectant wipes. Another stole it. Now cashiers take turns sanitizing carts.

Another customer leaned over the sneeze guard and huffed at my daughter, “See—what good is this going to do?”

People regularly rail at her about the escalating cost of eggs and steak and strawberries, as if cashiers priced the produce. One afternoon my daughter pulled down her gaiter for a moment. A woman jabbed her finger toward the plexiglass: “She’s the reason I’m going to die!”

Actually, it might be the other way around. At least 100 grocery workers have died of Covid-19, according to the Washington Post. But with no reporting requirements, it’s hard to keep track.

My daughter dried a few tears and kept the checkout line moving.

She vented later. If that woman is so worried, why doesn’t she use drive-through? Or get her groceries delivered? “I didn’t sign up for this,” my daughter wails.

Her manager has praised her for stepping up. “And?” my daughter asked. In her experience, critiques always follow compliments. “What am I doing wrong?” Her manager couldn’t think of a thing.

Sometimes my daughter lords her busyness over her nonessential brother and me, learning and teaching online, safe and bored at home. But she is rightly proud.

As Florida relaxes its sheltering-in-place guidelines, the line between essential and nonessential businesses is blurring. Once infections abate, my daughter will return to being “just” a cashier.

I hope she will find her métier in our clobbered economy. But shouldn’t any job done well convey dignity? My daughter is so essential to this family. Whatever her career, I wish she could carry that label into every workplace. 

Sylvia Whitman is a writer for children and adults — books and articles for children, articles for adults. She teaches professional and creative writing at Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida. Find out more about her and her work at http://www.sylviawhitmanbooks.com

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My cell phone vibrates while I am on a conference call with the CEO of my company. We’re talking about the impending layoffs and I am trying not to cry, gearing up to tell half of my team that they don’t have jobs anymore. It’s my mom calling me, for the third time in fifteen minutes. It’s also nearly 10 in the morning, and my son hasn’t made it past brushing his teeth yet, and I need to get him on task for the day.

By the time I’ve completed the call with my boss and gotten my son settled down to make his to-do list, trying to pull together assignments from nine classes spread out over three different web apps, my husband is whispering over his own muted Zoom meeting, “Honey, your mom keeps calling me. I can’t answer.”

I have to get through one more meeting and put out two customer fires before I can call my mom back. Nothing is wrong, she tells me, she just wanted to make sure her phone still worked, and also, when am I coming to get her out of this place and why haven’t I been to visit?

While I am re-explaining the COVID-19 restrictions that have kept her memory care unit on lockdown since March 15th, my son has fallen asleep watching a geography video. I can’t blame him. None of us are sleeping well at night, and the sofa is comfortable, but if I can’t get him through the last nine weeks of his freshman year, what is that going to do to his GPA?

My mom cries, my son snores, and Zendesk squawks at me that someone needs help, while I hear my husband’s conference call heating up in the next room.

In 1999, I was 28. I had a high-profile job at an internationally known non-profit. I was part of seminar based on the then-brand-new “motivational business fable”, Who Moved My Cheese? Our instructor went around the room asking us to identify with characters in the book. When it was my turn, cocky and self-assured, I said, “I’m the cheese.”

I did not make any friends in that seminar, but the answer was typical me. I have never identified with the confusion of a struggle. I identify with solutions and ambition, and I don’t care where you put the cheese, because ultimately the quality of my work is going to attract attention and the cheese will come find me. At least, that was me before I had someone other than myself to care about.

I was born in 1970. A latchkey kid starting in second grade, I took care of myself under the watchful eye of after-school specials, sheriffs from Mayberry, and dreamy Cleaver-style families from the time the bus dropped me off until my mom got home from her job in the evenings.  I grew up on slick Duran Duran videos and Madonna-fied feminism, with MTV babysitting my early teenage years. I was raised by a grab-bag of mixed media, and I believed the ideal woman should look like the cover of a Cosmo magazine, cook like a 50s housewife, and ball like Gordon Gekko, backwards and in high heels.

I never learned to cook, but I looked amazing and I worked like I was a Diane Keaton character in a Nancy Meyers movie. I figured when I fell in love and got married, my household would be like the Huxtables, with two successful parents managing a brood of smart, well-adjusted children. 

That is not what happened. Not even close. I did marry a great guy and we did have a great baby, but we were poor and struggling, both of us working to climb up into something better than the shady apartment complex where we were living. 

After a merger in 2006 and the crash of 2008 slapped me down from professional heights with two layoffs in a row, and after solid months of caring for my mother through cancer in 2008 and heart disease in 2014, while trying to parent and wife, the only cheese I resembled was at the bottom of a spray can wedged into the corner of a dumpster.

By the time my son entered middle school, with all its attending hormonal glories, my mom had succumbed to vascular dementia and I found myself sandwiched between one dependent whose pre-frontal cortex was only half formed, and another whose executive function had gone into early retirement.

I found myself having the same conversations with both of them about everything from hurtful dining room gossip after my mom moved into senior living, to hygiene. Yes, you have to shower every day. Yes, deodorant is a non-negotiable.

So, now, in Coronatimes, I sit at a desk behind my sofa trying to hold it together long enough to terminate good employees with the respect and recognition they deserve, while I worry about my own future. If I lose my job, what does that mean for our finances? What does that do to my son’s education? My mother’s living arrangements, as her savings dwindle and dip into my own? My ability to care for myself in retirement so that my son doesn’t have that responsibility?

Sure, I’m the cheese, but only because I’m sitting between two pieces of bread in a generational sandwich.

There was nothing in Quarterback Princess, any Judy Blume book, or my Trapper Keeper to prepare me for this. Well, maybe there was. “I’ll cross that bridge when I find it,” Simon Le Bon sang in my 8th grade anthem, The Reflex. And that’s what I do. 

Bridge by bridge, I figure it out, and try to keep inching forward, in pajama bottoms and bare feet because I haven’t worn shoes in two months. I don’t have the time or emotional energy to do anything else other than take it one step at a time. And anyway, my mom is calling again. I need to answer that.

Lane Morris Buckman is a writer from Dallas, TX. She is known for her work in picture books and the cozy mystery genre, and unknown for her smutty romance work as it is written under the pen name Nicole Lane. She also co-hosts the podcast about nothing, Divas Dish.

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