I don't drive. Which in America is hard enough as it is if it were only your own body that needed transportation, but with a child it's almost impossible to exist unless you succumb to the country's car-centric ways. This is especially true in a city like Houston where getting my kid to and from his daycare (a mere 2.5 miles away) has been nothing short of a pain in the balls.
Solo parenting this past week meant dropping my kid off at his daycare in an uber, only to uber back to my place where I also have my work setup. The same back and forth is repeated in the late afternoon, bracketing my work day which is also sprinkled with things like dinner prep, laundry, dishes, and tidying up (all of which with child I tend to need to do more of). Once he's back at the house, it's a back-to-back marathon of dinnertime-pottytime-bathtime-playtime-storytime-sleeptime, cherishing every moment of it, but falling prey to a deep kind of ultra exhaustion by night's end. Only to repeat the entire process the next day. A few consecutive days of this and you successfully have that living dead look down. No makeup, prosthetics, or special effects necessary.
I'm not even gonna get into the lack of productivity this causes.
I've been looking into hiring a trustworthy car+driver service to take care of my kid's drop offs and pickups because he'll be with me for the entirety of a month soon, but apparently this is so unheard of in this country that it's proven to be quite difficult.
Life in America is a case of constant problem-solving things that people don't even have to consider at all elsewhere. The United States is an exercise in obstacle course design as nation-building, I swear to god.