The Pandemic Pivot: Juggling Instacart, Insurance, and Social Work

Natalie Donaldson is a single mother of three boys in Toronto: Isaiah, 8; Joshua, 5; and Eli, 2. She works as a coordinator at a community agency supporting children with autism. When the pandemic hit, she was redeployed to a residential program. Working from home was not an option. Quitting was not an option either -- she was the sole breadwinner.

So Donaldson rearranged her entire life. She switched to evening shifts so she could be home during the day with her boys. Her mother took over in the evenings. The arrangement was functional but isolating. Donaldson's mother was the only person she saw outside of work.

Then she added more work. Donaldson is a licensed life insurance agent, and during the pandemic she met clients over Zoom -- selling policies in the margins between parenting and her agency job. In July, she started delivering groceries through Instacart. Three income streams, three children under nine, one adult holding it all together with scheduling and willpower.

By summer, she was burnt out. That word gets thrown around casually, but for a single mother running three jobs during a pandemic with no partner to debrief with at the end of the day, burnout is not a buzzword. It is a medical reality.

"It's a huge part of my self-care -- especially as a single parent -- being able to talk through scenarios that maybe other people talk through with other members of the household or their partner. I don't have that luxury," Donaldson said.

That sentence is worth reading twice. The thing she identified as essential to her survival was not money, not childcare, not a break from work. It was conversation. The ability to talk through her day with another adult. Married parents take this for granted. Single parents do not have it. Donaldson named it as a luxury she could not afford, and she kept going without it.

Christmas that year was quiet. Donaldson stayed home with the boys. She made turkey, macaroni pie, and cheesecake. There was no vacation, no extended family gathering, no respite from the routine. Just a mother and her three sons in a kitchen, making the holiday work with what they had.

"I'm looking forward to a barbecue in the park, where the kids can run around, music is playing, everybody is safe," Donaldson said, looking ahead to the day the pandemic would lift.

The ripple of Donaldson's pandemic extends through Isaiah, Joshua, and Eli. They will not remember the details of 2020 the way adults do. They will remember that their mother was there during the day and that dinner was on the table and that Christmas had cheesecake. They will remember stability, because Donaldson manufactured it out of three jobs and no sleep.

The Hero.me framework holds that a Hero fills her mind with the needs of others. Donaldson filled hers with children on the autism spectrum at her agency, with families buying life insurance for protection they hoped they would never need, with strangers whose groceries she delivered to their doors. The Service Paradox is the structure of her entire pandemic: by serving everyone else -- clients, patients, customers, her own children -- she held herself together. Not comfortably. Not gracefully. But completely. She did not break. And she made cheesecake on Christmas. That counts.