In the Before Times, Jenna Mason had been cobbling together enough money as a freelance writer and restaurant server to support herself and her two kids -- she has shared custody with her ex-husband. When the world ground to a halt in her town of Oxford, Mississippi, the life she’d built for her family -- and the confidence she felt in herself -- came apart … not in one big crash, but in a cascading series of crises, one leading to another leading to another.
On the one year anniversary of the pandemic shutdown in the US, Jenna talks about financial precarity, her mental health struggles, navigating unemployment and how she’s found a way to keep going.
This episode is a collaboration with the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and The Guardian. To read a print version of this story, go here.
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We want to hear from you: we know a lot of moms who are dealing with existing and new mental health issues. So we want to hear from you about what you are experiencing right now. What does it look like when you are not “holding it all together?” How has the pandemic brought on a change in your relationship to medication or self-medication? Or tell us a story about a turning point when you realized you needed to take action to support your mental health....Send us a email or a voice recording using the voice memo app on your phone -- to askthedoubleshift@gmail.com and we may use it in an upcoming show.
Jenna