This is fresh air. I'm Terry Gross. Like a lot of parents during the COVID lockdown, especially mothers.

My guest Angela Garbis had to stop working and become a full-time parent because she no longer had daycare.

Although she loves being a mother, during this period she experienced a loss of identity and clinical depression.

She abandoned the book she had been writing, and instead wrote an article about what women lost during that period.

The article was retweeted by Elizabeth Warren and OneFiral. That led to Garbis' new book, Essential Labor, Mothering, a Social Change.

The book is about how the work of mothering in the U.S. has always been undervalued and undercompensated.

By mothering, she means the work of raising children, and that includes all people who help raise children, mothers, fathers, extended family, nannies, daycare workers, preschool teachers, babysitters, domestic help, and fathers.

She describes mothering as the invisible economic engine driving our culture.

This is also an issue related to race and class, since the underpaid child care professionals are often women of color.

Garbis' parents immigrated from the Philippines after her mother became a registered nurse and her father a pathologist.

In the book she writes about how the Philippines became the care workers of the world.

She says the Philippines is by far the leading supplier of nurses to America.

Garbis' previous book, Like a Mother, was about the science and culture of pregnancy.

Angela Garbis, welcome back to Fresh Air. Tell us more about how it felt to not have daycare and not be able to write, because you were constantly involved with parenting.

And even when your husband was officially unparenting duty, you were interrupted by your children a lot.

It was complicated, I will say. In many ways I felt so sure.

And if you go back to those early days of the pandemic when we didn't know what was happening, we didn't understand this virus.

I remember thinking we could all get COVID from our groceries.

I remember.

When we were disinfecting our mail and my hands were red and peeling from so much, my daughter calls it, Hannah Tizer.

It felt really clear to me that the most important thing I could be doing was not writing.

It was not writing, it was not making a podcast.

...