In 2017, I was a middle school teacher in Oregon. I worked up until a few days before my delivery and took 12 weeks of unpaid maternity leave. Things weren’t easier as he got older. Like many American parents, we struggled with costs like childcare, which only increased when we had our daughter in 2021 and our daycare costs more than doubled. A few months after she was born, a new opportunity arose: our family could move to Spain. My husband’s job was expanding to Europe, and we saw this as an opportunity to move closer to his family.
