I’ll never know what it was like to be a working parent in the Before Times. My son was born in October 2020, and I returned to work—remotely—in February 2021.

My routine back then was simple: I’d drive six minutes to drop my son off at his San Francisco daycare and then return home to work at my desk in his bedroom. There was no sweating on the bus as I realized that traffic was going to make me late to pick him up. No lugging a breast pump to and from a windowl…