Kayla Breitbarth can't afford child care even though she works 50 to 60 hours a week at an Amazon fulfillment center in St. Peters, Missouri.

She relies on family members to watch the younger three children while she picks up enough hours to try to support her family.

"If I work less than that, I can't pay my bills. I already struggle to pay my bills or buy groceries," she said. Breitbarth began working at the Seattle-based tech and e-commerce giant four years ago. She moved to Swansea, Illinois, from Washington state two years ago to be closer to family who could help her with child care. Breitbarth commutes an hour each way because this location allows her to set her schedule each week, giving her some flexibility when her children are sick or have a doctor's appointment.

But despite the long hours, help from her family and monthly visits to a food pantry, her family is barely scraping by on the wage that Amazon pays her.

Meanwhile, Amazon reported $6.7 billion in profit for the three months ending in June. Jeff Bezos, the third-richest person in the world, who derives his wealth from ownership of Amazon stock, is worth an estimated $162 billion.

"They can afford to have some sort of in-house day care, but they don't," Breitbarth said. The company doesn't offer her any discount or credit for child care.

"They can afford to do things like that, but they choose not to," she said.

Kelli Kee, communications director of Progress MO, said Breitbarth's situation illustrates a growing disparity for Missouri women. More women in the state are becoming more educated and moving into better jobs, but more women are also living in poverty.

Kee cited these statistics:

In 2004, only 20.3% of Missouri women had earned a bachelor's degree or higher. By 2018, that figure had risen to 29.4%.

During those same years, Missouri women employed in managerial or professional positions increased from 35.1% to 40.1%.

But these achievements haven't translated into better economic outcomes for women.

In 2004, 11.1% of Missouri women lived in poverty; that figure has increased to 15.5% compared to 13.3% of men.

A study by the Center for American Progress found that mothers who were unable to find a child care program were significantly less likely to be employed than those who found child care, whereas there was no impact on fathers' employment.

"Mothers said that if they had access to more affordable and reliable child care, they would increase their earnings and progress in their careers by finding a higher-paying job, applying for a promotion, seeking more hours at work, or finding a job in the first place," the report stated.

Kee questioned why Missouri lawmakers have not addressed the child care deserts, where there are no affordable child care options for working parents. Additionally, the burden of child care in school districts that have dropped to four-day school weeks falls disproportionately on women, she said. Nearly a third of the school districts in the state operate on a shortened schedule for the cost savings and to help retain and recruit teachers.

Breitbarth isn't sure how much longer she can keep working at Amazon since the company has capped her hourly wages. Her pay hasn't kept up with the inflationary increases in the cost of living.

It's not possible for her to increase her wages unless she becomes a manager. But without any backup child care or flexibility in her schedule, she doesn't know how she will manage if one of her children gets sick or has a day off from school. Given the two hours she spends commuting daily, plus the long hours she works, she hardly gets to see her children much as it is.

She is working on efforts to unionize workers like herself at Amazon.

"We are coming together as a team in hopes that things will get better," she said.

It may be difficult to get Bezos to pay much attention to the trials of single mothers working at the company he founded. He's been busy touring Europe with his new fiancee on a 417-foot super-yacht.

On the third day of school, Cecily King decided she needed to upgrade her middle-schooler's bulletproof backpack liner with one that could shield her from the rapid-fire rounds of an assault rifle.

This is what back-to-school shopping in America looks like.

The $300 insert is advertised as providing "military-trusted" protection for the "vital torso area" of a young child in the line of fire in a classroom. The upgrade was prompted by the events of Aug. 23, when King, a St. Louis-area dance instructor and mother of four, received emails and texts from her daughter's middle school about a "yellow-level threat." The threat led to a two-hour lockdown.

"It was a very long two hours," King said.

For many in the area, the memories are still vivid from a shooting last year at Central Visual and Performing Arts High School (CVPA) and Collegiate School of Medicine and Bioscience, with which CVPA shares a building. On Oct. 24, 2022, a 19-year-old armed with a Palmetto State Armory PA-15 rifle killed a teacher and a student there.

Five of King's dance students attended CVPA.

"They were jumping over bullets on the floor, running past a body," she said.

That's when she and her husband decided to purchase the initial bulletproof backpack protection for their daughter, along with a cellphone with a GPS tracking app. After the Aug. 23 threat at the school, King's mother offered to split the cost of a new backpack liner that can protect against automatic rifle bullets.

"It's maddening. It's sickening. It makes my stomach turn that in order to keep my kid safe in school, this is what we have to do," King said.

Shooters have used AR-15s or similar semi-automatic rifles to massacre people in a grocery store in Boulder, Colorado; a nightclub in Orlando, Florida; a high school in Parkland, Florida; a music festival in Las Vegas; a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado; an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut; a Waffle House in Nashville, Tennessee; an office party in San Bernardino, California; on the streets of Midland and Odessa, Texas; in synagogues near San Diego and in Pittsburgh; a church service in Sutherland Springs, Texas; an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas; and a dollar store in Jacksonville, Florida. There were more school shootings in 2022 -- 46 -- than in any year since at least 1999, according to a tracker maintained by the Washington Post. The paper has counted 386 school shootings since Columbine.

No other country in the world comes close to murdering its schoolchildren the way America does.

Sales for bulletproof backpacks soared last year after a gunman opened fire at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde. He killed 19 children and two teachers.

The gear doesn't stop with bulletproof backpacks: In December, a New Jersey school district equipped its schools with armored shields: Ostensibly, teachers are supposed to hide students behind the shields while herding them to a safe corner of a classroom or ushering them outdoors. The shields were mounted next to fire extinguishers.

In the wake of the horror in Uvalde, Republicans pivoted to talking about ways to "harden" or fortify schools. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz talked about changing schools' doors. Anything to avoid mentioning the elephant in the room: the hundreds of millions of guns flooding America.

When St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones talked recently about her efforts to rein in the AR-15s on the city's streets, gun lovers had the usual meltdowns about their "rights" -- to conceal carry; to open carry; to buy, on a whim, whenever and however they want, the very weapons used to terrorize and massacre our children.

Any nation that makes guns more precious than its own children has lost its way.

A recent post in a moms' Facebook group asked about the best ways to track the location of elementary school-aged children. Moms swapped tips about the best surveillance and tracking devices. A few mothers said they attach Apple AirTags to their kids' shoes and backpacks.

Our Republican lawmakers would rather see a kindergartner covered in body armor, lugging a bulletproof backpack with GPS trackers planted in their sneakers, than pass gun safety laws.

The GOP wants to harden schools.

They've already hardened their hearts.

Last week, I felt stoic and enlightened about our youngest child leaving for college.

Seven days later, I feel like a liar.

I still stand by what I wrote earlier: I am excited for our children to experience everything the college years have to offer. I know we will still be involved and needed in their semi-independent lives. But I mistakenly thought I could intellectualize myself out of the emotional turbulence that accompanies this transition.

The morning before our flights to the kids' new horizons, I woke up feeling unsettled. They had to finish packing. The boy's friends were coming over for dinner and to hang out -- their last hurrah until Thanksgiving break.

Before I got out of bed, I texted a handful of close friends and my siblings.

"We're leaving tomorrow to drop both kids off at college, and I feel terrible," I wrote. I got empathetic responses from the moms who had recently experienced the same milestone, or were approaching it.

I curled up next to my husband and said, "I don't feel so great about this."

He made a sympathetic grunt and started snoring.

That's not to say that dads aren't emotionally affected by this process of letting go. My husband cried more than once after we dropped off our daughter two years ago, and he has warned me to expect similar tears when we leave our son in his dorm. He is not a crier, by the way.

After last week's column, I received several well-intentioned responses from fathers who could relate to my emotions. My colleague and friend Bill McClellan sent this note:

"The one thing I did miss when our youngest, Jack, went to college -- and I noticed it right away -- were the other parents. They were all casual friends, and they were all suddenly gone. Vanished. These were people, mostly dads, that I had stood on the sidelines with at soccer and tennis matches for years. I saw them every week, sometimes a couple of times a week. The kids kept up with each other on Facebook or whatever, but the parents did not. An entire part of my life that I had enjoyed but gave little thought to.

"Gone."

I hadn't even thought about the loss of friends we had made over the years of extracurricular activities. The message was a little bleak, Bill.

Another father wrote to share a similar experience: "After the fourth went away to college, I continued to attend the high school football games, etc. as I had done for a decade, thinking it would be the same. It wasn't. My youngest also happened to coincide with the youngest of all our friends. I sat alone, yet I persisted for the entire season."

This poignant scene -- a dedicated father sitting all alone game after game -- twisted a knife in my heart.

The dads were not helping.

That same morning, one of my friends shared a recent New York Times article saying we should lean into our negative emotions. It's healthier to acknowledge our feelings and let them pass, the research says. Feeling bad about feeling bad only makes you feel worse. That article gave me permission to feel a little off-kilter and sad.

I decided to make blueberry muffins and go to a yoga class. Maybe baking and moving would cheer me up. As I walked into the class, I told the instructor that I was leaving the next day to drop both our children at college for the first time.

The teacher teared up!

"I can't imagine," she said. "It must be so hard." This young yoga instructor seemed years away from college drop-offs. She asked if I was OK.

I guess, I said. Truthfully, I had been questioning my parenting choices on the way over. My parents had given me the option of applying to any college within the radius of a four-hour drive. Why had I expanded those boundaries for my own kids?

During the class, I focused on breathing and stretching.

Afterwards, the teacher hugged me. She said she would be sending positive vibes to me. I don't know if it was all the breathing or the hug, but I did feel considerably better.

The wisdom of the dads, younger parents, childless friends, the experts quoted in the Times -- it had all helped.

It's normal to feel nervous about big changes.

It's OK to let my heart break a little when I leave pieces of it behind.