Doing this as a single parent — anyone else, and how do you handle it without local family support?

Not solo-parenting myself but wanted to say this sounds genuinely hard and you're not imagining that it's harder without the built-in support. One thing that helped us even as a two-parent household: other parents at school were surprisingly quick to offer pickup swaps once we actually asked — I'd guess that network builds faster than you'd expect once people know you're up for reciprocating.

Different life stage (our kids are grown) but I remember my sister doing almost exactly this decades ago and what saved her was finding one or two other single parents locally, even if not the same nationality — the shared logistics understanding mattered more than shared background, in her experience.