Rewriting Motherhood

What if “women’s work” was recognized as the vital force it is?

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I was interviewed recently for an upcoming feature in the Atlantic about the Pew Research finding that modern parents don’t place much importance on their children marrying or having kids. Instead, they overwhelmingly prioritize their kids’ financial independence and job satisfaction. There’s also a growing share of childless adults in the U.S. who don’t expect to ever have children. It got me thinking about what matters to me. As a parent, I don't care much about official marriage though I do hope my kids find fulfilling partnerships. But, if I’m honest, I'd like to be a grandparent someday, both for the joy of it and because I'd like to give my kids the support I didn't get. It’s healing for me to imagine giving my kids what I felt lacked in my life, raising children thousands of miles away from my family of origin. I don't want my hard-earned knowledge/experience/wisdom both of parenting and of the system parents are up against to go to waste.

They should not, of course, have children for my sake. If they do choose to take on the joy and challenges of having a family, though, I want it to be easier.

I’ve been silently promising them since they were babies that I’d be there for them as much as they wanted for future consultation and babysitting, including giving them relationship-saving time away with their partners and sanity-saving time with friends; when they just can’t take making another dinner, or the kid is home sick and they have to work. The fantasy is I’ll be retired and while still very engaged in my own life, the flexibility will allow me to prioritize easing their experience of childrearing. If we don’t live near each other (though I hope we do because, ya know, it takes a village), I’ll advise them to live in communal spaces rather than isolating nuclear families, which aren’t all that beneficial for women in particular. I’ll give them all the empathy from afar that I longed for, and visit them or care for their kids when they need a vacation from them.

There’s likely a confluence of reasons that explain why many parents are placing less emphasis on their children having babies, including climate catastrophe and political instability, among others. But my guess is a large part of it has to do with another finding from the Pew poll: 88% of parents say being a parent has been somewhat or a lot harder than they expected. This was especially true among mothers. In the last couple of decades, motherhood has become harder both economically and culturally, and yet—and I think this central—it’s still paid little respect. Let’s break this down.

The economics of motherhood

The United States is the wealthiest country in the world yet we’re the only industrialized country without paid leave. One in four women go back to work after just two(!!) weeks post partum. It’s the wealthiest nation that spends the least on child care. Denmark, for example, spends $23,140 annually per child two and under, compared with just $200 per child in the US. 40% of parents are in debt due to childcare costs. When you couple that with the fact that only 50% of people born in 1980 have grown up to earn more than their parents, compared with 90% of people born in the 1940s, and add the rising cost of living, along with the burden of enormous debt even from public universities, a very challenging picture emerges. And parenthood often stagnates career trajectories for women even as it boosts men's. People perceive women’s income as optional (despite being substantial) which partly explains why working mothers earn just 62 cents for every dollar earned by working fathers, or why we have to trade pay for flexibility. Having children is just less practical. Women cannot care without a thriving care economy.

The cultural insanity of motherhood

Feminism fought for women to gain entry into traditionally male spheres. That 93% of mothers report being burned out is used to prove feminism isn’t working. But what’s really happening is that when women make strides, our patriarchal culture shifts the goalposts. So in the 1980s when women began flooding the workforce (no longer only into low-status, low-paying jobs), we added the “Good Mother” trope that included an exponential rise in expectations for mothers, ensuring they’ll constantly fall short and be self-critical. The intensive parenting expected of mothers today is untenable. There’s a reason my most read article ever, It’s All in Her Head (and it’s Exhausting), keeps circling the internet because the mental and emotional labor women are expected to take on is soul-crushing. Mothers today dedicate almost double the time to daily childcare tasks compared to six decades ago, even though moms are much more likely now to be working outside the home. Of course, affordable childcare and paid leave would help tremendously but the cultural glorification of the perfect mother would still pull for the chronic shame and anxiety mothers feel about whether they’re doing a good job.

The belittling of care work and the rise of tradwives

I am one of those parents who was bowled over by how hard parenting is. There was the sudden and complete lack of autonomy over my time and body, and the perception from others my potential had nosedived. And there was the fact that my first child didn’t sleep for more than two or three hours at a time until he was well over two years old, and even then sleeping through the night was rare for years. When he was eleven weeks old I went back to work, bleary-eyed, sometimes helping other bleary-eyed mom-patients, anxious and angry that they were expected to move on as if nothing had changed. It’s a “pull yourself up from your bootstraps” mentality, and if you can’t, something must be wrong with you, not the system.

Maybe our children don’t want marriage and babies because they’ve witnessed the struggles of being a working parent, especially a working mom. But in addition to the frustrating lack of time and resources, the care work women take on is just not recognized as difficult or important. Women have fought for their dignity and, while there’s still a long way to go, they’ve tasted what it’s like to be taken seriously in school and in the workforce. They’re tired of having to fight for their labor at home to be seen and valued.

Consider the industriousness, discernment, efficiency, ingenuity, insight, and patience required to ensure proper child development, and to create safe, nurturing, clean spaces for our families, to research and cook nutritious meals, build community with friends and neighbors, and create rituals that ground kids in an ever-shifting world. Yet, time away from work is stigmatized and a strike against women. As

Jo Piazza

says in What if you put MOM on your resume?, “Caregivers are some of the most resourceful and efficient people out there and those skills should be celebrated instead of castigated in the workplace.”

As parents, we always hope our kids’ lives will be better than ours, so it’s understandable that some of us aren’t pushing our kids to take an often unacknowledged, depleting path. And kids themselves have absorbed cultural messaging that motherhood is thankless and exhausting, straining careers, well-being, relationships, and sex lives.

I tried to do and be all the things (hello homemade baby food!) but at some point I realized something had to give. My efforts to stay on top of things—my care—would go directly toward my children and my patients but, among other things, I’d have to let go of the neat and ordered home I’d imagined having. An uber organized home doesn’t make for happier kids, I reasoned. But I was constantly stressed or angry that I couldn’t find the other shoe, the baseball mitt, the carrot peeler. There was no time for these lapses. Stressed out parents aren’t good for kids.

I truly didn’t have the time or energy to make everything from scratch and to thoroughly order and tidy (though sometimes it felt like that’s all I did), but there’s more to the story. I think I also held some resistance to homemaking. I knew as the woman of the house any mess would reflect on me, and me alone, but I understood too that homemaking is considered shallow and unworthy of respect except in a competitive-mother sort of way or as proof of being a Good Woman. I resented it all and wasn’t playing. But looking back, maybe that resistance hindered me developing and honing organizational and other crucial skills that make the chaos of raising kids and running a home easier. So when extra help wasn’t affordable or my husband wasn’t helping enough, or whatever, maybe I was drowning more and angrier than I might have been had I—had society—been able to value those things.

The chronic devaluation of care work might explain the rising popularity of the “tradwife” on social media. A tradwife is a so-called traditional wife whose gorgeous home is filled with poised, productive children, beautiful, wholesome meals, and zero waste because socks get darned and food is grown on the premises. Oh, and championing strict gender norms, tradwives submit to their husbands and teach their daughters to depend on men. In her piece, Where Feminists and Tradwives Can Agree,

Kerala Taylor

writes, “temporarily setting aside the misogyny, religious dogma, and general ickiness [of tradwifery], I don’t think we can ignore that there is an allure to a life in which we have the time to properly attend to ourselves, our families, and our communities.” Tradwives document their every move (“except,” as Taylor notes, “…for all the flurries of scrubbing and arranging and haranguing and arguing that I can only imagine has to go on between their carefully staged videos”) and they get respect in the form of hundreds of thousands of followers and admiring comments, and in some cases, dollars, which, ya know, kinda flouts the economic dependency espoused in traditional wife-ing.  

What if we valued care work?

What if so-called “women’s work” was recognized for being the vital force it is in creating the human connection we all need to feel truly alive? What if the raising and supporting of families were taken seriously in our culture such that the government invested in it and we could adjust our work weeks to better balance the demands of paid and unpaid labor? Not only might women feel more satisfied with domestic labor, or even take pride in it without being deemed frivolous, but men would participate in it, too. This would not only ease women’s burdens, but, as

Jeremy Mohler

notes in his critique of tradwives, men have been cut off from the relational and emotional dimensions of being human. Care work would help reconnect them to their humanity, and create support networks they often lack now.

Science has already debunked the idea of women as more natural caretakers by showing that men who are regularly engaged in childcare undergo transformations in their brains and hormones remarkably akin to those experienced by gestational mothers. So it’s time and behavior, not sex and gender, that make us nurturing. Rather than longing for that short-lived time that really only existed among the wives of well-to-do men (and didn’t make most women happy), we should be looking at the reality of modern life and improve on that. Two income earners are needed in most households today and many of us need to work full-time to get health insurance. So we must work to make the lives of working mothers—all mothers—more reasonable.

Beyond family income, mothers in —and not in— the workforce make essential contributions to art, education, politics, science, and the economy. But it shouldn’t be at the expense of their wellbeing. Equitable arrangements in heterosexual partnerships are increasing but change is slow, in part, because doing care work is so disparaged and the patriarchal capitalist monster that exploits our labor wants to keep it that way.

Care work is the bedrock of our society. Yet, as Taylor notes, “there’s a rising generation that is looking around and seeing women who feel more embittered than emboldened. More burnt out than galvanized. More ashamed than unapologetic.” I’m thrilled that being childfree is increasingly less associated with dysfunction, but I’m sad for those who would otherwise have wanted children. We fought for women to enter the workforce, now it’s time for men to participate more fully in caregiving and for workplaces to build in varying paths to success. Placing care work on the same plane as paid work will allow us to balance our need for autonomy and industry with our need for connection and emotional fulfillment—which can only come from the work that goes into caring.

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If you’re a mom celebrating Mother’s Day, I hope it goes well, spent with your children doing what YOU want to do or far away from them, relaxing. And if you’re a mom caring for another mother on Mother’s Day, you deserve a medal.

xox Jo-Ann