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Spare Me the Flowers and Chocolates this Mother’s Day

 2 years ago
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Spare Me the Flowers and Chocolates this Mother’s Day

Show me the money instead

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Photo via Canva.

When my children were five and two, they acknowledged Mother’s Day by serving me a raw carrot and a single egg. The egg, thankfully, was already hard-boiled.

I ate both with gusto. I have never been known to turn down a meal that someone else makes for me, nor have I ever been known to be ungrateful for it.

But whether I’m served eggs poached or hard-boiled, I have a complicated relationship with Mother’s Day.

The gendered commercialization of the holiday is obnoxious, at best. So much so that the day’s founder, Anna Jarvis, actually ended up renouncing the holiday and lobbying the government to remove it from the calendar.

Just as I will graciously accept any meal another person prepares for me, I will graciously accept (and enjoy) flowers or chocolate, but… really? Are there no other gifts that a mother might appreciate? I, for one, need wire cutters and hiking boots.

My real beef with Mother’s Day, however, has far less to do with the content of the gifts than it has to do with the frenzy of consumer spending, which is expected to total over $31 billion this year.

It doesn’t make me feel valued. It feels like a slap in the face.

Most of the companies that profit from the holiday — and even those that may not directly profit but that still attempt to engage their consumer base by posting corny memes and sending out cliché-ridden emails — grossly fail the mothers on their own payroll. Forty-plus years after the Women’s Liberation Movement, mothers are still routinely denied paid family leave, opportunities for promotion, flexible hours, and equal pay.

In an incredible twist of irony, May not only marks Mother’s Day, but also Mother’s Equal Pay Day, which recognizes the number of months that a mother must work into 2022 to make the same amount as a father made in 2021. As noted by Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, Executive Director and co-founder of MomsRising.org, “There’s a grim reality in America: Being a mom is a greater predictor of wage and hiring discrimination than gender.”

So nearly five months into the year, moms finally catch up with their male counterparts, get one day of recognition — not a paid holiday, mind you, so no time to even use the spa certificate that Groupon convinced your husband to buy — and then it’s back to pumping in bathrooms, scrambling to find childcare, getting passed over for promotions, and earning 75 cents on every father’s dollar.

The “motherhood penalty” manifests itself in the home as well, even in homes where involved fathers do dishes and change diapers. Time-use studies revealed that before Covid, mothers were undertaking twice as much unpaid labor at home as their male partners.

In addition to spending sprees, as the History Channel notes, “families also celebrate [Mother’s Day] by giving mothers a day off from activities like cooking or other household chores.” Mothers don’t need a “day off” — mothers need support from fathers and the childfree to dismantle a patriarchy that still insists the home is the woman’s domain. Mothers need 364 days in which they are not performing four daily hours of unpaid labor to their partners’ two.

And Covid only made things worse. While our country was busy bailing out airlines, it simply shrugged its shoulders at the gaping holes left in the wake of school and daycare closures. The expectation was that mothers would step up, because mothers always step up, at the expense of our careers, earning potential, retirement funds, and mental health.

In a country that so blatantly shuns and under-appreciates mothers for the other 364 days of the year, it’s hard to get too excited about a single day dedicated to buying us frivolous things and serving us breakfast in bed. If we were proportionately appreciated for 364 days and over-appreciated for 12–14 hours, perhaps I would greet the holiday with more enthusiasm.

This year, let’s make Mother’s Day about something more than doing a symbolic load of laundry and lining the pockets of retail companies. Let’s stop paying lip service to the women who are taking on the brunt of our country’s unpaid labor while getting paid less on the job.

Spare us the flowers and chocolates, please, and show us the money instead.


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