It’s almost Mother’s Day. And you know what that means: well meaning posts, reels, and AP articles will start popping up with calculations of the financial worth of a mother. The hypothetical “If you had to pay for these services how much are they worth?”
These imaginary salaries are based on a stay-at-home parent being chauffeur, chef, nanny, tutor, therapist, housekeeper, and laundress. Current estimates put these services somewhere between $175,000 and $205,000 annually. These calculations are usually used to sell you things like life insurance. “If you die, what would your family do without you? Buy some life insurance to ensure you can be replaced.”
These reports always begin by talking about the “unpaid labor” of women–a concept I find reductionist, Marxist, and quite frankly stupid. Every year well-meaning people send me these reels or posts because I have so many children. They are trying to be complimentary. But it’s condescending at best. Does that sound harsh? I feel like it should.
The very idea that an activity has value only when couched in financial terms is a crazy premise to me. While all labor has dignity (thanks, MLK, Jr.) that does not automatically mean that all expenditure of energy, time, talent, or resources should be quantified and labeled with a price tag. To do so often robs that very thing of dignity.
For example, marital intimacy is an expenditure of energy, time, and talent (amirite?). And yet, I would be absolutely horrified if in a misguided attempt at complimenting me someone said, “If your husband had to pay for your services you could be making six figures!” Get a bottle of lotion and a wash cloth, a wife is not a whore.
This idea is so off-putting because everyone knows that marital intimacy is about far more than a biological act with a predictable and quantifiable outcome. It’s about connection, fruitfulness, healing, comfort, understanding, love. It’s the total gift of self. That can be neither bought nor sold.
So it is with mothering. To love my kids, care for them, clothe them, make them breakfast, drive them to museums or to the beach, teach them their prayers, bandage their wounds, read them stories, take them to Mass is all an act of love and the most natural thing in the world. It is only natural to exult in the wonder of seeing the world through a child’s eyes. It cheapens it to try to put it on the payroll.
In all this dads have equal participation. Mothering is not “the hardest job in the world.” Michelle Obama said it in an interview and we certainly get a steady diet of that rhetoric this time of year, laced with a heavy dose of misandry. In an effort to elevate the role of women this idea begins on a premise that women are victims of their own fertility. We are told somehow that women have it worse than men because we have to be pregnant and give birth, that being a mother is more difficult than being a father because dad can get breaks going to work and mom has to work 24/7, that wives have more worries than husbands because men are clueless and women make the world go around. As a mother of sons and the wife of a good man all this schtick hurts my heart.
How does this talk about how hard it is to be a mom make our children feel? It’s akin to telling your spouse that they are very difficult to love. What a hurtful thing to say! No wonder we struggle with connection to our children in our culture. We tell children they are burdensome, that they are a hard job and we cannot wait until they are grown and it is over, that if only we could get paid for loving them it would then perhaps be worth it.
But answer me this, what is a better use of your days? If you weren’t raising a family, what’s the trade off? A little more sleep? A few less grey hairs? Some boring-ass corporate job making more money? And then what? More money but no one to share it with? Who is going to give you delicious sleepy hugs in the morning? Who is going to slip you funny little notes in childish-scrawl saying you are the best ever? When you get old who is going to call you on Sundays and say, “Just checking in Mom. How are you? How’s dad? How’s the new lawnmower working out?”
There is nothing I would rather be doing with my days than making meals for my family and sewing the buttons back on their shirts and listening to the older ones talking about their new love and how their date went. When I have to be at my stupid corporate job nothing delights me more than when a colleague says, “Daja, your kid is in the lobby.” And I say, “Oh goodie! Which one?!” And I get to rush over and get a hug. Maybe they’ve brought me a chai. Or maybe they just need to ask for 20 bucks. Either way, I do not mind. To see their faces and to feel that connection that transcends any transactional understanding of the way the world works is the best thing in the world.
“…when people begin to talk about this domestic duty as not merely difficult but trivial and dreary, I simply give up the question. For I cannot with the utmost energy of imagination conceive what they mean. When domesticity, for instance, is called drudgery, all the difficulty arises from a double meaning in the word. If drudgery only means dreadfully hard work, I admit the woman drudges in the home, as a man might drudge at the Cathedral of Amiens or drudge behind a gun at Trafalgar. But if it means that the hard work is more heavy because it is trifling, colorless and of small import to the soul, then as I say, I give it up; I do not know what the words mean. To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labors and holidays; to be Whiteley within a certain area, providing toys, boots, sheets cakes, and books, to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene; I can understand how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people’s children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one’s own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No; a woman’s function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its smallness.” –GK Chesterton
The next time someone tries to tell you that being a mother is “so hard” and that you are “unpaid labor” tell them they have bought into the materialist lie that feeds both Marxism and Capitalism. Being a mother is a natural result of fecundity. Don’t pity me because I get to be creative nor because to some precious soul I am their whole world. You could be too. No one is stopping you except your belief that money is worth more than life.
reconciling things 