How Can I Honor My Mother?
We just celebrated Mother’s Day in the United States and I’ll admit that it isn’t my favorite holiday. I lost my mother to an incredibly heroic battle with pancreatic cancer about six years ago and so the barrage of emails, advertisements, and grocery store reminders about remembering moms is a little much to take. This year, though, I started thinking more about how I could honor the legacy of a wonderful woman all days of the year and not just on the second Sunday in May. And then, on a larger scale, I thought about how we as a country and a culture need to do a better job of respecting, supporting, and honoring the incredible work that moms do (we extend that to anyone who does the work of mothering).
Being a mother is a remarkable and difficult job. I’m not a mother but I know this to be true, both from my own mother and from the many strong women in my life. I hope that I honor them in my life always and that they know, even though I do not always say it, how great I think they are. But celebrating individual wonderful moms isn’t enough, especially in a society that seems to have, at best, a mixed relationship with the institution of motherhood.
Obviously, moms come in all types and the definition of “mother” can be broad. This post, while supportive of mothers of all sorts, is not about that. It is about what we expect from moms and what hurdles moms face everyday. The hurdle that I focus on this week is paid family leave.
Let’s start with current parental leave policies. The United States is the only country in the developed world that does not federally mandate that paid leave be provided to new mothers. Does that mean that no organizations in the US provide paid maternity leave? Of course not. But very few women have access to paid maternity leave: only 60% of all female workers are eligible for leave through the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) and only 1 in 12 women who work in the private sector have access to family leave. You may be sitting there wondering, so what? They chose to have a child, so they can choose to stay home to take care of it for awhile without pay. Or they can come back to work. But why should they be paid for not coming to work? Putting aside the incredible physical and emotional toll that having a child takes on a woman’s body, let’s look at the practical implications of this policy. Am I suggesting that three- and four-week old babies should go in to daycare? Or that, just weeks after giving birth, moms should be back at work, acting like nothing has changed? What about moms who have adopted? Should they be able to bond only as permitted by their job schedules? No, that doesn’t seem right. And yet, if you can’t afford to go for months without one of your household paychecks or if your job won’t hold a spot for you until you can come back, that is exactly what you may be forced to do. And with 40% of American households unable to cover a $400 unexpected expense, how many do we really think can afford to go for a few months without a paycheck?
Now some would say that people who can’t afford to have kids or to take time off of work to care for them just shouldn’t have kids. Well, that argument is just ridiculous and not the way the world works. We also know that one in three families spends 20% of their yearly household income on childcare (and five million families spend more than 25% of annual household income on childcare). Prescribing family planning hasn’t worked for literally thousands of years (just ask the Romans) and I don’t anticipate that it will start working now. Nor should it. The decision to have a child or not is a personal decision, based on many factors. But one of those factors shouldn’t be whether you are going to have to give up grocery shopping for months to afford to keep your house if you decide to have a child. We have to do better.
Obviously paid family leave isn’t the only way that we can support moms. Lauren has written brilliantly about the wage gap, a topic that definitely requires more of our attention and action. But paid family leave - for all parents - is a great place to start. Many moms, including my own, went back to work when their babies were less than a month old. Don’t we want more for mothers and for their young children?
Want to support moms? Contact your state reps and tell them. Tell them you support paid family leave. And then vote for it.