I’ve been a mother for 50 years. Yet I rarely read or hear anything truly honest about motherhood. Motherhood itself, not the Hallmark version. The real day-to-day slog. The unending, unpaid, under appreciated work that women do to feed, clothe, nurture, bathe, change diapers, and later hand over car keys, cash, and college tuition to their offspring.

Of late, though, there’s been a change. The Covid 19 pandemic is partly responsible for ripping away the gauzy trappings. The pandemic has exposed the emotional as well as physical labor that women perform, the double and triple shifts they put in, the demanding and exhausting – and yes, sometimes deeply fulfilling – work of raising children.

Maya, age 18 months, at Lake of the Isles in Minneapolis

Now, instead of paeons to motherhood, we are beginning to consider the emotional and creative costs women bear during their child raising years. There’s a new book out, “The Baby on the Fire Escape – Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem,” by Julie Phillips, which delves deeply into how mothers who are artists attempt to balance those roles.

“I can’t think which is more satisfactory, having a baby, or writing a novel. Unfortunately, they are quite incompatible,” says the writer Doris Lessing, summing up the bind of the artist mother. Or, for that matter, any mother attempting to retain a sense of self unencumbered by the needs of others.

Split Consciousness

For brief stretches, in order to concentrate, in order to work, mothers need to forget about their children. The childcare industry – an army of vastly underpaid caregivers – has grown up to meet this need. Covid made it impossible to get childcare unless you were super rich and had a nanny who was willing to isolate with you. So, mothers bounced a baby with one hand, and navigated a Zoom meeting with the other.

I have the highest regard for this split consciousness, for the ability to juggle knives while tightrope walking over a vat of hot oil, and still bring home the bacon. I did it myself. But not during a global pandemic, and not by working at home with my kids in the next room.

I grapple with my fraught relationship with Mother’s Day each year when May rolls around. Brunch and a bouquet of flowers seems woefully inadequate to celebrate mothers. When my daughters were little, I treasured the hand drawn cards depicting me with a triangle nose, mega eyelashes, and curly hair signed “I love you” in red crayon. Going out to brunch when my  kids got older was a treat. But to truly honor the labor of raising a family, we need tangible support.

Free childcare funded by everyone who benefits from women’s labor (i.e., all of society) seems long past due. At a bare minimum, a woman should be able to choose whether and when to bear children. Without choice, there is no true freedom.

The Original Mothers’ Day

And speaking of freedom and the laws and customs of our great land, it turns out that in its first iteration, Mother’s Day was actually a day on behalf of all mothers, not just your own mother. It was known as Mothers’ Day – plural of mother. Heather Cox Richardson, a well-known historian, tells us that it was started in the 1870s by Julia Ward Howe, a key figure in the American Woman Suffrage Association as an antidote to the bloody aftermath of the Franco-Prussian war. It was to be a day when women – many of whom were mothers – united in opposition to war.

She believed her Women’s Peace Movement would end war just as the antislavery movement had ended slavery. The festival she envisioned would be held on June 2 each year around the world and designed to be observed a day when mothers united in support of peace.

But Howe quickly realized that uniting women worldwide was a project beyond her scope, Richardson writes. Instead, she threw herself into the struggle for women’s right to vote, understanding that for peace to become a reality women must participate equally.

But Anna Jarvis picked up on the idea of a day for mothers in 1908 and decided to honor her own mother. The singular, more personal version of Mother’s Day was born. And the rest is greeting card history. As well as memories of misshapen pancakes transported to countless mothers on trays with the aforementioned handmade card.

A special day to recognize and appreciate mothers is a good idea. I just wish that a lot more care and thought was given to mothers who’ve lost their own mothers, or as in my case, a child – to all of us who may be grieving, or lonely, or whose children are far away. To those of us who, like Howe, would like to see an end to war, not just down another Mimosa.

A different version of this post first appeared in my column for The Rossmoor News.