If you asked me why I don’t like Mother’s Day, first I’d say: look no further than the month of May.
It’s a month so packed full of events for parents (OK, mostly moms) to plan and attend and organize and bring snacks that it feels like death by a thousand papercuts.
We’ve got dance recitals and sports tournaments and band concerts and end-of-school parties, proms and graduations and summer camp signup deadlines and awards banquets and an absurd number of birthdays.
I have three active elementary schoolers. By the time Mother’s Day rolls around halfway through the month I’m barely hanging on.
I love my kids to pieces. I even love the chaos, sometimes. But if I’m being brutally honest, I don’t get excited about a day that’s ostensibly to celebrate my motherhood because it feels fake. The reality is that our country routinely fails mothers.
You already know this if you are a person who’s ever scrambled to cobble together makeshift childcare; hid a pregnancy to keep your job; took a pay cut to be more available for your kids; or waited tensely to hear a doctor explain pregnancy complications that will impact you or someone you love.
Here’s an example of what I mean: In 2017 I was a reporter in Montgomery, Alabama covering the state legislature’s debate over a bill that would legalize midwifery. Certified professional midwives are a regular part of maternal healthcare in other states, but couldn’t legally work in Alabama. Home birth in my state was only legal if it was unattended by a midwife. Go figure.
That year, I watched a scrappy, organized group of mothers show up at the statehouse every day. Some were pregnant, some wore their babies in carriers or wraps, and others pushed their toddlers in strollers. They stopped legislators in the hallways to chat. They held a rally on the statehouse steps. They sat in the viewing gallery every day. They wanted to ensure the legislature – at the time composed almost entirely of men – could not ignore them and their demand that families have the freedom to choose a midwife as a birth care provider.
Meanwhile I listened to debate on the bill from legislators who, it turns out, were appallingly ignorant about how birth works.
I was a young mother at the time, and though I didn’t know much about midwifery, somehow I knew more than the people who got to make the final decisions about how people are allowed to give birth?
In the end, the women’s sheer determination won out. In the final minutes of the final day of the session, legislators voted to legalize midwifery. Out-of-hospital birth with a midwife is now an option in my home state because of their bravery.
After that, it was like a dam burst for me. I couldn’t look away from all the ways our systems fail mothers and babies. Since then I’ve reported on mothers who struggled to find affordable and safe child care for their babies. Mothers who were fired for having a baby or for asking for reasonable pregnancy accommodations. Mothers who nearly died in child birth, or couldn’t get approved for insurance coverage or couldn’t access mental health services for postpartum depression. Mothers who nearly lost custody of their babies due to faulty drug tests or postpartum depression or legal loopholes. Mothers who watched their rural hospitals shutter, leaving them hours away from the nearest obstetrician or labor & delivery department.
In the summer of 2019, I interviewed a young woman who’d lost her twin boys during an emergency delivery and nearly lost her own life.
I sat with her and her partner in their small living room as they recounted the worst experience of their lives. As a reporter, I try not to insert myself into an interview – it’s never about me.
But their situation hit so close to home. Before I could talk myself out of it, I shared with them that my first pregnancy had been with twin boys as well, and it had ended in an emergency c-section 12 weeks early. My older son survived but my younger son did not. He died a week after their birth from complications of prematurity.
In that moment this mother and I connected over our shared loss: our grief, our frustration at how helpless we felt, and our overwhelming need to do something, anything to prevent that from happening to anyone else.
A few days later the article came out. In it, I had shared a detail that the mother and her partner had not yet been able to bring home the ashes of their baby boys because they couldn’t come up with the money they owed the funeral home for cremation expenses.
The day the story ran, readers from across the state emailed me asking how they could help. All of them were women; many of them were mothers. I called the funeral home, got the necessary information and passed it along to anyone who asked.
The balance was paid by the following day.
I cried as I messaged this mother to tell her, and she sent me a photo the next day of herself and her partner holding the jars with their babies’ ashes, finally bringing them home. It remains one of the most moving and influential reporting experiences of my career.
As I reflect on that story this Mother’s Day, I understand something now that hasn’t been easy to admit, even to myself: Maybe I dislike this holiday because, for me, a part of motherhood will always be tied to a sense of helplessness. It’s a feeling that I didn’t know enough and that the systems around me weren’t good enough to keep my children safe.
What I want for Mother’s Day is lower maternal and infant mortality rates. I want improved access to healthcare for all families. I want child care treated as the infrastructure issue that it is and made more affordable and accessible. I want the U.S. to stop being the only wealthy country in the world without guaranteed paid parental leave. I want evidence-based gun reform that will make my kids’ schools safer.
And I know that big, complex, systemic problems can be solved, because I’ve seen it happen. Changes are usually tiny and incremental, but they almost always come through the hard work of regular people – in many cases I’ve covered, regular moms – who want something better for those coming after them.
The best way to honor mothers is to join them in that work. I’ll see you there.
