Thank you, Mom, for Your Courage
Posted May 8th, 2009 by Elizabeth CoxI love Mother’s Day because it is a time to reflect on the priceless care moms provide for free. Well, perhaps not free, but without a documentable price tag. Think back to your best childhood memories. Most likely, they involve home and family, and someone there for you every step of the way. For many of us, the time we spend with our mothers/children is the most precious.
I salute the mothers of the USA for their courage. We are the richest nation on earth and yet the price our nation extracts from caregivers is amongst the highest in the world. Many mothers have no or insufficient healthcare or retirement plans in their own names. This is because usually both are tied to employment. Often those mothers who seek employment outside the home pursue a flexible work schedule to accommodate their role as caregiver. The price paid for this flexibility is immense. Those who work part time or flex time (often mothers) experience a sizeable wage gap compared to fulltime, salaried workers. This is in part because flex jobs tend to be more available at lower skill levels and a consequent skills gap develops and widens between those holding part-time versus fulltime positions. Additionally, the flex time worker often pays more for healthcare proportionately than a fulltime, salaried employee and has less ability to contribute to a retirement plan. However, given that fulltime employment in the U.S. often means 40+ hour weeks, few sick days or vacation days and an inability to telecommute, mothers opt for lower-paying, more flexible alternatives. Perhaps there is an instinctual calculator in their brains that adds up all the value they are giving to their family each and every day and knows that this sums to more than a wage differential.
I joined Momsrising.org because I believe the price of motherhood in this country does not need to be so high. I believe that we are in a millennium that will increasingly seek balance including work/life balance. I’d like to think that one day mothers can spend time raising a family and still have healthcare and the ability to accumulate retirement savings. Mothers are renowned multi-taskers. Technology and the ability to telecommute could prove to one day become a woman’s best friend as we build a world in which moms can balance caregiving with paid work and achieve both at a high level.
Until then I celebrate the courage of mothers who innately know that although at times the price of motherhood may same unnecessarily high, it can also offer the most valuable rewards. After all, where would we all be without mothers?
4 Comments
May 12, 2009 at 9:11 pm by LaVonda R. BaileyI believe that women we need to honor the true reason that Mother’s Day was created. It was created during the Civil War by a woman who had lost her husband and son in the Civil War and she created this holiday so that women would march in the streets and on Government buildings to tell them to stop the war! She did not want another mother or wife to lose their son or husband and she too, like me believed the true victims of war are the women and children left at home or who lose their love ones.
Everyday many women have sons and husbands who die in Iraq and that means there is yet another women who now has to figure out how she is going to make it financially, because her partner will no longer be there to help pay the bills or raise the kids they created.
Women and children are always raped, killed and abused as a part of war and history proves this fact to be true. I have a problem with the government dropping bombs on women and children in Pakistan, because those are women who love and care for their children just like I do and it would be wrong for a country to drop bombs on my neighborhood and kill my children and we as women should believe and and work to stop war around the world so another women does not have to suffer the lost of love one or her home or security.
WAKE UP AND UNDERSTAND WE ARE ALL INTERCONNECTED NO MATTER WHAT COUNTRY WE LIVE IN WE ALL LIVE ON THE PLANET EARTH!!
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May 10, 2009 at 1:27 pm by Nika QuirkNot everyone’s mom is wonderful and inspirational, and I think we need to remember that. But we also need to acknowledge what they did do. My mother was deeply depressed, poor, angry and unaffectionate (a woman of her time in the early 20th Century) AND yet she dedicated herself to raising my sisters and me, making sure we were educated at any cost. We so often take even those basics for granted and all we need to do is look around to see that food, shelter, relative safety, play and education are not available to most children. Her investment in me allowed me to thrive and invest myself in my son, and to learn from her pain how to be a more alive and nurturing mother.
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May 9, 2009 at 11:46 pm by SherryI sent “Mother of the Year” to 6 friends, after receiving it myself on Friday 5/8. I got confirmation they were all sent, but NONE of them have received them, whats up?
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May 9, 2009 at 2:04 pm by Sharon MooreI’ve sent your Mother’s Day message to lost of my friends and relatives, but it will not send to my niece Megan who just gave birth to her second son last month! I’ve tried four times, but only get a message that the site does not acknowledge her name and address, though I’ve filled it out in four different spaces! Help!
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