Motherhood Isn't The Hardest Job In the World, But the Pay Definitely Sucks

On Mother's Day

Honestly, aspirational. /Married… With Children/Fox)

The American version of Mother’s Day started as a religious observance designed to honor the role of mothers in the family and society— as though all of that could fit into one day.

It’s pretty commercial and borderline trite now– really? Brunch?! That’s the meal that restaurants serve so they can maximize margins for their cheapest ingredients! But anything deeper than brunch and a bouquet would lead us to some awkward conversational places– like: why do so many moms want, more than anything in the world, to feel like they’re not moms just for a day, as a treat? 

I have this friend who, in the runup to a recent Mother’s Day, had a simple request for her husband. Like many mothers, she took on the lion’s share of logistics, from scheduling appointments to shopping to cooking to picking up and dropping the kids off from school and day care. (This in addition to a demanding job outside of the home, where she earned a similar income to her husband’s while working similar hours.) Her husband, whom she describes as a “great dad,” would “help out” by doing what she asked him to do, but wasn’t great at looking around at his surroundings and determining what things needed to be done without being given instructions. 

When her husband asked her what she wanted for Mother’s Day, she told him that what she wanted the most was to not plan anything. 

Okay, her husband replied. But what do you want? 

She reiterated that it was up to him to both plan and execute the events of the day, as the thing she wanted the most was to not plan anything. 

Okay, her husband replied. But what do you want? 

This went on for a few minutes, Who’s On First-style, my friend trying to tell her husband that what she wanted was to not have to give him instructions, and for him to reply by asking for instructions. Finally, she caved a little and told him that she wanted brunch. 

Where? He asked. 

By the end of the conversation, my friend, who had started the conversation by expressing a desire to not plan something, had been roped into planning 75% of the thing regardless. 

When Mother’s Day arrived, her husband took her and their two kids to a restaurant that was on the shortlist she’d given him. When they showed up, with no reservation, the hostess told them that it would be at least a 90 minute wait for a party of four. 

She asked him why he didn’t make a reservation, since Mother’s Day is such a busy brunch day. And he said: 

“You didn’t tell me that I needed to make one.” 

Another woman I know says that every year, her husband and kids bring her breakfast in bed, which she eats as carefully as possible, because later in the day, she will be the one who has to change the crumb-filled sheets. (This is why breakfast in bed should only be enjoyed in hotels, or when the recipient is sick or hungover, and the person bringing them the breakfast understands that later in the day they will be on linen-swapping duty.) 

Moms don’t get parades and fireworks displays like other holiday honorees; they get brunch and bouquets– which, most of the time, aren’t even presented to them in vases. (Mother’s Day bouquets should not be sold without vases! If you don’t give somebody flowers in a vase, or offer to cut and put them in a vase yourself, you are giving that person a chore, as a present.) 

I know a woman whose Mother’s Day tradition is to have her husband drop her off at a hotel with an overnight bag and not contact her until the next morning, thus giving her the freedom to spend her time watching her favorite bad TV and ordering room service, totally uninterrupted for a night. While it’s not as common as a perfunctory brunch, it’s not a rare practice. Think about that: the deepest wishes of a not-insignificant number of moms is to have one goddamn day off being a mom. It’s like if we commemorated our wedding anniversaries by spending a weekend apart. 

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Bill Burr had an old bit about how he’s incredulous that being a mother is “the most difficult job on the planet.” 

“Being a mom is the most difficult job on the planet?” goes the setup. “How many mothers died on Ice Road Truckers last season?” 

 

Bill Burr, at the time, did not have any children. 

I love Bill Burr’s comedy–then, and now–but I still remember hearing this bit for the first time as a childless woman and thinking, even in my limited life experience, that this guy didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about. 

How hard could motherhood be? It’s just a years-long commitment to serve the physical, emotional, and fiscal needs of a semi-helpless entity, with very little supportive infrastructure and a built in social expectation that the experience will hollow you. It’s not like one of those truly difficult, heroic, and necessary jobs, like telling jokes into a microphone, or having a podcast wherein you get mad about Boston sports. There’s something about a childless man joking around about how hard mothers job isn’t that makes me wonder how men would receive it if a female comedian did a bit about how getting kicked in the balls doesn’t actually hurt. 

In Burr-circa-2010’s defense, being a mother is almost certainly not the most difficult job on the planet– because if it were truly the most difficult job, it wouldn’t be one that was performed satisfactorily by literally a billion people at once. I think being an astronaut is probably harder– imagine shitting in zero gravity! Being the president or a neonatal nurse also seems hard. 

But I can say from my limited, single-human experience that motherhood is very hard, but it’s especially difficult considering how much the salary sucks. How many Ice Road Truckers worked 18 hours a day last year and earned no income? Motherhood demands something almost superhuman, immediately, and with an insanely steep learning curve. Maybe it’s not the hardest job on the planet, but most people who do hard jobs aren’t expected to work for negative ten thousand plus dollars per year, unless you’re enrolling in improv classes at UCB.  

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At some point around when my daughter was six months old, the first time my head was clear since the day she was born, I realized that I had signed away the last years of my youth to her. I barely knew the kid and I’d bet my entire goddamn life on her being cool enough to justify the sacrifice. Luckily, she has turned out to be pretty okay so far, but if I’m being perfectly honest that wasn’t clear to me until she was about a year old. By the time she doesn’t need me on a near-constant basis, I’ll be an old woman– at best, with expensive hormone therapy and the lottery of genetics, old-adjacent.

I lived an entire life of dumbfuckery before I got married and had a baby. All of my ya-yas are out. My demons have been so exorcised that they’re thinking of becoming yoga instructors. And yet, I still understand that having a child put an end to something for me. There are places I thought I’d go that, realistically, I’ll probably never go. There are things I’ll never see and experiences I’ll never have. I can’t wrap my head around the opportunity cost of my mother’s generation, when women were getting married before their frontal lobes closed and whose kids were in high school by the time they were in their early 40’s.

I hope my daughter has the same opportunity to get to know and enjoy herself that I had. And I hope that when and if she’s ever being celebrated on Mother’s Day, she doesn’t need to remind anybody to make the brunch reservations.