“Motherhood is the hardest job—the most important job.”

Then let me retire or take a lengthy sabbatical before you start pestering about my next act or reinvention. Is there a next act or reinvention? Motherhood isn’t optional once you step inside—it is permanent. Perhaps it’s not so much the irritating pressure about what’s next and more the insinuation that up until this point, my life has been somehow lacking that gets under my skin. Reemerging after a long period of unpaid caregiving and management, there is an assumption that, of course, given the opportunity, why wouldn’t you rush into something that finally matters? Meaning, something with a paycheck. Because a meaningful existence is measured by comfort and contentment, which, in our world translates to money—ideally, the more you have, the deeper your contentment. Another, lesser measure of meaningful existence, is what you contribute—your legacy, and legacy is mostly defined by physicality—wealth, buildings, parks, monuments, scientific discoveries—one rarely hears mention of legacies of kindness, of human development or wisdom unless there is some association to the political or religious.

The impact, legacy, and contribution of unpaid caregivers (or paid caregiving, for that matter. The value we assign to those jobs is unashamedly apparent seeing as how they are some of the lowest paid of all sectors) is intangible within this common definition. It is an impact, a legacy that takes shape over time in the mostly invisible spaces of the body, psyche, and soul.

I know people get tired of hearing this; it is an itch we’ve been trying to scratch since the first whispers of the feminist movement. I’m tempted, in many cases to leave it be for fear of the fatigue of whiny women. But, in the interest of legacy, mine has been, along with a tireless contribution to the invisible, a legacy of not shutting up. My intolerance for skewed standards and injustice is just as much a part of me as my petite stature and brown eyes. I may waver, fall prey to popular definitions of worth and berate myself for not measuring up from time to time, but one constant has been my inability to tolerate injustice. I’ve often borne “the right thing” as a burden, especially since being the good girl is mostly an insult. But the closer I get to me, the more I understand that the heaviness and the shame are an internalization of insecurities and expectations that are saturated in this distorted definition of value.

Where I grew up every woman around me had a very clearly defined purpose—to be a wife and mother—the former far more important than the latter. When I left, I was plunged into a world where being “just a mother” was almost abhorrent. The new expectation I internalized demanded boundaries no less clearly defined, but greatly expanded, so expanded in fact as to include—everything. The “having it all” culture was nothing short of superhuman. In this new world, the successful, complete, desirable woman was entirely self-sufficient, possessing all the qualities of woman we’ve come to expect, plus all of the attributes we’ve come to associate with man. Super-woman, super-mom, super-CEO; anything we would endeavor to do would be insufficient unless we could “super” it. I internalized that definition of value without hesitation, and it nearly broke me.

I despise the trad-wife fad and the “wife schools” that have sprouted within conservative religious movements—another topic for another time—but I understand the backlash against the impossible measure of value we’ve been trying to live up to. Being a full-time caregiver and household manager wasn’t a choice for me; it was the path of least resistance, one that I did resist vigorously for years. But being compelled to fill the role—as so many women are, for reasons beyond our control, whether it be the cost of childcare, proximity to opportunities, or health challenges—has clarified my perspective and the stark reality around the actual value our society is willing to grant “the most important job.”

Mother’s Day is a day to celebrate mothers, but this year I’m preoccupied with erasure. Whatever the origins, whatever it has become, the day is swaddled each year in my present stage of mothering, and as per the usual, I celebrate by contemplating the subliminal messages of popular culture and societal norms that inform expectations, assumptions and perceptions of the role.

Painting mothers as pathetic creatures is part of that messaging.

Actually, mixed messaging to the extreme is the norm when it comes to mothers. On one hand, we are essential and sacred, goddesses even—for a limited time. But that ends abruptly the instant our kids are grown.

From the moment our kids are born we are bombarded with incessant reminders of separation, a subliminal insistence of restraint, of showing up invisibly, of crippling our attachment, surrendering to the limited necessity, the temporary role, the need to carefully manage and minimize our investment. Too little investment, we are selfish, preoccupied with our own fulfillment, value, and desire—too much investment, we are also selfish, obsessed with the need to be needed, immersed entirely in a role that is fleeting.

At this juncture, where archaic gender roles are regaining traction and taking on the hue of a romanticized past that never existed, this contemplation is essential. When women, many of whom were mothers, insisted on equal rights and opportunity, there was no way to have predicted that having it all would mean doing it all. Again, I understand the backlash to that unattainable expectation. But shifting frantically into reverse isn’t the antidote. We’ve been there and we rebelled. I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating, the flaw wasn’t in the expansion of equality, but the refusal to meet that expansion and accommodate it.

The patriarchy is experiencing a resurrection, which is a tepid description seeing as how it never died in the first place. It needs mothers in order to perpetuate itself, but it needs them to be contained, restricted, and narrowly defined, to be obsolete after a relatively short period. A guaranteed method of implementing that narrow definition is through shaming mothers for continuing to care and shaming their offspring for continuing to need that care. Forcing us to shrink back down ensures the impact of mothering well will be overshadowed by the dispensability of the role. The fear of mothers as indispensable reveals the magnitude of our contribution.

Fragile men have regained their footing in our increasingly misogynistically inclined social temperature and are unabashedly insisting women return to the sacred role of submissive mothering. Advocates of the patriarchy may need mothers, but they need mothers to remain small because in our full capacity we burst the seams of the straightjackets and spill over into their carefully curated, inflated sense of necessity and value. The modern patriarchal man needs free childcare, unpaid household labor, and that extra bit of income if we can swing it. And once the kids leave, the stagnant man-child continues to greedily syphon up every last drop of nurturing and care from his mother-wife, all the while insisting she accept it as a most meaningful and pampered existence.

Meanwhile, the mothering of our actual children must be confined to the very fleeting years between birth and adolescence. The insistence that mothers separate from and forcibly teach their kids to separate begins the instant the babies arrive, with sleep training, feeding schedules and self-soothing. Every cell in my body revolted against those demands, but I did try to distort my raging instincts and comply, because, after all, I was just a mom, what did I know? Everybody else, of course, knew better. I’m glad I quickly abandoned those particular demands. It was easy to put my foot down when sleep training felt more like torture, when feeding on demand allowed us all to get some rest, and when the absolute terror in my children’s eyes confirmed that forcing self-soothing was bullshit. Other measures of prescribed separation and isolation were more subtle, and the damage of conforming was cemented before I had the chance to catch up. Truth is, individuality and identity emerge in their own time, and that desperation to initiate the process upon a child’s arrival serves to subliminally remind us that mothers will play a liminal role and eventually be obsolete.

Making mothers obsolete is one of the many ways the patriarchy maintains control. Rapidly increasing the distance between mammas and their babies is essential to achieving and maintaining the rudderless anxiety required to cultivate a population ripe for surrender to the all-powerful, all-seeing, authoritarian nature of a radiant masculine ruler.

Think of the shame hung round the necks of enduring and powerful connections between mothers and their kids, especially mothers and sons, a metric not often applied to fathers and their kids. Common insults of smothering motherand mamma’s boy are not similarly applied to the daddy’s girl. Mammas are warned not to coddle their sons, while daddies are encouraged to spoil their daughters. Over-protective (possessive) daddies are laudable—no one is going to blame him for loading the shotgun every time another boy/man shows interest in his (ownership implied) princess, but the insults and narratives that drown the trope of the impossible mother-in-law are endless. Consider the slew of movies, books, TV shows, and even conversational adoration of overprotective fathers. They are mostly sweet comedies or tear-jerking heart-warming narratives. In contrast— we have the monster in law, the deranged, psychotic woman who just can’t let go. Both tropes are extreme and absolutely indicative of problematic parenting, but they speak convincingly to a perception of what is acceptable and what is—pathetic. Fathers are sources of revered wisdom; mothers are fonts of unsolicited advice. Fathers, with limited presence and input it seems, can still loom large as heroes, while mothers, showing up with stability, consistency, and unconditional nurturing, are effortlessly relegated to the mundane and tedious. Men become elders, women, crones. Personally, I’m thrilled to embrace the crone, but it’s not a trope that was intended as complimentary.

To be a woman conditioned by the tenants of patriarchal belief is to dread aging and that feeling accelerates when your primary work has been nurturing small humans. Dye your hair, fill the wrinkles, bemoan age spots and fragile skin. Age= invisibility and dispensability, especially when lacking a legacy tied to something tangible like wealth or career achievement. For those women with flourishing careers, whether mothers or not, invisibility can be postponed a little but is still inevitable. Keeping us distracted with fear and insecurity restricts our energy and commitment to grow into the full expanse of our knowledge and capabilities—that is the point. A woman without shame, without barriers, who is clear eyed, resolute and confident, is nightmare for the patriarchy.

When we’re young, we put up with so much shit. We rationalize it and absorb it, conditioned to believe it is the only way to know love or be the object of desire. But as mothers, whether we have mothered by nature of physical birth or by nature of who we are, we have birthed love, a love more complete than any we may have longed for as young women.

My motherhood has not diminished me—quite the opposite. It is an expansion unlike anything I could have imagined. And it doesn’t halt abruptly when they’re grown. I will always care for my children more than anything else in the world—it is a fountain that doesn’t dry up once it begins to flow, and I never want them to feel diminished in any way if they need to dip back into that care no matter their age. The ongoing intricacies of growth that mothering demands as our offspring move rapidly through defining phases of transformation is a metamorphosis more potent and ground-shifting than any philosopher’s pen.

Bell Hooks is right to insist repeatedly in her books exploring love (All About Love; Communion) that women aren’t inherently better at care just because they’re women. But when we are exceptionally good at it, we risk being the ones who care too much, love too much, feel too much and are dismissed and ridiculed for it. A caring, feeling man on the other hand, is cause for celebration.

Which brings us back to the erasure of matriarchs, the invisibility and disposability of women after midlife. This is not a new discussion; we’ve been chipping away at this old block for decades. While the patriarchy may desperately need us to be suddenly obsolete in a role it demands we fill so selflessly and unconditionally, I, for one, refuse to shrink.

The patriarchal structure will continue to define legacy and value in terms of the building of things and not of humans and human relationships. The essential work of dismantling that structure requires us to reimagine every last facet.

This Mother’s Day, we celebrate “the most important, hardest job,” but let’s not stop there. Let’s show up, every moment of every day, to stand our ground in a moment in history when even the solidity of that ground feels uncertain.