A Mother’s (Invisible) Labor: Why We Value Dads More
It’s not hard to predict which parent’s personhood those offspring will conclude is more valuable.
Children are gender detectives, distinguishing between the sexes from as early as 18 months and using that information to guide their behavior, for example by choosing strongly stereotyped toys.
And family research shows that men’s attitudes about marital roles, not women’s, are ultimately internalized by both their daughters and their sons. This finding is a testament to kids’ ability to identify implicit power, to parse whose beliefs are more important and therefore worth adopting as their own.
I’ll be honest: I didn’t really appreciate my mom that much until I was in college or later.
It wasn’t just teenage girl vs. mother challenges.
My mom’s work at home — the basics of food and shelter, clothing, medical care, school supplies, driving to activities, etc — was this fundamental framework that supported my life.
My dad’s work with us was much more obvious and tangible: helping with math homework, teaching me to read maps & navigate on road trips, employing me at his business to help with bookkeeping (aka the beginning of my spreadsheet addiction).
It was generally a given that my basic needs would be met (because I am lucky), so while my dad’s lessons were measurable teaching moments, my mom’s work was more emotional labor and didn’t involve announcements or special attention. It just was.
This division of labor became even more obvious after they were divorced, even though they both provided us with separate households & the fundamentals.
They both worked, both self-employed and therefore always on-call to clients, always finishing something up in their home office, taking us to work after we got out of school, bringing us along to meetings on weekends.
I was proud of both of them — then and (even more so) now.
I looked up to my mom in her suits, toting her comically large 90s-era mobile phone, driving her gold Cadillac to open houses. I loved all the tools in my dad’s office, listening to him review designs with clients in the car on road trips.
But outside of work, my mom was “just” mom.
She took care of things, and we were free to use our time with her however we needed — socializing with friends, catching up on homework, throwing hormonal fits to loud music in our rooms, relaxing in front of the television.
Our time with dad, however, was always productive & consciously spent. We did projects and chores. We learned skills and played games. We helped cook and clean. The things that were taken care of invisibly at mom’s house were a group effort at dad’s.
Put simply: we took her & her time for granted; we respected him & his time.
How could we not? Culture and society had taught us all that that’s how it should be. We all just did what we’d been told and shown.
So I valued my dad and his time and his contributions more for a long time.
To this day, I recount stories of when & how my dad taught me specific skills that I know — which has prepared me incredibly well for school and life.
I notice how often I refer to him, how often things remind me of those special moments. And I am so, so grateful to have had such an actively involved dad & to have learned so much from him.
But I don’t talk much about my mom’s work — what story is there to tell about someone providing for your basic needs every day for decades?
There’s no exciting narrative arc to most of what she gave me — which is doubly sad because she surely had a lot to offer to teach me, but no time (and, probably, confidence) to sit me down and pass her lessons on.
Recognizing the value of my mom’s time and the importance of that invisible framework doesn’t diminish the incredibly huge value of what my dad taught me and did for me. That not how love or gratitude works — there’s no finite capacity for it.
But it’s supremely unfair that I spent 20 years seeing his work with us and parenting as greater than hers — especially when it’s easy to argue that it would be useless without the foundation of what she gave me.
And it’s wrong that these foundations still receive so little credit — outside of holiday cards and awards speeches, there’s not much to say about the people (typically mothers) who enable us to develop thanks to years of invisible efforts.
It’s taken a lot of personal development, reflection, and reading (and rinse and repeat) to become aware of this, and to work to shift how I see my mother, myself, other women, and men & our respective roles and biases.
So what do we do?
First, accept at least half the responsibility for this pervasive marital dynamic.
Power issues are not often raised between couples, but when they are, studies show that they’re most often framed not in terms of how husbands need to change but rather how wives do — you know, she needs to be more assertive. When juxtaposed against a discussion about rampant sexual harassment, it sounds like another tired version of “She should’ve worn a longer skirt.”
Second, commit — wholeheartedly and without being asked — to examining male privilege.
Our culture’s devaluation of “women’s work” has left men with little incentive to shift into less-traditional roles at home, even as women have become ever more successful breadwinners. Women are much more likely than men to report that the division of child care with their spouses is imbalanced, perhaps because, as one study found, men perceive that they are doing their fair share when they contribute just 36 percent of the work at home.
With that in mind, up the ante around participation in the most laborious and chore-like aspects of family life.
Men can pack backpacks and suitcases, they can search for child-care alternatives in preparation for upcoming school holidays. They can restock groceries, plan meals, purchase birthday presents, send thank you notes, schedule pediatrician appointments, check folders. Any husband can invite his wife to sit down and drink her coffee while he makes the family’s lunches.
Katherine works remotely while she travels the world — on the road since June 2014. Want more? Follow along on Medium and sign up for the mailing list.
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