Why it’s time to change Mother’s Day

When Remi Michael was born three weeks ago in Lafayette, La., he was immediately taken away from his mother. Abi Bordelonor, who tested positive for COVID-19, was not allowed to hold him or see him in person. It was Brittany Prevost, a nurse at the hospital where the newborn was delivered, who fed and cared for him during his first hours.

“I want you to know he was loved today and that I treated him as he was my own. Even though you aren’t able to be with him at this time, he is being loved on your behalf,” Brittany wrote in a letter she penned to Abi. 

Britanny’s is only one of many moving and often harrowing stories we have heard about since the start of this pandemic. Nurses, nursing-home employees, and domestic health-care workers are at the forefront of the coronavirus crisis, doing the work of mothering: carrying, cleaning, feeding, providing, comforting, caring. 

From the nurses and other medical professionals are known as the frontlines, to the clerks, cashiers, cooks, cleaners and carriers we rely on as essential during the crisis — we have come to see how vital mothering is to the sustenance of our communities and our lives.

This kind of care reflects mothering not simply in its narrow sense, relating to those who raised us, but also “the enduring social capacity and practice involving the nurturing of all that is necessary for the welfare and flourishing of human and non-human life.” 

Indeed, the COVID-19 the crisis has thrown into sharp relief just how vital mothering — or the reproductive labor of caring — is for our lives. It has also revealed the way this labor is profoundly gendered and racialized. Most of the people who make up the frontline of medical care during the COVID-19 outbreak are disproportionately women of color. 

Women hold 76 percent of health care jobs in the United States and are also far more likely to be domestic workers and service workers. In turn, domestic and service workers are largely made up of persons of color. These segments of the workforce, which have long been underpaid, overworked, and under-resourced, are the most impacted by the current pandemic.

The precarity of the lives of those millions of workers who sustain our families, communities, and economy is finally moving from the background to the fore. People like Abi, who have been invisible, are making headlines on a daily basis.

However, sustained attention will evaporate without the creation of enduring models for a reconfigured approach to the labor of care.

An obvious place to start is with changing the way we think about mothering. 

Every year on the second Sunday of May we convey love and appreciation for our mothers, who still do the lion’s share of childcare and household chores in the majority of US households. 

The COVID-19 crisis, which has spotlighted this stubborn inequity, provides an opportunity to reimagine more equal familial and societal arrangements.

On this Mother’s Day, let us honor not only our own mothers but all those whose mother as a verb, and not just in a time of a pandemic: the front liners, second liners and those whose “lines” are less visible but no less essential. 

Let’s acknowledge, celebrate and value mothering — the hidden, undervalued and unpaid labor that is interwoven with our daily lives. 

A Mother’s Day that applauds mothering in this broader sense reflects the values of a caring democracy. Such a democracy would ensure the safety and wellbeing of all its inhabitants through affordable housing, education, vocational training, employment, and health care. Now that would be something to celebrate.

Kate A. Baldwin is a professor of English and communication at Tulane University. She is the author of, “The Racial Imaginary of the Cold War Kitchen.” Follow her on Twitter @katebldwn. Shani Orgad is a professor in the department of media and communications at the London School of Economics (LSE). She is the author of, “Heading Home: Motherhood, Work and the Failed Promise of Equality.”