What if it was a mom’s world? Sure, we rule a lot of the world directly around us, but what if we were truly in charge of everything. We posed that question (amongst others) when we sat down to interview six women, mothers, neighbors, wives, partners, friends, and individuals with a lot to say. About life, child-rearing, breastfeeding, and what the future holds for moms everywhere.
| Q: | What is the easiest part about being a mom? |
Loving your child is easy. It is very easy to love your child and more as they get older and you develop more of a relationship with them and they become more themselves. But almost nothing else about it is easy.
| Q: | What would a mom’s world look like? |
If moms ruled the world everything would be so much more efficient, everything would be scheduled down to a tee. There would be support for everyone who needed it. People would be taken care of a lot more than they are. Children would have a place to go that was free and accessible for all families, and giving birth and raising a child would be much more supported and much easier.
| Q: | What makes you hopeful for future moms? |
Women are in more spheres than they ever have been before. We are in politics, we’re leaders. We have so far to go to reach equity and to have true choices for women, but we have amazing leaders who are leading us to a future that I feel hopeful that my daughter can take part in.
| Q: | Do you feel respected as a mother? |
Motherhood is political. I feel like it was the most radicalizing experience of my life to become a mother. You learn to care for other people in a way that you never had to before in your community because you have to care for a small child and yourself. You have to completely disassociate to not see motherhood as a political act.
Breast milk should be a gross domestic product. It should be actually tallied up last year how much labor I spent breastfeeding and pumping. It is just so time consuming. Women are just doing so much invisible labor that is not compensated, and it's got to end. It’s constant. It’s like 35 hours a week. It's like having another job. If you are actually working the entire time, then you have two jobs, and one of them feels much more important because parenting puts everything else in perspective and gives you a completely new perspective on everything that matters.
| Q: | How can moms show up for other moms? |
Being a mother made me much less judgemental of other people, because I realize that we are all trying to survive something that is impossible in our culture. People have lots of different ways of trying to survive, so the best way to show up for your mom friends is to not judge the choices that they make. Help them be the moms that they want to be, not the mom you want them to be. Help them reach their best potential to be the best mom to their babies.
What would a mom’s world look like to you? Share your story here.
