How We Built Civilization on Her Back, Then Gave Her a Walmart Bouquet
By Delilah McSwain
May 12, 2025
Today is Mother’s Day. A day for brunch reservations, limp carnations, and vaguely panicked text messages from grown children who forgot to buy a card. A day for syrupy Facebook tributes posted from airport bars. For sentimental ads starring golden retrievers and slow-motion spaghetti dinners. For the one annual family photo where Mom is allowed to look exhausted on camera. A day when the world pauses just long enough to say, “Thanks for everything you do, Mom — now get back to work.”
And what is it that she does?
Everything.
Mothers are still performing an average of 2.3 more hours per day of unpaid labor than fathers — the equivalent of a second job, minus the paycheck, health plan, or lunch break. They’re more likely to serve as caregivers for elderly parents, to step in as teachers whenever the school system buckles, and to act as emotional triage units for every household crisis.
Since the pandemic, women have returned to the workforce in record numbers, yet they’re still getting paid less, promoted slower, and penalized harder for being visibly human at work and visibly exhausted at home. Meanwhile, more than $113 billion in unpaid child support hangs in limbo — most of it owed to mothers, most of it unlikely to arrive before the next utility shutoff notice. We don’t call it double duty. We just call it womanhood in America.
And what did she get in return?
A pink card with glitter glue and a $10 coupon for bath salts… packed in a floral box that smells like expired lavender and the slow decay of social infrastructure.
It wasn’t always like this. The origin of Mother’s Day was Mothering Sunday, a medieval tradition where English workers returned to their “mother church” — and, if distance and circumstance allowed, to their actual mothers too. It was spiritual. It was sacred. It was rooted in gratitude, not Hallmark inventory cycles.
It was in that spirit that Anna Jarvis founded Mother’s Day in 1908, to honor her own mother — a Civil War nurse and public health crusader. Jarvis was the ninth of eleven children born in rural West Virginia; seven of her siblings died in infancy or early childhood, so she didn’t need a marketing team to teach her what motherhood costs. She imagined a quiet, reverent holiday — no pageantry, no merchandising, just solemn reflection in the form of simple, handwritten letters.
What she got instead was scented foam bath baskets, $18 mimosas, and a handwritten IOU for a Costco oil change stuffed into a teddy bear’s lap.
Jarvis devoted the rest of her life to fighting the very holiday she created — picketing, protesting, and threatening lawsuits against everyone from the American Legion to the florists’ lobby. She got herself arrested at a 1925 war mothers convention for protesting their white carnation fundraiser. She once ordered a “Mother’s Day Salad” at a department store tearoom, dumped it on the floor in protest, and stormed out. When people started sending greeting cards, she called them “a poor excuse for the letter you are too lazy to write.”
She was not wrong.
Jarvis torched every bridge she could find trying to kill her own holiday — and died blind and broke in a sanitarium, her care funded (wait for it) by the very florists and card companies she’d spent her life trying to destroy.
America buried her quietly, then sold out her legacy by the rose.
And now? We’ve got influencers posting “#MomGoals” while maternal mortality in the U.S. continues to rise — especially for Black women. We’ve got lawmakers who wax poetic about the sanctity of motherhood while voting against paid leave, child tax credits, and baby formula aid. We’ve got a culture that demands everything from mothers — and offers damn near nothing in return.
We say motherhood is a choice, then treat it like a personal indulgence the moment someone needs help. We act like it’s sacred, then treat it like a luxury item the second it becomes inconvenient. The only thing bipartisan about American motherhood is how both parties love to leverage it in campaign ads — and then forget it by inauguration day.
And still, moms show up — not just the smiling ones, or the soft-spoken ones, or the ones who make it look easy. All of them. The ones who rage. The ones who flinch. The ones who are still standing even when they shouldn’t have to. They show up when the fridge is empty and the rent is due. They show up at Little League games and grave sites. They show up when we fail them, again and again. And today, we hand them a mimosa and a half-hearted “You’re amazing” — like that’s going to make things even. Things will never be even.
I remember my own mom, working 12-hour overnight nursing shifts, only to come home just long enough to get me and my brothers off to school. Then she’d wake up in time for the youngest to get home — four hours of sleep on a good day. Then back in the car, heading to the hospital with the kind of quiet focus you only see in marathon runners and people being hunted. She didn’t look like a zombie. But… okay, maybe she did.
Meanwhile, May is also Zombie Awareness Month (Zombie Hotline: 1-900-490-DEAD).
But before you call the hotline to report a woman dragging twin three-year-olds across a Target parking lot — limping, glassy-eyed, and foaming at the mouth — maybe take a breath. Odds are she’s not undead. She’s just a mom. She’s already seen worse than the zombie apocalypse before breakfast.
Filed from a front porch with dead flowers, chipped china, a heart full of other people’s memories, and a mouthful of flesh.
#ZombieAwarenessMonth
I love you, Mom!
