She Gave Everything
She Gave Everything. And Nobody Asked If She Wanted To.
This is not an attack on mothers. It is a defence of them — from the myth that was built around them without their consent.
My mother is one of the most capable people I have ever known. She has also spent most of her life making herself smaller so that everyone around her could feel bigger. I used to think that was just who she was. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realise it was also what was expected of her.
I don't think she would describe her life that way. I don't think most mothers would. Because the story we've been handed — the one that gets repeated every second Sunday of May with flowers and breakfast in bed and cards that say everything you do goes unseen — is that a mother's selflessness is her superpower. It is what makes her extraordinary. It is, the story goes, the purest form of love.
And I'm not here to tell you that's wrong, exactly. The love is real. The sacrifice is real. The fact that my mother would set herself on fire to keep me warm is something I carry with me every day and do not take lightly for a single second.
But I've been thinking about something. And once I started thinking about it, I couldn't stop.
Who designed the role that requires her to do that? Who decided that a good mother is, almost by definition, a woman who has learned to disappear? And why are we celebrating that — with flowers, once a year — instead of questioning it?
The selfless mother is not a natural phenomenon. She is a cultural construction. And like most cultural constructions that disproportionately cost women, she has been around long enough that we've stopped noticing she was built at all.
The blueprint looks like this: a good mother puts her children first. Always. She puts her partner's needs before her own. She does not complain about being tired because tired is just part of the job. She does not take up too much space with her own ambitions, her own health, her own interior life — not because those things don't matter, but because the role was not designed with room for them. And she does all of this, ideally, with warmth. With patience. Without resentment. Because if she does it with resentment, she is failing at the thing she was supposed to be good at naturally.
This is the myth. And it is everywhere. It is in the way we talk about mothers who "sacrifice everything." It is in the quiet social penalty for mothers who visibly prioritise themselves. It is in the fact that a father taking his children to the park is celebrated as an involved parent while a mother doing the same thing is simply doing what mothers do. It is in the language we use on Mother's Day itself — the going unseen, the giving without asking, the love that requires nothing in return.
We have romanticised women's self-erasure and called it motherhood. And then we have handed out flowers once a year and called it gratitude.
We have romanticised women's self-erasure and called it motherhood. And then handed out flowers once a year and called it gratitude.
Here is where I stop editorialising and start showing you the data. Because this is not just a feeling or a cultural observation. The health cost of maternal self-erasure is documented, studied, and consistently overlooked in exactly the same way that the self-erasure itself is.
Research on what sociologists call the "maternal health penalty" shows that mothers — particularly those in partnerships where they carry the majority of household and caregiving labour — consistently rank their own health needs last. Not occasionally. Consistently. They delay medical appointments. They underreport symptoms. They describe their own exhaustion in minimising language: "just tired," "just stressed," "just a lot on at the moment." The word "just" doing a lot of heavy lifting over years and decades.
Studies on the mental load — the invisible cognitive labour of managing a household and family — find that even in partnerships where domestic tasks are relatively evenly split, the planning, anticipating, remembering, and coordinating falls disproportionately on mothers. This is not a minor inconvenience. Chronic cognitive overload is associated with elevated cortisol, disrupted sleep, increased inflammatory markers, and higher rates of anxiety and depression. The body keeps the score on invisible labour too.
And then there is the postpartum period — the window immediately after birth when a mother's body is undergoing one of the most physiologically demanding recoveries in human experience, while simultaneously being expected to be entirely focused outward. The research on maternal nutrient depletion postpartum — iron, magnesium, omega-3s, vitamin D — is striking. The research on how often those depletions are systematically investigated is less impressive. Because the mother's body, once it has produced the baby, becomes somewhat beside the point. The role has been fulfilled. What happens to the woman inside it is a secondary consideration.
This is not an accident of medical oversight. It is a downstream effect of a culture that has always valued what mothers produce more than what mothers need.
I study Innovation Sciences. One of the things you learn early is how to trace a design gap — the space between what a system claims to offer and what it actually delivers to specific groups of people. And when I look at the institution of motherhood through that lens, the design gap is enormous.
The institution of motherhood was not designed by mothers. It was designed around them — by a society that needed their labour, their emotional output, their physical availability, and their silence about the cost of all three. It extracted the maximum possible from women in the domestic sphere, gave that extraction a beautiful name — devotion, sacrifice, unconditional love — and built an entire cultural infrastructure to make the role feel like a calling rather than a contract.
That infrastructure includes Mother's Day. I want to be careful here because I love my mother and I will be buying her flowers on Sunday and meaning every word I say to her. But I can do that and also say this: a single day of celebrated appreciation does not undo fifty-one weeks of a system that was not built with her wellbeing at its centre. Giving someone a spa voucher after breaking their legs is still giving them a spa voucher. The gesture is not the same as fixing the structural problem.
What would actually change things? Parental leave policies that don't make it economically irrational for fathers to take time off. Healthcare systems that investigate maternal health with the same rigour they bring to other areas. Cultural narratives that stop treating a mother's selflessness as her defining virtue and start treating her needs as equally legitimate to everyone else's in the household. Workplaces that don't quietly penalise women for becoming mothers while quietly rewarding men for becoming fathers.
These are not radical ideas. They are just ideas that require the system to give something back, rather than only asking women to give more.
Giving someone a spa voucher after breaking their legs is still giving them a spa voucher. The gesture is not the same as fixing the structural problem.
None of this is about making mothers feel unseen on Mother's Day. It is about making them seen properly — not as symbols of sacrifice, not as the role they perform, but as full human beings whose needs are legitimate every day of the year, not just the second Sunday of May.
My mother gave a lot. She still does. And I love her for it with everything I have. But increasingly, the most important thing I can do with that love is refuse to romanticise the conditions that made so much giving necessary in the first place. To say out loud: she deserved more support than she got. She deserved a system that saw her as a person, not just a function. She deserved to be asked what she needed, not just thanked for what she gave.
So this Mother's Day — yes, buy the flowers. Call her. Tell her what she means to you. Mean it completely. And then, when the day is over, stay angry at the system that made her work so hard for so long with so little structural support. Channel that anger into something. Advocate for the policies that would have made her life easier. Raise the children around you to share the load. Refuse the myth that a good woman is one who has learned to need nothing.
That is not a tribute to your mother. That is a defence of her. And she has always deserved someone in her corner doing exactly that.
To every mother who gave everything — you were always worth more than the flowers. ❤