I just got off the phone with a BFF who doesn’t yet have kids. She is one of the many who struggled with my decision to give up my career to raise my kids. Though this phone call wasn’t the usual ‘hi, how are you? Lets talk paint colours…’. It was more of ‘hey, I was just thinking, society really doesn’t value stay at home moms’. In agreement I sighed ‘oh, so that’s what everyone is passively saying when they ask me if I’m ‘just a mom?”
Colleagues, family, friends and strangers have called me ‘just a mom’. It’s a term that makes it socially acceptable to discreetly tear down the value of being a mother.
Mommy wars, working moms, stay at home moms, the mode of ‘mom’ has changed over the generations. For modern moms there is little value put on being a stay at home mom, it’s not enough. It is just…. just a mom.
But there is a poker hand of moms that society smiles at with an easy breath of acceptance: