The original plan for our Mother's Day article was to highlight the way female world leaders have been facing the pandemic crisis. While we have been celebrating female leaders from New Zealand to Iceland who have been responding to the Coronavirus with such strength and grace in these unprecedented times, we noticed a trend: we love to celebrate women who do it all. And why not? They have high powered careers, a partner, a family; in other words, they’re essentially superwomen. While these women are deserving of all the praise and accolades they get, their reality is not the reality for most moms - who are just as influential and awe-inspiring.
For Mother’s Day, Wearshop wants to celebrate all moms. We want to celebrate the career woman, who comes home at the end of a long grueling day, makes dinner, and helps her kids with homework. We also want to celebrate the moms whose jobs don’t necessarily have fancy titles but are still taking time away from their families to go to work, maybe at night or on weekends, all while making sure their home remains in order and doesn’t fall apart. We definitely want to honor moms who stay home, whether by circumstance or by design, who keep the house going and have centered their lives around their families.
A mother is so many different things to any one person. She can be your best friend, caretaker, confidant. She’s the one that gave you radishes as a snack in your lunch because even though you wanted a Fruit Roll-Up like the rest of the kids in your class, she wanted you to know about healthy eating. She taught you not to waste food, to be cognizant of your privilege, how to make a perfect pasta sauce, how to be someone who listens rather than speaks.
We tried to find a link between those women who are running countries in the face of uncertainty and our own mothers and mothers in our social circles. While it may not seem blatantly obvious that the mom working at home with two screaming toddlers who are used to being in daycare has anything to do with a woman who is trying to ensure the survival of her citizens are in the same boat, they are.
To be a mom, you have to know how to divide your heart into a million pieces. You don’t need a degree for that. You have to face even the scariest things that come your way with kindness and empathy. You don’t need a title for that. It’s innate. Even Barack Obama was well aware that it takes a woman to lead, he once said: “If more women were put in charge, there would be less war, kids would be better taken care of and there would be a general improvement in living standards and outcomes.”
We think that’s the great equalizer with female leaders and regular moms at home - they know how to be mothers, making them all superheroes in their own right. Whether everyone around you is screaming, no matter how tired you are, be it from taking care of the kids all day, or from a crazy day at the office, you will continually take your house and ensure that it remains a home.
And so for Mother’s Day, no matter what it says on your cv, no matter what your email signature reads, if you’re helping everyone around you without necessarily receiving a paycheck or recognition for it as you deserve, or if you are governing a country, we just want to say, thank you.