Mother’s Day: One Day in May—and Every Day

Look into Nature and you’ll see some powerful examples of the strength and selflessness of mothers.

Mothers go to great lengths to give their babies the best start possible in life. Monarch butterflies fly over 5,000 km between the northern United States and southern Canada to reach their overwintering grounds in Mexico. The next spring, they begin the cycle of life all over again by flying just far enough to lay the next generation’s eggs.

They’re not the only ones who travel such great distances. In early spring, the Porcupine caribou herd travels hundreds of kilometers from its winter ranges in Alaska and the Yukon to its traditional calving grounds on the coastal plain of the Arctic Refuge. The bar-tailed godwit undertakes the longest migration of any bird, traveling each fall from the arctic nonstop to New Zealand. As the days lengthen, it returns to raise a family of chicks on the tundra.

Other animal mothers make great personal sacrifices for their babies, too. Mother orangutans are single parents and care for their young as long as eight years—longer than any other single parent in the animal kingdom. They make nests with their babies each night in the rainforest canopy and carefully teach them where to find fresh food and how to stay safe from predators.

Some mothers give everything. The octopus lives about a year, and the final act of her life is producing her eggs—as many as half a million in all, depending on the species. After laying them in a burrow, she guards them until they hatch, and then she passes away.

There’s another strong, selfless kind of mother, too, one who is in it for the long haul. She’s the human mother. While she’s deserving of celebration every year, she’s especially worthy of recognition after the year we’ve just been through.

Mothers and pandemic stress

Certainly, the pandemic has affected us all in some way. Some have lost beloved family members or friends. Others have lost jobs, livelihoods, and savings. Amid these realities, the pandemic has been an especially difficult burden for mothers.

Research from the Pandemic Parenting Study (and others) has found that the pandemic has increased the time mothers spent with their children by as much as 85% over the last year. This makes sense. With remote school and interruptions in childcare, many working mothers added additional responsibilities to their already-full plates in 2020 and 2021.

Mothers also filled new holes in their children’s social lives during lockdowns and social distancing, becoming playmates and activity directors throughout this long year.

Of course, this has taken a toll. In September alone, more than a million women exited the workforce in the US and Canada. A Canadian study found that levels of anxiety and depression doubled in parents during the pandemic—and it measured this against the previous 10 years for particularly stark insights. Pregnant women and new mothers also struggled with increased rates of anxiety and depression that could be traced to our pandemic stress. In further possible evidence, the birth rate in the US and Canada has fallen since the start of the pandemic as people put off starting or adding to families during this time.

Celebrating mothers’ strength and creativity

It’s not all gloom, though. Mothers have shown amazing strength, resilience, and creativity during this time.

We’ve helped our children navigate new and complex school schedules and responsibilities. We’ve managed multiple Zooms and Google Meets and GoToMeetings, served as IT director and snack manager, and guided them through Zoom fatigue.

We’ve made our children’s birthdays special even in a pandemic, with video parties, car parades, favourite cakes, and special gifts.

We’ve made sure that Santa and the Tooth Fairy were designated essential workers and could get through with their special deliveries.

We’ve taught our children chess. We’ve found online art classes and drawing videos. We’ve learned new hiking trails. We’ve made up scavenger hunts. We’ve made time for grandparent time, even when it was reading stories together over FaceTime across the miles until we could visit.

We’ve bundled our children up in warm layers and masks so they could see friends outside in person for a playdate.

We’ve made hot meal after hot meal, even when shortages and long lines made grocery shopping a bigger challenge than it has ever been.

We’ve consoled kids who melted down over anxiety, unhappiness, isolation, frustration, and the pure misery of missing a world that was changing before our eyes.

Most of all, we did this while inside we were also struggling, while our stress levels were high and our mental and emotional reserves were spent and we had work and bills and life responsibilities piling up, too.

Something very much like hope is blossoming around us now as we move from a dark winter into the lightness of spring. Sometime in the future, what we’ve been through will be a memory with softer lines than it has now. Someday, your grown child will ask you about the pandemic, and how you got through it, and what you learned.

We’re hoping you learned that like the bar-tailed godwit and the monarch butterfly, your endurance is real. We hope you know that like the orangutan, what you teach, your children learn. We hope you see that like the octopus, you’d give anything it takes to see your children safely through this time.