How to make your wife not hate you on Mother's Day: An open letter to men (paid subscriber bonus)

The Mother's Day gift guide your partner wishes you'd read, why Mother's Day matters, and how you can avoid fucking it up again this year.

Dear Men of the World,

Mother’s Day in the United States and much of the world is next Sunday. You need to celebrate the mother of your children. If your first impulse is to explain why you don’t have to, then you’re a fucking problem.

It doesn’t matter what pseudo-intellectual bullshit you want to couch your laziness in. Mother’s Day is a feminist issue, and celebrating mothers on this day matters. Here’s what your wife/partner/girlfriend/babymamma really wants you to know as the day draws near.

You need to celebrate Mother’s Day

Our entire culture is devoted to devaluing mothers and their labor. We like to pretend that their work isn’t work, so that we don’t have to acknowledge it. And in the rare instance where we acknowledge the work, we pretend that it is unskilled so that we don’t have to acknowledge the intelligence, ingenuity, and exhaustion of motherhood. This refusal to acknowledge mothers is foundational to patriarchy. The devaluation of motherhood is about devaluing women.

And is that really what you want? To devalue mothers? To devalue women? To devalue the partner you are supposed to love?

Statistically, mothers do roughly 80% of the parenting and 80% of the household labor. On Mother’s Day, for one day out of the year, mothers ask that this role be reversed. What do you think it says about you, and about your feelings about your partner if you don’t think you should have to support them as much as they support you on one day of the year? If you don’t think you have to show them love or appreciation?

It’s nothing good, that’s for goddamn sure.