This is NPR's Life Kit. I'm Asma Khaled. I cover the White House for NPR, but I'm also a mom of two little boys.

And when I'm not working at the White House, I still feel like I am working all the time, cooking, changing diapers, cleaning bottles.

Which is interesting because I will say I have always thought of mothering as something that I am instead of

something that I do. So much of the work of parenting and being a mom is action. It is waking

kids up. It's feeding them breakfast. It's getting snacks. It's wiping butts. It's all of that stuff.

And it's made up of thousands of small actions. So I like mothering as a verb because it gets

into what I think the daily experience is. That's Angela Garbus. She's author of the new book

Essential Labor, Mothering as Social Change. Angela's book is part memoir, part historical

survey, and part discussion of the ways parents can

create a more equitable society and how they raise their children.

I want everyone to sort of be in on this belief, which is that taking care of children and

taking care of people is a social responsibility. We cannot do this work alone. And so mothering to me is a way of acknowledging that it's parents who do it, it's mothers who do it, but it is also, you know, early childhood educators, it's babysitters, it's nannies, its grandparents, it's aunties, its chosen family.

But often, we are expected to do this work alone, which is why I have been

obsessed with the fact that so many women, particularly moms, left the workforce during the

pandemic. In total, nearly two million. Many mothers were forced to choose between being full-time

caregivers and online school administrators and keeping up with their professional lives. And it seemed like for a minute, maybe something would change in the culture.

That as a society, we'd finally recognized the immense amount of work that it takes to care

for others, for children, for partners, for aging parents. And it seemed like we realized

who is most often responsible for that work.

The weight of domestic labor is on women. And we are all sort of in a condition of servitude to like patriarchal society.

There will always be kids in need of care. Domestic labor is not going away. It is the work of being

a human being and keeping ourselves and our loved ones alive. And we need better, more

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