This is NPR's life kit. I must m'hawle it. 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 Garbess, 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 in how they raise their children.

I want everyone to start being 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 early childhood educators, it's babysitters, it's nannies, it's grandparents, it's aunties, it's 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 sustainable solutions on how to continue to do that work.

On this episode of LifeKit, how we can recognize, compensate, and celebrate the essential work of mothering.

I started off my conversation with Angela asking a big question. If mothers and parents are not going to get paid for caregiving, then how can we start valuing it more?

That's a great question. I think that number one is we need to talk about it.

This is the work that makes all other work possible. And this is something we saw in the pandemic.

When our infrastructures of childcare, when babysitters, when nannies, when childcare centers and preschool places closed, we were all scrambling.

We were lost. I think insisting upon its visibility is the first step.

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