We’ve Been Sold a Con

“I sat in that pump room and thought, what was all this for? That’s when I realized the system is rigged—it asks everything of mothers and gives nothing back.”

"In my culture, we believe the first 40 days shape the next 40 years—but here, mothers are left to fend for themselves."

"I wanted to be there when my kids got off the bus, but my job couldn’t make space for that. So I had to rebuild my entire career just to be the kind of mother I wanted to be."

"In Europe, people questioned why I would go back to work full time—but in the U.S., burnout is just expected. I had been running on empty for years and didn’t even realize it."

"We expect women to recover from birth and go right back to work—like nothing happened. There’s just no support for mothers, and it only gets harder as time goes on."

"In one day, I had a sick child, a school closing, and a baby fall off the bed—and still had to show up for work. That’s what motherhood in America actually looks like."

“I realized I wasn’t just raising a child—I was expected to do everything, alone. The ‘village’ we’re told exists simply isn’t there.”

“I lost my job, my income, and my health insurance—all because I couldn’t solve childcare on my own. I still haven’t recovered from that.”

“I didn’t quit because I wasn’t capable—I quit because I was pregnant, raising a toddler, and had no support. That’s what the system does to mothers.”

Being a stay at home mom never crossed my mind growing up- not even throughout my pregnancy, but I remember getting my first quote for child care and quickly doing the math in my head. The math wasn't mathing. I wish I could say I had the choice to either spend 3/4 of a paycheck to have someone care for my baby, or sacrificing my career to stay home and raise my family, but the truth is, even after I learned the cost of care, I found out there was a waitlist for infant care in the 10 mile radius from my house. So honestly, I feel I was pushed out of the workforce. If I was to be a stay at home mom, I would make sure I stayed productive and find ways to improve myself as well. So, I pursued my Bachelors, and then my Masters. Five years of night feedings, morning breakfasts, outside child activities, snack times, lunch times, nap times, cleaning, making dinners, intentional play, bedtime, homework, exams, cleaning, sacrificing, isolation and perseverance. By the time my youngest entered TK, I had earned a BA and MS in a field I have been working in for 15 years, hoping that education would be a great way to shield that 5 year working gap. In 3 years I went from ready to take on the world, to 1000 job applications unanswered and deep depression. Not to mention, breakfast, snacks, lunch, dinner, cleaning, cleaning, cleaning, searching, searching, searching. Showing up for everyone and everything when it feels like the world has shut the door on me. After years of questioning who I was, where I was going and if there was something wrong with me, I finally land ' a job'. While it is not the job a busted my ass all my life to get, it was something to add to my plate that somehow balanced the plate of motherhood. Reflecting on this. I don't know how anyone does it. It's a lose lose situation. We either lose the opportunity of time to raise our children, or we lose out on lucrative careers. While women have had the opportunity to work since the 18th-19th century, how have we not developed a method of raising a family that doesn't include a mothers sacrifice? How are we okay packaging motherhood up into a happy housewife role, when for many it's lonely, stressful and for most, a choice made by financial need? We live in a society where women are expecting to be the care giver, but also, because wages have not kept up with the cost of living, we live in a world where both parents have to work. In some way or form, moms are always playing a balancing game, but I think it's due time we start making our own rules.

I think I most realized how the system was failing when my baby got sick and was in a day care. The daycare typically made him sick, but then expected you to drop everything to get him out of there as quickly as possible and not come back until he had seen a doctor to ensure it wasn’t Covid. He was born in late 2020. We had no “village” to support us, which we didn’t fully realize until after he was born. It was incredibly isolating and the pandemic worries were just stacked on top of the already huge pile of new baby worries. I left a somewhat flexible job to earn more to cover childcare costs. The new full time job expected me to be on site 5 days a week. I felt panicked every day to pick him up on time and perform everything needed for dinner and bedtime so could never stop anywhere while commuting home. I broke down in tears one morning at work bcs I couldn’t keep up with everything and was getting sick about every other month because I was so stressed. I ended up quitting my job in landscape architecture, quitting my industry which I earned an advanced degree to enter, and moving to a new one that is more flexible with wfh and supportive of families. I’m getting sick less from stress, but now have to live with feeling internal conflict about leaving a career I worked hard to build, only to do something I feel less committed to but is more healthy for my family. It’s upsetting to see businesses keep moving towards in office full time again, without realizing or acknowledging how much wfh helps families and especially moms. It’s still incredibly challenging even with one child because the times of things don’t align between work and childcare and summer is a great example as everyone scrambles to enroll in camps to fill the time. I can’t believe how out of touch this country is to this crisis and how little anyone cares about fixing it. Mothers are often the best employees because we don’t have time to mess around, but I’m not sure this is acknowledged enough. Thanks for shedding light on this complex issue.

Becoming a mother in the United States was one of the first times I truly understood, in my body, how deeply a country’s policies shape women’s lives. After giving birth to my first child by C-section, I was back at work after eight weeks. I remember pumping milk in parking lots and McDonald’s bathrooms while trying to keep up with a demanding job working with vulnerable young people. What broke my heart most, though, was leaving my baby with a nanny who had been forced to leave her own children in South America in order to come to the U.S. and earn money caring for other people’s children. I cried almost every day going to work. It felt so deeply wrong — not just for me, but for her, for our children, and for the entire system that made this seem normal. Later, I moved to Sweden while eight months pregnant with my second child. The emotional reality was still incredibly hard. I was in a new country, with a toddler and a newborn, and my then-husband left again after only a few days and was away most of the year for work. So I know very well that no system removes the emotional, physical, and relational intensity of caregiving. But the structures around me were entirely different. Sweden offered affordable childcare, longer parental leave, and a basic understanding that raising children is not simply a private burden for mothers to absorb alone. It is a societal issue, an economic issue, and a public good. That difference matters enormously. In Sweden, support for parents is not primarily framed as kindness or generosity. It is understood as smart economics. When there is paid parental leave and affordable childcare, more women can remain in or return to the paid workforce. That means tax revenue, stronger labor force participation, and more long-term stability for families and society alike. It also means that children get access to early education, language development, socialization, and support systems outside the home. For children from more vulnerable households, that can be life-changing. A functioning childcare and parental leave system does not just support individual mothers. It strengthens the entire society. At the same time, I think even many progressive conversations still miss something crucial: we must stop treating caregiving as primarily a mothers’ issue. It is not enough to simply ask how we can support women in carrying more. The whole paradigm needs to shift. We need to stop assuming that mothers will continue to bear the brunt of unpaid labor, mental load, and caregiving, while fathers are treated as optional helpers. Until we move from a “mothers first” mindset toward a real “parents first” vision, where both parents are seen as natural, necessary caregivers, we will never achieve gender equality on any large scale. No country in the world has fully accomplished shared caregiving. Sweden certainly has not. We still have a long way to go. But the changes that have happened there show how powerful this shift can be. When fathers are given real parental leave — and lose it if they do not take it — it changes norms, expectations, and family dynamics. Men learn firsthand how hard caregiving is. They bond more deeply with their children. And over time, engaged fatherhood becomes not an exception, but something admired and expected. In Sweden today, being an involved father is increasingly a status symbol. That shift brings enormous benefits — not only economic, but emotional, relational, and health-related for fathers, mothers, and children alike. This is something I have spent much of my life working on — not only advocating for a better world for mothers, but also for fathers and children. Among other things, I helped create global fatherhood campaigns such as MenCare, because I believe deeply that more equal caregiving is one of the most powerful levers we have for healthier families and more humane societies. What I wish America understood is that this is not a niche “women’s issue.” It is not a luxury. It is not something to do after the “real” economic questions have been solved. It is one of the real economic questions. A society that gives parents time, support, and affordable childcare does better — economically, socially, and in terms of public health. Mothers benefit. Fathers benefit. Children benefit. Businesses benefit. Society as a whole benefits. It does not have to be the way it is in the U.S. And until we stop treating caregiving as women’s private burden, and instead build systems that support both parents and shared responsibility, we will keep failing families in ways that are both heartbreaking and entirely avoidable.

I am a surgeon. I have three degrees, completed two fellowships, and am double-board certified. I run the trauma bay in the emergency room, perform life-saving operations, and I run a surgical ICU. I am married to another successful surgeon. I make more money than he does. We have two wonderful children and I was pregnant, gave birth, and breastfed TWICE during surgical training with only 5-6 weeks of parental leave made up mostly of sick and vacation time. I worked until I went into labor with both children. I am objectively a badass, but it was more sacrifice than what should be accepted. My children are my whole world and I do everything in my power to be everything to them while remaining a working mother. I am in a career that doesn't let me hit the pause button. When you are a surgeon you have a duty to keep your hands moving. If you take a break, your skills start to falter, especially when you are early in your career. I have to keep going at 100% speed. Not only do I work as a full-time surgeon, I also manage the household. I manage the children's schedules, the school reminders, travel arrangements, my husband's schedule, I handle all of the budgeting and billing, and I handle the housework or make sure it is delegated. My husband is a wonderful man and a fantastic father, but he is more comfortable with me handling the mental burden of the home as he's not wired to take control of our lives to a standard I am willing to accept. Instead of getting upset about the mismatch in mental and emotional energy, I outsource as much as I can. Instead of becoming angry that I am doing all of the housework and he's doing none, a third party does it all and takes a lot off of my plate. I joke that it's coming out of his paycheck because he chooses the imbalance, but this works for us for right now. Another important part of my story is that I have three male partners, each with 2-3 children. Each of them has a stay-at-home wife. We have the exact same job and have the exact same hours and duties at work. I have been trying to educate them on how to equalize the structure of our workplace so that parents without stay-at-home spouses can fulfill their duties as caretakers of children. It's an ongoing and never-ending project. Instead of rage, I am just trying to find a way to push forward without becoming angry at the men who have been brought up in this society. There is a lot of recent data that if you have a woman surgeon (or doctor), the clinical outcomes are better. So we are doing it all and doing it better.

Ever since the morning I found out I was pregnant in August of 2025, something strange happened: the internet seemed to shift around me. Almost overnight, my feeds, once full of career inspiration, humor, and harmless recipes, became flooded with videos insisting I’d never balance motherhood and ambition. Clips of stay-at-home moms describing their “traditional roles,” warnings about how a woman’s career supposedly ends the moment she sees two pink lines, and posts romanticizing the idea of marrying a “provider” as the only path to real stability. But the comments… the comments were even louder. Women attacking other women. Accusing strangers online of not being “good wives” or predicting their husbands would leave them “high and dry.” People confidently declaring that independence was naive, that success would evaporate the second a baby came. It felt like everyone was shouting, and all of it was pulling me away from one simple truth I thought pregnancy was supposed to bring: isn’t motherhood supposed to be magical? I found myself wondering when the world became a battlefield of opinions disguised as facts. When did it turn into me vs. them? How did we go from celebrating each other’s choices to tearing down anyone who didn’t mirror our own? Eventually, the noise became so overwhelming that I had to protect my peace. I blocked certain words. Muted phrases. Curated my feed like my sanity depended on it—because in a way, it did. And once the digital fog began to clear, I could finally see what I had been trying to remember all along: motherhood was never meant to be a weapon used against us. It was meant to be a sisterhood. A season of life where we look to those around us for inspiration—whether they are women thriving in their careers, or women who find deep fulfillment at home. I’ve always drawn strength from both. And why shouldn’t I? The women who came before us fought for our ability to choose: to choose our paths, our passions, our futures. So when I see the current climate working so hard to divide us, I can’t help but pause. Because the moment women start turning against one another is the moment we should all be asking the same question: Who benefits from us being divided? Because it certainly isn’t us. Not as mothers. Not as women. Not as a sisterhood

I'm a runner and athlete so I continued to work out during my pregnancies as long as I could. Unfortunately, after my second child, my abs were separated so badly that no type of exercise was ever going to bring them back together. I hated my body because of how it looked and my belly protruded because my abs were not able to support me. I could stick all my fingers down into my center without touching my abs. It was shocking how little information there was about diastasis recti (the separation of the abs) and how it was too late for me to fix this problem naturally. After as much research as I could do, I decided to have very invasive surgery (abdominoplasty) to sew my abs back together. Typically people undergo this surgery to remove fat but my purpose was to structurally put my body back together. This had to be done by a plastic surgeon and of course this was not paid by my insurance at all. I'm fortunate enough to afford this, but there are so many women who are impacted by this post-delivery of their children that cannot. It not only impacted me physically, but mentally as well. This is crazy how such little information is shared with expectant Moms about this condition.

I work from home, so I thought returning from maternity leave would be easier. I was wrong. The laptop doesn’t care if my baby wakes at 2 a.m. Deadlines don’t pause for sleepless nights. But the hardest part isn’t the work itself—it’s what I lost when I became a mother. Projects I once led were quietly reassigned. Promotions I was on track for were delayed or passed over. Opportunities to shine were withheld, with subtle explanations: “We thought you needed to focus on your family.” The message was clear: motherhood comes at a cost. Corporate culture celebrates “flexibility” but punishes women for using it. Remote work didn’t save me—it just made the expectations invisible but relentless. I’m expected to be constantly available, fully productive, and somehow undistracted by the human responsibilities I now carry. I realized this country—and corporate culture in particular—is not built for mothers. Even from home, I am forced to juggle full-time work and full-time caregiving while watching the system quietly stall my career.

Postpartum anxiety/depression hit me as soon as I got home from the hospital. I believe I was suffering from antenatal depression, but given major life changes my family and I concluded that was the cause in addition to being extremely pregnant and overworked. At one point, my husband told my OB at a routine ultrasound appointment that I was sad, I giggled and the OB replied, “she doesn’t look sad”. I tried my best to get in front of any PPD but I found it hard to find mental health care that was covered by insurance in the state of New York. My hope was once my son was born the cloud would lift. It didn’t. I told everyone and anyone that would listen. I was not myself and I was scared. At my 6 week check-up, in an attempt to get help, answered honestly (albeit confused and worried) on my mental health evaluation. My OB reviewed the form told me it wasn’t good and that he didn’t want to see me on the news because I had done something to my child. He told me to follow-up with my therapist for additional help. I was not prescribed anything until I asked for more help via the patient portal. The appointment, including the Pap smear, lasted 10 minutes. I left the office in tears. I simply wanted help, I had delivered a beautiful healthy baby boy via a scary c section and it felt like the concern for my well-being ended there. Baby was here and thriving and my own care became nonexistent. By the end of the week I took myself to the ER for ideation and severe intrusive thoughts. The ER care team instructed me to follow up with my OB. My OB seemingly washed his hands on the situation and told me to relay all the info the physician on call. I wanted my OB who knew my history and whom I trusted to help me manage the PPD. I was left feeling helpless, hopeless and lost. Despite receiving some support it felt like I was begging. Care matters and I believe the treatment I received from my OB contributed to my spiral. I will never forget leaving my newborn with my mother to go and find help at the same hospital he was born. It is a disease(s) I do not wish on anyone. At the hospital I was put in the psyche ward, I feel for these individuals, but I was the only one that appeared to be dealing with postpartum issues. Mothers need different care, I don’t know what that looks like but the hospital visit is one I feel incredibly shameful about but it had to be done for my child and for myself. I am grateful to the organizations and doctors who did listen and helped me get better. But, it didn’t happen without a fight. It feels like I clawed my way out of a pit. I still fear relapsing and articulating the difficulties postpartum mental health presents to people who lack understanding. The experience changed my life and I am grateful for every day that I have my health. It shouldn’t have been that hard. Childcare is Mothercare!

What I wish America understood about motherhood: After I became a mom, I really struggled to come to terms with choosing a career or being the one to raise my baby. Nothing about the current U.S. labor market is conducive to me being a mom AND using the skills and expertise I’ve built over the decades between school and work. Layer in the value society attributes to careers and the lack it places on domestic labor and now you’re struggling with your sense of self. I didn’t go through all those late nights in the library at school, eating cold take-out at the office while iterating on presentations, pushing to be seen as equal to male counterparts at every turn, to put it all on a shelf just because I had a baby. There is also the financial reality of motherhood today: it’s challenging to support a family without a dual-income household. If the U.S. offered 12-18 months of maternity leave, better access to affordable childcare, or a society that valued domestic labor, many other moms and I wouldn’t have to experience such a deep psychological and identity crisis.

The majority of my life I never wanted to be a mother. I watched my mother be forced to stay home with 5 kids and felt I couldn’t be a career woman and a mom. I was driven and wanted to climb the ladder as quickly as possible. But when my husband and I got engaged, something shifted. I wanted a child desperately for the first time and started making shifts in my HR career to ensure I could be a mom and continue working. I took a step back in my career and took a lower title and pay cut to ensure better work/life balance for childcare pick ups and drop offs given my husband had a high-demand, long hours job. I had never wanted to live in any country other than the USA until I got pregnant. My husband, an immigrant, always said he dreamed of leaving the USA and I told him there was no shot. When I found out I didn’t have paid maternity leave I slowly started to change my mind. When the daycare bill showed close to $3,000 for full-time care, I was shattered. When my husband asked if I would consider staying home, I got angry. Why can’t I be both? I had already stepped back so much in my career for this other dream. Why didn’t my husband have to stay home? Why does it make me a less invested mother to have aspirations outside of child care and child rearing? For the first time, I told my husband, in tears, that I hated this country. I felt trapped by infrastructure that was not made for me or for other women. It was meant to trap me in a traditional role because pick ups, drop offs, child care costs, and so much more wasn’t aligned with modern society or modern working roles. My husband and I are now actively considering and researching where we can move to because this beautiful country of ours is no longer supporting our needs. I cannot imagine raising my daughter in a country that has stripped away so many reproductive rights for women and forces us to give birth, but provides no support for mom and child during and after birth.