How Motherhood Liberated Me | ‘My daughter doesn’t care if I’m exceptional. She just cares that I am hers.’

https://www.thefp.com/p/motherhood-liberated-me-mothers-day

A bit late for Mothers' Day, but an essay by a young, bright, ambitious woman discovers that motherhood is measured on a whole different metric:

...It was disorienting for a twenty-five-year-old who’d spent more than a decade trying to prove I was exceptional. I had defined myself by what I believed would make me valuable in the markets where I competed: college admissions, job opportunities, the dating pool. ...

... I knew that providing my baby with milk was the most useful, necessary thing I’d ever done in my life—but it made me feel the opposite of extraordinary. ...

That is, until my daughter turned six weeks old—and she did something that changed my world forever: she smiled at me.

That smile blew all those traditional status markers out of the water—better than a million Instagram likes, an Ivy League acceptance letter, a competitive job offer—even though making my baby smile was one of the easiest things I’d ever done.

All this makes me so glad that, despite all my attempts to distinguish myself, I’ve ended up like every other mother....

Motherhood isn’t the only path to accepting this, but for me, it was my daughter’s love that freed me from my delusions of grandeur. It liberated me from the tyranny of trying to prove myself.

The reason that traditional society did not want women out "in the workplace" was not because women are not capable of being diligent and responsible workers. Daily experience has shown that they certainly can be.

But rather the reason traditional society did not want women out in the workplace is because the work of a mother at home raising her children is a far more valuable contribution to society as a whole than anything she could have been doing in the work-world.

The contribution an office worker makes through their office job to "society as a whole" pales in comparison to the contribution a mother raising sane, mentally healthy, members of the next generation.