My step-daughter has lost something. Her garage door opener, a notebook, or a permission slip that’s due tomorrow. She doesn’t ask me. She asks her mother.
She’s on a work call and texting another work colleague before she heads into the office. However, two minutes later, she walks into the kitchen and tells her where it is. She’s right. She’s always right.
I’m clueless. By my own admission, I’m the sitcom dad in sweatpants who can’t find the milk in the fridge without help. My wife runs the operating system. I run a few applications.
This is the part of motherhood I’ve been thinking about all week, with Mother’s Day on Sunday.
This isn’t about cooking dinner or handling the kids. It’s the thing underneath all of it. The noticing.
She knows which account is used to pay certain bills. She knows when everyone needs to go to the doctor. She knows when her daughter is going through a rough patch and how to ask about it without making it weird. She knows the woman at her office who’s carrying the team and never gets credit for it. She knows because she pays attention. That’s the whole trick, and it’s not a trick.
We talk a lot about what mothers do. We talk less about what they see. The seeing is the work. The doing flows from it.
A mother’s attention is so reliable that the whole household gets to relax into not having to pay any of their own. I don’t have to remember when the laundry gets done or when the dog is due for shots, because someone else is remembering for me. That’s not a small grace. That’s the thing that makes a home function. To be fair, I need to be much better at paying attention and keeping up with what’s actually happening around my house.
Her absence makes the labor visible. Her presence makes it invisible. That’s how good she is at it.
Every household has someone like this, and in most of them, it’s still a mother. She’s the one the kids go to, the one her colleagues lean on, the one her husband needs when he’s having a bad day. She’s the one her siblings call at 10 p.m. when they need advice. The receiver of everything.
It’s labor. It’s just unwaged.
What I want to say on Sunday, and what I usually fail to say well, is that the noticing is the love. The remembering is the love. You can buy flowers, cook breakfast, and write a card, and those things are nice. But they don’t quite reach the work itself, because the work isn’t an event. It’s a quality of attention sustained across years.
So this Sunday, if you’re like me, try saying the specific thing. Not “thanks for everything,” because everything is where the meaning goes to hide. Try “thank you for remembering to pay the water bill, because if it was up to me, I’d surely forget.” Try “thank you for helping me be a better husband, step-father, and son.” Try the actual thing she did that you didn’t have to do, because she was already doing it for you.
The mothers in our lives have been paying attention this whole time.
The least we can do is return the favor.
Be seeing you.
