Mother’s Day and the Subversive Apostrophe

For most mothers, the day is doing work that policy should be doing the rest of the year.

On Mother’s Day ten years ago, Ethan and I (Jess) invited my parents to lunch. I had a surprise for my mom: a coffee mug that said “Babcia, est. 2017” (babcia is Polish for grandma). My son’s due date was January 7, 2017. He arrived three weeks early, on December 19, 2016, making the year on the mug wrong, though it remains her favorite.

Our family tradition has settled into something simple. No cut flowers. I love flowers, but I like them most when they’re still in the ground, so we plant something in the garden instead. Ethan makes eggs Benedict and fresh-squeezed orange juice. No fancy restaurants, no babysitters. We go outside and do something together. Last year, we rode our bikes over a bridge across the Connecticut River and stopped for hot dogs and refreshments along the way. Perfection.

The thing about my Mother’s Day is that none of it is really about Mother’s Day. It’s about Ethan and me both having jobs that let us be home together. Ethan runs an ER and works plenty of holidays, but he does his best to protect this one; I run my own company and can choose to step away. It’s about a garden to plant in, all of us being well enough to ride bikes together, having bikes in the first place, and having the stability to enjoy a carefree day as a family. For most mothers in this country, the gap between what Mother’s Day promises and what their actual lives allow is enormous, and it’s not a gap that flowers fix. My friend and colleague Katie Schenk, an epidemiologist, wrote something this week that captures this better than I have. I’m handing the rest of the article over to her…

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It’s framed as the hardest job in the world, and we celebrate it for one day a year: Happy Mother’s Day.

One way to think about this day is not only as recognition, but as an opportunity to consider the systems that shape family health and well-being. Evidence consistently links maternal and child outcomes to access to healthcare, paid leave, childcare availability, reproductive healthcare services, and workplace protections, all of which are shaped by policy decisions. When policy underinvests in these areas, families bear the consequences in predictable and inequitable ways.

That apostrophe in Mother’s Day is doing ideological work. This is not only about celebrating an individual mother in isolation; it also reflects mothers as a population group and the systems that affect them. The singular framing obscures the collective realities of caregiving and the policy environments that shape them. Reframing it as Mothers’ Day shifts attention from the individual to the population, and from sentiment to the policy environments that shape the lives of mothers and all those in caregiving roles.

When symbolism and systems diverge

Mother’s Day can highlight the gap between symbolic recognition and the policy supports that shape day-to-day experiences of motherhood in the United States. Too often, it functions as a commercial and cultural distraction from the structural conditions that actually determine family well-being. Symbolic gestures are common (cue the flowers, cards, and brunches), while structural supports such as paid family leave, affordable childcare, and workplace flexibility remain unevenly available.

From a public health perspective, current approaches to supporting families are often described as reactive and fragmented. Resources are concentrated on addressing outcomes only after they emerge (for example, responding to maternal mental health challenges or pregnancy-related complications), instead of being invested in upstream factors that reduce risk and prevent the poor outcomes in the first place. These patterns are not evenly distributed. Caregiving burden varies by income, race, geography, and employment status, contributing to persistent disparities in maternal and child health outcomes.

A meaningful framing of Mothers’ Day must also reflect that motherhood is not universally experienced. For some it is joyful, for others it is marked by grief, infertility, pregnancy loss, estrangement, or barriers to parenting. Messaging that presents a single celebratory narrative can miss these differences in lived experience and can unintentionally exclude those whose experiences fall outside dominant cultural expectations.

When a stranger in a store or clinic addresses me as ‘mom,’ it may seem like harmless shorthand. But the assumption behind it, that any woman accompanying a child must be her mother, collapses a complex relationship into a generic placeholder. The shoe salesperson does not know whether I am a parent, a foster parent, a guardian, or simply someone accompanying a child who needs support. This reflects a broader pattern in how caregiving is treated as invisible, interchangeable labor, particularly for women. The same flattening happens at the policy level, where caregiving is treated as an individual responsibility rather than a collective one supported by public infrastructure.

Commercial messaging can further widen the gap between symbolic gestures and real support, offering mothers special deals on wellness products and novelty gifts marketed as self-care, rather than the sustained investments that would actually make a difference. Consumer recognition is being substituted for structural support.

What evidence supports

Research consistently identifies a set of interventions associated with improved outcomes for families. These include policies such as paid family leave, access to affordable childcare, comprehensive healthcare (including reproductive healthcare services), workplace flexibility, and community-level safety initiatives. These supports are associated with improvements in maternal mental health, reductions in infant mortality, increased workforce participation, and greater economic stability. They are also linked to reductions in disparities by improving access to resources across populations.

This is where framing matters. If Mothers’ Day is to mean anything beyond flowers and brunch, it could function as a public health reminder of what evidence already shows. Caregiving outcomes are policy outcomes, and the conditions in which families live and work are shaped by political and economic decisions, not individual effort alone.

The evidence points to a persistent gap between what we know works and what we actually invest in. Short-term gestures continue to substitute for long-term infrastructure, and the burden of filling that gap falls on individual families rather than being addressed through the collective systems that could reduce it, particularly for the most vulnerable. We continue to celebrate caregiving symbolically while underinvesting in the conditions that make caregiving sustainable.

If we are serious about maternal and family well-being, we should stop treating Mothers’ Day as an endpoint, and start using it as an entry point to a broader policy conversation about what it actually takes, based on evidence, to support caregiving in a modern society. Anything less is sentiment without systems. And the evidence gives us every reason to do better.

Honestly, I’d happily give up any hope of receiving flowers altogether if they’re being used as proof that “we’ve done something for mothers today.” We haven’t. But we still could.

Katie D Schenk MSc PhD is a mother, an epidemiologist, and a health informatics specialist based in Washington, DC. She is the author of The Public Health Workforce is Not OK.