Working In A Society That Worships Motherhood But Disrespects Mothers
Three weeks ago, someone I am collaborating with on a project told me:
“If you cannot handle the rigors of the position, you should go back to walking your dog and doing mommy things.”
Did you gasp?
I did too.
Let’s talk about how we got there.
We are nearing the end of July, and 2026 has unfolded in ways I never anticipated—and, consequently, in ways I couldn’t have adequately planned for. Professionally, I entered the year with confidence. I had a five-year contract that was reduced to two before the fiscal year had even closed. I invested time nurturing relationships with promising creatives, only to watch those opportunities disappear before they could fully mature. Then there was the audit that seemed determined to become a permanent fixture of my life: seven months spent scrutinizing a five-figure budget. I’m not exaggerating. By the time it ended, the cost of the audit had consumed an entire program line.
Financial pressure has a way of making us entertain opportunities we would ordinarily reject. Out of necessity, I found myself entering professional relationships that my instincts would usually have warned me against. Desperation has a remarkable ability to drown out discernment.
Some of those relationships have been perfectly fine. We discuss deliverables, do the work, and move on. Others have reminded me why I happily left corporate America behind when I boarded a South African Airways flight in 2016 with my family.
Unfortunately, geography doesn’t protect you from toxic work culture anymore. In the digital age, it simply follows you through your Wi-Fi connection.
I love the work I do. I don’t take for granted that I get to shape narratives and tell stories for a living, especially at a time when creative industries are being hollowed out by executives who celebrate efficiency while eliminating the very people who make meaningful work possible. Entire departments disappear, experienced professionals compete for scraps, and we’re told this is innovation.
But that’s another essay. You’re here because of Mr. “Go Walk Your Dog.”
When we began working together, we agreed on a clearly defined role with clearly defined responsibilities. Before long, however, I found myself being assigned work well outside that scope. Some of those tasks required skills I simply hadn’t developed yet. I was upfront about that.
“No,” I said. “I’ve never built a cabinet from unicorn tears. But give me a few days and I can figure it out.”
Apparently, honesty was not the correct answer.
The requests kept coming. Every time I completed the work, it was picked apart and dismissed. Worse still, I was publicly blamed in WhatsApp groups for failures involving responsibilities that had never been assigned to me.
Me.
A whole CEO.
Herh.
Eventually, I pushed back. I explained that the goalposts kept moving and that I couldn’t continue meeting expectations that changed by the day. Instead of addressing my concerns, I was labelled “childish” and “defensive.”
Then came the response that stopped me cold.
“If you cannot handle the rigors of the position, please go back to walking your dog and doing mommy things.”
What struck me wasn’t simply the rudeness. It was the assumption buried inside the insult.
“Mommy things” was offered as the opposite of serious work. As though raising children is what women do when they aren’t capable of accomplishing anything important.
I have spent twenty-one years raising four children.
Twenty-one years of nurturing, teaching, correcting, comforting, budgeting, scheduling, advocating, negotiating, problem-solving and loving human beings into adulthood. Twenty-one years of helping shape responsible citizens who will someday influence communities I will never even see.
To dismiss all of that with the phrase “doing mommy things” wasn’t merely disrespectful. It revealed just how profoundly our society misunderstands motherhood. And I don’t think this is unique to me.
I suspect many women who step back into professional spaces after raising children encounter some version of this same prejudice. Sometimes it’s subtle. Sometimes it’s overt. But the underlying assumption is remarkably consistent: motherhood is something women do instead of real work.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
The early years of parenting demand more from a person than many corporate jobs ever will. There is postpartum recovery, sleep deprivation, isolation, anxiety, the loss—and gradual reconstruction—of identity, all while caring for a tiny human whose needs evolve almost daily. It requires project management, financial planning, emotional intelligence, conflict resolution, endurance, creativity, flexibility, resilience and an extraordinary capacity for functioning despite exhaustion. Yet somehow we’ve convinced ourselves that this isn’t work.
I remember someone telling me, when my third child entered first grade, that it was time to “get back into the real world.”
By “real world,” they meant corporate employment.
As though collapsing into bed every night after a day spent caring for children wasn’t real. As though the invisible labor that keeps families—and ultimately societies—functioning somehow doesn’t count because it isn’t salaried.
This is the contradiction I cannot stop thinking about.
We tell women that motherhood is life’s highest calling. We celebrate pregnancy announcements. We praise mothers on Mother’s Day. We insist that women should embrace motherhood as one of their greatest achievements. And then, the moment they become mothers, we treat that work as professionally irrelevant.
Worse, we weaponize it.
We use “mommy” as shorthand for unserious. We imply that years spent raising children leave women less capable, less ambitious and less competent than those who never stepped away.
I’ve never heard a man told that if he couldn’t handle a demanding role, he should “go back to doing daddy things.”
Fatherhood is viewed as evidence of maturity.
Motherhood is too often treated as evidence of diminished ambition.
No wonder so many young women are questioning whether they want children at all. My own daughters have expressed little interest in becoming mothers, for reasons that have nothing to do with biology and everything to do with the way society treats women once they accept that responsibility.
So, am I still working with this person?
Yes.
Not because I believe what they said was acceptable, but because every difficult relationship teaches us something. Some people teach us practical skills. Others expose the values and assumptions that quietly shape our world.
This collaboration won’t last much longer. That much is clear. But it has given me something unexpectedly valuable: a deeper understanding of the quiet, everyday misogyny that so many women endure at work. If we are ever going to build healthier workplaces, we first have to acknowledge the assumptions hiding in plain sight.
Perhaps one of the most dangerous is this: We expect women to become mothers. We simply don’t expect anyone to respect the work once they do.
Women who work: What’s the most outrageous thing anyone has ever said to you because you were a woman—or because you were a mother?