The Best Mother's Day Gift 🎁

This is an awful place to find a gift for your mother. Even if it was, I don’t have any affiliate links. You don’t want to get your mother or the special person in your life just any gift. You might be thinking about a piece of jewelry or a Christian Dior perfume (believe me, I just bought one for my mom for Christmas). We all hate gifts that you have to fake being grateful for, just to throw them in your closet or give them away. So why don’t you give something that your mother would appreciate? What’s the best gift that you could give your mother this Mother’s Day? Doing the dishes. Let me explain.

We All Know It, But Few Admit It

In a world where we cannot begin to comprehend statistics, here’s a number that will shock you. In a single year, women do almost $11 trillion of unpaid work. I’ll let that sink in with you. There are stark disparities between the genders in leisure time and time spent doing unpaid work.

Of course, there are many nuances in this statistic, which I encourage you to read more on. Women’s unpaid labor has been studied as women have grown from 20% to 76% of labor participation over the last 100 years. Old gender norms are no longer applicable as single-earner householders are becoming rarer while everything gets more expensive (and that was before our current inflation). As women continue to join the workforce, they are gaining financial independence, but they are also expected to maintain the same responsibility at home. Childcare, cooking, and cleaning are responsibilities that are attributed to women. This gap in unpaid work can be seen in their “leisure time” below.

The only country where there is some semblance of gender parity is Norway. In basically every country in the world, women are doing more work and have less leisure time than men. So what in the world does this have to do with doing the dishes?

Do the Dishes

At any given time, this is what my sink looks like. I’m guessing yours probably looks similar. If you do the dishes regularly, you know how much work it is. If you don’t, yet you continue to open the cabinets and grab clean dishes, you need to do some more dishes. This isn’t a one-time “I guess I’ll do the dishes”, but a complete overhaul of a household system.

The old “You don’t know what you have until it’s gone” rings true. When I was growing up my mom was a homemaker. She was excellent, especially at cooking since her parents owned a restaurant when she was in high school. She recently started working again and occasionally has to go into the office. On one of the days when she went into the office, the rest of my family and myself were caught in our worst nightmare. Cooking lunch for ourselves! As we scrambled to figure out what was in the fridge and how to cook the dishes piled up. What my mom considers easy and basic to cook became an ordeal for us. It all came to a head when my dad grabbed an untouched spice off the spice rack and dumped it on our food only to find it was infested with bugs!

We all take it for granted how much support we receive from others. David Brooks talks about how we shouldn’t teach kids to be independent, we should teach them to be interdependent. Once we realize what we’ve been given, we need to give the proper gratitude.

Credit is Due

It has been well-researched that one of the things that makes us the happiest is control over our own time. From Morgan Housel to Dan Gilbert, if you want to make someone happy, give them control over their time. Let them spend it how they want, with whoever they want, wherever they want, for however long they want. Many mothers can’t do that because they are bound to familial responsibilities.

This isn’t a call to all people to drop everything to sweep the house or do the dishes. It is a call for a more equitable and sustainable life. By removing some of the stresses of life, we can help grow and support the people around us. And if you truly love your mom, why wouldn’t you want to do the dishes?

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