Of course Kamala Harris is a mother

There has never been a time when motherhood wasn’t politicized, scrutinized, devalued, pushed aside, attacked. Sure, on one day a year, Mother’s Day, the flowers come out. But on every other day moms face intense discrimination due to our nation’s lack of care infrastructure.

Mothers are judged, overworked, overlooked and discounted. That’s even more the case for moms of color.

So it should be no surprise that the recent article published in this outlet, “Kamala Harris is the highestranking mom ever in U.S. politics,” was met with a firestorm of negativity, including those questioning the vice president’s very right to embrace her selftitled moniker of “Momala,” simply because she is a stepmom.

The comment section is telling: “Ms. Harris has never given birth.” “Stepmothers are not birthing persons.” “She's not really a Mom.”

And those were the nice ones.

Not okay.

The erasure of moms and motherhood is relentless. And the “nuclear family” myth has long been used to silence, delegitimize and punish moms — even moms who happen to be vice president of the United States of America.

Let’s get one thing clear: Motherhood is never defined by biology — and biology should never hold anyone back who aspires to motherhood. There are all kinds of moms: adoptive moms, stepmoms, foster moms, grandmoms, relatives who raise children, families with two equally mom moms, married, unmarried, partnered and single moms, chosen family moms, families with wholly new definitions of moms.

The defining component of motherhood is the work of care.

Motherhood is about those who are doing the work of raising the very future of our planet. It’s about loving, nurturing and supporting a child through the ups, the downs and the bumpy learnings of life.

Yet the unpaid work of caring is regularly overlooked (or attacked, as in this case). Meanwhile, the paid work of professional caregivers is chronically devalued and underpaid below livable wages (early childhood educators are one of the lowest paid professions in our nation). Moms in the labor force face an uphill battle against bias — with moms of color experiencing compounded impacts due to structural racism.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Right now moms in America face a wholly inadequate care infrastructure, including a lack of national universal policies relating to childcare, paid family and medical leave, living wages for care workers, home and communitybased services, access to unbiased health care and more.

These are policies that most other industrialized nations take for granted. Studies show that implementing these policies in the U.S. would help stop the intense wage and hiring discrimination that moms in America still face.

They would create millions of good care jobs, and would enable people doing the daily work of “momming” to employ themselves with jobs that put food on the table for the children they're raising. Polling shows people across the political spectrum broadly support these changes.

Addressing and ending the hate, the discrimination, the judgment, the dismissal, the attacks on moms of all kinds isn’t just the right thing to do. Ending the wage discrimination that moms face would boost our economy and get kids out of poverty. A recent study found that finally building a care infrastructure would lift our country’s longterm real GDP growth by 1015 basis points.

So instead of focusing on who gets what mom title, shaped by people with no knowledge of what’s actually happening in a family, let’s follow Vice President Kamala Harris, Momala’s, lead. Let’s address the fact that our care infrastructure was hanging by a thread before the pandemic and that it has all but unraveled now.

The result is that moms have been disproportionately pushed out of muchneeded jobs during the pandemic, with moms of color experiencing compounded economic and health harms. This has put women’s labor force participation at a 30year low, setting back gender and racial equality.

Our vice president knows this emergency is real, and that we need to build a care infrastructure in an urgent way, not just because of piles of academic studies and fact sheets that fill rooms, but also because of her direct experience in the work of momming.

Representation matters. Experience matters. And the experience of Vice President Kamala “Momala” Harris is a benefit to us all as she tries to navigate our nation back better than we were before the pandemic.

That’s the kind of mom we all need.