The Invisible Labor of Mothers :: Cleaning Up Poo is a Crucial Contribution to Society, and This Is Why

Not long ago I was in the bathroom with my very sick four-year-old, cleaning his actual diarrhea off the floor while he simultaneously turned around and puked into the bathroom sink. I just stared straight ahead…eyes glazed-over, blinking slowly…a blank expression on my face…thinking to myself, “how is this my life?”

Have you had those moments as a mother? When you just think…no really…how did it come to this? How is this my life? What choices did I make along the way that amounted to this. ME. Here in unwashed hair, still in my pajamas at 2:00 in the afternoon, cleaning poo off the floor and strategically planning the best way to remove an entire sink-full of vomit. This is not what I signed up for. This is not humane. This is degrading on so many levels. Where did it all go wrong?

If this sounds a little familiar, please read on. I am hoping to convince you (and myself) that cleaning poo off the bathroom floor is one of the most crucial and important ways we can contribute to society!

All of the mundane, seemingly pointless chores we perform each day can feel like they are amounting to a whole lot of nothing. You sweep the floor, it’s covered in Cheerios one minute later. You unload the dishwasher, knowing in a matter of hours it will be full again. You schedule appointments over the phone, fill out tedious medical forms and preschool registrations online. You kiss owies. Pack and unpack diaper bags and picnic bags. You do three loads of laundry and before you can even get it folded the baskets are already full of dirty clothes. And yes, you probably deal with a lot of human excrement. Pee in your face, puke in your hair, poo on the floor. Puke on the couch, poo on their clothes, pee on your rug. Poo in your lap, puke in the sink, pee in the car seat. And yes, you clean it all. And yes, you probably have kids yelling at you, crying for you, and blaming you for everything while you’re at it.

Nothing you do has permanence. None of your work shows. And no one seems to care. At the end of the day you are a hot mess, the house is trashed, the kids are running wild (or on screens) and you can’t name a single thing you accomplished, yet you know you never had a moment’s rest. You feel defeated. You feel abused. You feel invisible.

This is hard on a soul.

This experience can summed up in a simple term. Invisible labor. The unpaid, unacknowledged work we do for hours each day has a name (It’s a real term, google it!). And it matters. THIS WORK MATTERS.

I look at it this way. Society needs a lot of resources. We need raw materials. Food. Buildings and roads. We need many goods and services to keep this world operating and we are willing to work hard and pay high premiums for these resources.

But the one thing we need most, that we literally could not function without, is humans. I’m not just talking theoretical human population numbers, I’m talking about top-of-the-line, grade-A, high functioning, emotionally intelligent humans. Humans who know how to work hard, respect others, communicate openly, and one day produce more humans of a similar calibur.

Can you think of a resource that is more necessary than this? Whatever you might feel about birth rates or population control, we clearly need to sustain the human population to some degree. And we need to sustain it with people who can be trusted to care for our Earth and our progeny.

Where do those top-of-the-line, grade-A humans come from? They come from our bellies after 9 long months of sacrifice and discomfort. They come from hours of adoption paperwork and hoop-jumping, praying for a child to come to your home. They come from our arms after months and years of breastfeeding and bottle feeding. From our bedrooms after nights of bad dreams, sick tummies, and waiting up for teenagers. They come from our kitchen tables after thousands of meals served (or slopped) on its surface. They come from our minivans after countless miles of carpooling, school pickup and soccer games. And yes, they come from our bathrooms after agonizing hours spent potty training, rubbing backs of puking kids, and even cleaning poo off the floor.

It’s inescapable. Trust me, I’ve thought about it. This work has to be done. As I knelt on that bathroom floor I considered the options. You can’t get adults without those adults first being kids. And you can’t have kids without all of the labor that comes along with it. Yes, you could hire someone else to do much of the labor for you, but many lack the resources or simply find value in doing it themselves. Even if we went full on Brave New World style, creating and rearing children in factories…one way or another those mouths will have to be fed and those bums will have to be wiped. And I’d like to call for a little more respect for the ones doing the wiping.

I believe it was Myrel Chernick who said something along the lines of, “motherhood is simultaneously romanticized and undervalued.” (please correct me if I’m wrong on this quotation). This hit the nail on the head for me. We love to praise mothers, ‘ohhh, yes, it’s such important work, so holy and noble, etc etc’ yet at the same time mothers who do not work outside the home are often made to feel insignificant and accused of wasting their brain/talent/potential. When in fact, it takes an unbelievable amount of one’s brain and talent and potential…and a whole lot of grit to raise children and do it well. And WE NEED THEM TO DO IT WELL. We need adults in this world with as much mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual stability as possible. And that stability nearly always comes back to childrearing.

People (societies, governments, much of the world at large) just assume we will do this work out of the goodness of our hearts. That because we have maternal instincts we will bear and adopt children, and because we love them we will pay for their food, clothes, education, dance classes, medical bills and so on. We will bend over backwards to do everything humanly possible to make them the grade-A, top-of-the-line humans this world so desperately needs. But they don’t make it easy on us. It’s like single-handedly growing a crop that takes a literal lifetime of 24/7 tending and nurturing, then giving it away for free. So much work, and for nearly zero financial gain. (Aside from tax breaks and occasional government assistance). Of course there are countless non-monetary benefits of raising children, and I’m not necessarily implying we should be paid (a conversation for another day) but I am insisting that WE SHOULD NOT BE DOING IT ALONE, and we should FEEL SEEN AND ACKNOWLEDGED.

Childrearing is becoming more and more difficult with the changing structure of our communities and the way it isolates mothers/caregivers. We need support! We need strong ties with family and friends. We need community. We need access to resources, education, excellent healthcare and mental health professionals. Mothers were never meant to do everything alone. I don’t know the answers. I don’t know how to make the changes I wish we could see when there is so much beyond our control.

But I do know this…we have control of our own narrative. We have control of the conversations we have with ourselves and with those in our circles. We have the ability to strengthen our own communities. And above all, we can take pride in our work. Though the labor we perform often feels degrading and invisible, we are not invisible and the implications of that labor are profound. Including, if not especially, cleaning up poo off the bathroom floor.

The next time you find yourself in one of those moments…questioning your life’s choices, wondering how it all went so horribly wrong, remember that this work is ESSENTIAL. This work MATTERS. You MATTER! And you are absolutely, one hundred percent not alone.

Sending so much love,

Denise

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