Your Motherhood Matters

Samantha Stephenson gives a boost of encouragement to anyone feeling like she is just a mom.

“Mom, how big am I?” My son bounces on his heels, eagerly awaiting my answer.

“What do you mean, honey?” I ask. I am slow to look up from my reading, so I miss his gesture towards the wall.

“I mean, how much do I weigh?” he asks.

“We’ll have to go upstairs and see,” I reply, thinking of the digital scale in my bathroom.

“NO!” he replies with uncharacteristic force for my usually mellow 5-year-old. “You know,” he says with a meaningful look, and this time I follow where he is pointing.

He wants to know how much he weighs, according to the measure on the wall, where on each of their birthdays we make little pencil marks to show how tall our children are, so that they can see how much they’ve grown each year.

He’s asking how much he weighs, but that isn’t really what he means.

The Mundane Life of a Mom

When I left work to stay home with our kids, my husband would come home every day and ask me one dreaded question: “What did you do today?”

I hated answering that question. When I was working, that question might have any number of interesting answers. I might have had a meaningful conversation with a student or come up with a brilliant idea of how to teach a difficult concept.

As a stay-at-home mom to two littles, my answers weren’t worth repeating. I got that jam out of the couch. I changed out of clothes covered in spit-up. We played with Barbies while the baby inched his way across the carpet.

Whether you’ve left a career full of accolades or are still accruing those accomplishments, the daily tasks of motherhood are often mundane, thankless, and unfulfilling.

We do dishes. We prepare meals. We fold laundry. We sweep up crumbs. And whether we bake sourdough from scratch or slap some Wonder bread on the table, there really isn’t a lot of glamor in this job description.

Sure, we can coordinate calendars with the skill of an executive assistant. We become experts in removing blood stains, rotating toys, and cutting off crusts. Some of us can even fold a fitted sheet. Motherhood is challenging and forces us to develop skills we feel are beyond us. I’m still working on those fitted sheets.

Using the Wrong Measure

Our difficulty appreciating the value of motherhood has the same problem as my son wanting to weigh himself by the marks on the wall: They use the wrong measure.

My son won’t learn his weight from the wall, and we will never understand the meaning of motherhood when we try to account for it by any of the world’s measures. Not productivity. Not economics. Not statistics.

The immeasurable and intangible meaning of motherhood cannot be captured by a checklist.

Mothering children is a divinely appointed vocation, one in which the souls of our children have been entrusted to us to raise. The effects of motherhood are not inconsequential but have eternal significance that few employment opportunities can hope to provide.

Cardinal Josef Mindszenty phrases it like this:

The most important person on earth is a mother. She cannot claim the honor of having built Notre Dame Cathedral. She need not. She has built something more magnificent than any cathedral –– a dwelling for an immortal soul, the tiny perfection of her baby’s body. . . The angels have not been blessed with such a grace. They cannot share in God’s creative miracle to bring new saints to Heaven. Only a human mother can. Mothers are closer to God the Creator than any other creature; God joins forces with mothers in performing this act of creation … What on God’s good earth is more glorious than this: to be a mother? (The Mother)

And if you don’t believe the good cardinal, ask yourself who has been the most important woman in all of history. Who is the most powerful? The most influential? Whose work during her earthly days has not only moved our world, but ripples into eternity?

The answer, of course, is the woman God crowned Queen of Heaven and Earth, His Mother.

And yet if we reflect on Mary’s daily tasks, we will find that they were not much different than our own –– even if she did not yet have to contend with fitted sheets. She washed dishes. She prepared meals. She folded laundry, swept up crumbs, and made bread.

And as the mother of God, she even made the bread that comes down from Heaven.

Mary practiced by example what her Son would later advise: “Whoever wishes to be great among you shall be your servant” (Matthew 20:26).

The greatest woman on earth spent her days cooking meals for her husband and washing her Son’s clothing. Why should we desire anything different?

God has given us souls to steward, and no measure on earth can tell us what that is worth.

Motherhood is littleness. Motherhood is servanthood. And motherhood is monumental –– by every measure that matters.

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Copyright 2026 Samantha Stephenson
Images: Canva