Happy Mother’s Day

Happy Mother’s Day! I hope that you are celebrating this day with loved ones.

My mother left New York for Taiwan a number of weeks ago. New York City was becoming the hub for COVID-19, and my mom is in her seventies. My boys won’t see their grandma for a while.

But every single day Evelyn is keeping our family afloat by being a world-class mom to Christopher and Damian. Christopher is 7 years old and on the autism spectrum, so he requires a lot of attention. Even when he is supposed to be attending school online, he often wanders off, so someone has to be there to keep him on task.

Watching Evelyn in action each day and helping where I can gives me even more appreciation for all that I missed while on the trail these past two years. The boys missed their dad, but didn’t miss a beat and were happy throughout. Now, the day-to-day tasks of parenting form the rhythm of our family’s days in quarantine — changing clothes, preparing meals, cleaning up, riding bikes, everything that goes into raising kids.

I used to joke on the trail that Evelyn was working harder than I was. I knew it was true then. I know it’s true now.

I’m going to call my mom today and also celebrate everything that Evelyn does to keep our family whole and strong each day. I hope that I express it every day.

One of the big ideas of my campaign was that the work that Evelyn does is work like any other, even if the market doesn’t recognize it. If anything, it’s the most important work. Without it, our kids will not have a chance at anything like the future we want for them and deserve.

This is even more true for single mothers, who are faced with incredible levels of responsibility. In 2019, 15.76 million American children were being raised by single mothers. In the same year, 40 percent of newborns were born to unmarried mothers. Being a single mom is the new normal in the United States. And each and every one of them seems superhuman to me.

This Mother’s Day, let’s do what we always do and celebrate the moms in our lives. They’ll appreciate it. But let’s also keep fighting for a world where moms are valued appropriately. Where their work is seen as more central to our well-being and way of life than the work of a hedge fund manager or management consultant. Where the love and nurturing being shown to our kids each day is seen as foundational to our shared future.

That’s a world that the moms in our lives will be thrilled to see. They deserve it, and so do we.

- Andrew