Mom's post about doing 'nothing' all day shows how the work of motherhood is viewed
"We can't put a monetary value on love."
Like many moms, Lo Mansfield's life can get very busy and jam-packed with different activities.
The mom of three, a former labor and delivery nurse who currently lives with her family in the Netherlands, is an online educator but also a caregiver for her two daughters and son alongside her husband.
Oftentimes, she's the parent who spends all day with the kids while her husband, Kelvin, a consultant, works from home.
But that doesn't mean Mansfield isn't doing countless things, a reality she says she struggles to put into perspective sometimes and has to remind herself is just as valuable as what her husband or some other parent might be doing.
"When my husband asked me what I did today, I told him 'Oh, nothing,'" Mansfield recalled in a December Instagram post.
"What a load of cr--," she continued, before describing all the tasks she tackled, including dropping her kids at preschool, feeding them and giving her son a bath, among other tasks.
"This idea of the work of motherhood, and how we kind of quantify and qualify, it has actually been something I've personally struggled with for a long time, because I am an achiever and a doer by nature," Mansfield told "Good Morning America."
"And I know that it's a struggle for many others, as well," she added.
Writing and sharing her personal motherhood journey has helped Mansfield, she said, and she hopes her posts can spark a broader conversation and possibly even shift societal perspectives on how child care and the work behind child rearing is viewed.
"When did we start qualifying the loving, the caring, the tending to human life as nothing?" Mansfield asked, in part, in her post.
When she reflected on what she wrote, Mansfield said it was also a reminder to herself that her work was just as important.
"Putting that out there just felt like almost my own desire to remind myself, like, hey, this matters. And the more we say it and the more we keep reminding others that this is valuable and it's meaningful, even if it's unglamorous or simple, the sooner we're going to get to the place where it's easy for all of us to believe it," Mansfield said.
The idea of the value of child care, she admitted, can be hard to consider in the same way many think of other types of work.
"I think that the reason some of this gets a little messy sometimes is because there's love mixed in and so, we can't quantify and we can't put a monetary value on love, and we shouldn't be trying to," the 36-year-old said.
At the end of the day, though, Mansfield said her message to fellow parents is simple.
"You are the right parent for your child," she said. "You might be a little bit broken, you might be a little bit grief-stricken. ... You might have done a really s--- job that day, you might have genuinely done nothing except keep your kids alive but that child is intended for you. You are intended for them. That is why they are yours."
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