I hope you’re having a good Mother’s Day, and if this holiday hits you hard, my heart goes out to you.

I’m thinking about my mother today. Specifically, I’m thinking about a time when she dug deep to take care of our family.

After my daddy had a heart attack, he couldn’t work for a while. Bills piled up. We lost our family station wagon. It looked like the house would be next to go. At night, I’d overhear my parents talk, and that's when I learned words like “mortgage” and “foreclosure.”

One day, I walked into my parents’ bedroom. My mother’s face was red and puffy. A dress was laid out over the bedspread — the dress that only came out for weddings, graduations, and funerals.

"We are not going to lose this house,” she kept saying. “We are not going to lose this house.”

She’d never worked outside the home. She was terrified. But she knew what she had to do. She put on that dress, she walked down the street to Sears, and she got a minimum wage job that saved our house and saved our family.

This Mother’s Day, I’m remembering her courage. I’m thinking about all the mamas fighting for their families. And I’m thinking about all the ways the deck is stacked against them:

Today, a minimum wage job won’t keep a mama and her baby out of poverty. That is wrong, and that is why I am fighting to raise the minimum wage and put more power in the hands of working moms and working people everywhere — which includes strengthening unions.

Most women who get abortions are already mothers. Many are working multiple jobs that don’t pay enough to support their children. Abortion bans make it even harder for those families to make ends meet. That is why I am madder than hell that our reproductive rights — and freedom to decide when and if we raise a family — are being attacked right now, and why I’m fighting for reproductive justice for all.

Without quality, affordable child care, mothers have been shoved out of the workforce in this pandemic. They will feel the consequences — in lost earnings, in lower Social Security benefits — for the rest of their lives. That is why I am fighting for universal child care in our country.

I’m going to keep up those fights, and more, like paid family leave, to honor my mother and mothers everywhere.

And, look: I’m sure that social media right now is chock-full of Republican politicians waxing poetic about how much they love mothers. But I don’t want to see any tributes from them today unless they’re actually going to do something — anything — to improve the lives of mothers tomorrow.

Thank you, for being a part of our grassroots movement to make real change — to put our government on the side of mothers and families.

Happy Mother’s Day,

Elizabeth

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