My Ma is similar to many mothers in this country – once a bright, highly educated and successful woman, who then got married, and gave up her career and life to raise my sister and me and take care of my father's family.
One day, in an argument over some money matters, my father, very much the family patriarch and breadwinner, told her to "stay out of it as she's just a housewife", and it isn't "her money" to manage anyway. Fuming on my mother's behalf, I suddenly remembered I had stumbled upon this graph from an article in Economic Times that showed what stay-at-home moms unpaid labour is worth.
So, I decided to do the most intense maths I've ever done in my life — to calculate the money my mom's owed for the hours she's worked daily to provide childcare, fresh meals, elderly care, and all the other invisible house chores that each mother does for her family.
And trust me, friend, the numbers were crazy – more than a crore for the past 25 years (!) — a number we couldn't even afford. Mind-boggling, right? And according to this Times of India report from almost a decade ago, as a country we owe Rs 1.75L crore per year to our stay-at-home moms!
We all tend to take these kinds of things for granted, but this conversation instinctively made us all look at my Ma in a new light. And not that it made a world of difference to my dad, but after that day, my mom chose to stand up for what she's worth more often, and I'm so proud of her for that :')