Every year on Mother’s Day, restaurants are packed as families queue up for brunch and dinner. Giggles and smiles and hugs abound.

This year, most restaurants are wistfully quiet, their lights off, shades drawn. For a lucky few, there’s take-out but it isn’t quite the same when you’re not enjoying it with your mama.

The experience of Mother’s Day is grossly different for many this year. Hugs are shared on Zoom. Meals eaten apart. Smiles hidden behind face masks, partitioned by glass.

Yet stores still found a way to capitalize on this perennial display of maternal sentiment. Online, the sales are bigger than ever. Advertising is snazzier (and smarter!) than ever. And don’t forget: free shipping for all!

In the middle of a pandemic, Mother’s Day manages to stay commercialized. Actually, Mother’s Day spending this year is expected to be the highest ever at $26.7B, according to the National Retail Federation.

We praise and romanticize motherhood only to put a dollar sign next to it.

But if you really think about it, hasn’t motherhood always been an economic proposition?

From biblical era concubines winning favor by bearing sons to the number of dependents on our tax return, there has always been an economic cost attached to motherhood–whether positive or negative.

Beneath the nurturing faculty lies a deeper reality that mothers not only care, they provide. They plan. They procure. They benefit their families–economically.

Even the proverbial Wife of Nobel Character served an economic purpose for her household as she exercised her entrepreneurial acumen.

Unfortunately, our modern society has increasingly treated motherhood as an inconvenience or, at best, a mere necessity. We’ve effectively reduced the value of motherhood to zero as we worship dual income lifestyles and prioritize careers over caregiving.

Even as a little girl, I remember being filled with possibilities for all sorts of grand careers and ambitions. None of them involved being a mother. That was a given, not an aspiration.

That paradigm followed me to college as I toiled feverishly for a finance degree and promising career only to be met with years of childbearing and financial difficulty.

Now, almost a decade later, I’m still recovering from the economic ‘hit’ that my family took from me not working for many years. Some days I’m tempted to feel ‘behind’, as if those years of nursing and diapering and naps were wasted.

I realized that just because I didn’t get paid to be a mother doesn’t mean that it’s worthless. In fact, it’s worth more than what any paycheck or life insurance policy or national GDP can quantify, for motherhood is not an industry or vocation. It is not easily defined in dollars or negotiated in contracts.

On the contrary, motherhood is a calling, privilege, and sacrifice, all wrapped up in a boundless sphere of duty and devotion. 

As we order gifts and post endearing tributes for our mothers–and accept adoration from our own children–let’s remember that there is no price to motherhood. No gadget, appliance, or piece of jewelry can do it justice.

Mother’s Day may be commercialized but real motherhood can never be commoditized.