Thank You for Your Service (Now Please Be Quiet)

A Meditation on Motherwashing

They gave me a candle once.
Said it smelled like gratitude.
Said I’d earned it.
Said “thank you” with their hands in their pockets.

I lit it.
The flame went sideways.
The wick curled inward like a spine.

Mother’s Day.
A national theatre of amnesia—no funding, just filtered tributes.
Where the government writes odes to “the backbone of the nation,”
while childcare costs rise, quietly and steadily,
like pressure no one plans to release.

I used to think I was lucky.
Then I realised I was just cheap.

This is what institutions do.
What corporations do.
What governments and glossy campaigns
and even well-meaning friends do:
wrap you in admiration
so you won’t notice the knives.

Call it Motherwashing.¹

It’s how a culture hides guilt beneath sentiment.
It’s how a workplace sends flowers while stalling your promotion.
It’s how they praise your selflessness—
so you’ll stop asking to be seen.

There’s a reason every Mother’s Day ad looks like a funeral.
White. Washed. Full of roses.
They’re burying us in softness.

Let me tell you a secret.
I am tired of being soft.

I want steel in my teeth.
I want truth in the room.
I want it to land like glass.
I want to say that sacrifice is not noble—it’s theft—
and not watch a man’s eyes glaze over
like I’ve asked him to do the washing up.

But I know how fast the air changes
when a mother stops performing grace.
So I smile.

And this is the most dangerous thing:
the lie doesn’t come from outside alone.
It grows in me.

I repost the campaigns.
I cry at the cards.
I whisper to myself: maybe this is enough.

Because to admit it isn’t—
would break something I do not have time to fix.

This is called love.
I call it vanishing.

Because love doesn’t ask you to disappear.
Love doesn’t flatten your ambition into “balance.”
Love doesn’t say, “We see you,”
while building a world where seeing you is a liability.

I want to believe the praise is real.
Because if it’s not—
then all this pretending starts to rot.

Ambitions postponed.
Intimacy dimmed.
Minds packed tight with everyone else’s needs—
mistaking survival for choice.

It becomes something harder to swallow.

But I know better now.

They give us applause
so we won’t demand action.
They say we are heroes
so we stop asking for help.
They gift us candles
so we won’t burn the system down.

A culture that flatters mothers and forgets them
will forget everyone else soon enough.

Mother, if you're reading this with a knot in your chest,
light that candle anyway.
Watch the flame.
Let it flicker,
then flare.

The wick is your rage.
The smoke is your refusal.
The fire is still yours.

If this resonated, feel free to share it or leave a comment. And if you’d rather reply privately, my inbox is open to you. I always read what comes back.

1. Motherwashing (n.)
A term I coined to describe a cultural tactic in which mothers are publicly praised while structurally neglected. It’s the performance of gratitude—cards, candles, hashtags—used to mask the absence of real support. Like whitewashing, but softer, more insidious: sentiment replaces systems, and admiration is weaponised to keep mothers silent, compliant, and self-sacrificing.