Being a mother, Jessica de Vreeze

Being a mother is beautiful, and it is also deeply demanding. You give yourself fully, endlessly, while learning how to keep being you.

As children grow, trials multiply. Children are individuals of their own, with their own needs, emotions, and expectations. In acknowledging this, a mother endures, adjusts, accepts—and forgives—again and again. She holds space through change, disappointment, misunderstanding, and growth.

Yet the woman must live too. She is herself a person learning, over time, how to live, how to move forward, and how to become fully herself. She faces her own challenges and obstacles—not only for herself, but for her children and for the family as a whole.

Her children place her on a pedestal, love her intensely, sometimes reject her just as intensely, and eventually need to detach in order to grow into adults—only to return, in time, to her embrace. This evolution is one of the most demanding emotional rollercoasters a mother will ever go through.

Whether supported emotionally by a family, another support system, or standing entirely on her own, she often becomes the center—holding everything together—until she learns how to step aside just enough to be fully present when truly needed.

When a woman grows, she offers her children something just as essential: a living example of someone trying to balance life, resilience, and becoming. Not in opposition to motherhood, but alongside it. It does not make her perfect—she is a work in progress, growing along the way, shaped by trials, errors, and eventually successes.

This is a love that asks everything. A love that lasts forever—and evolves with time.

Some women choose—or need—to work outside the home. Others choose to stay and dedicate themselves fully to their families as stay-at-home mothers. Both care for their children in different ways. Both provide. Both respond to their children’s needs.

To be fully present for their children, some women decide—when their family can afford it—to give up an outside career and dedicate themselves solely to the family, sometimes setting aside other ambitions by choice. Yet to this day, the work of stay-at-home mothers is not financially recognized. While less than a century ago women had no choice—no career paths allowed in much of the Western world, and still in many countries today—this work must now be fully acknowledged, respected, and valued.

Their capabilities deserve recognition: the strength required to manage daily life, multitask endlessly, handle crises, resolve conflicts, teach, organize, drive, care, and adapt—often without pause or recognition.

Mothers who work outside the home, too, never leave their children behind. They carry them into every decision, often multiplying their diligence, resilience, and pursuit of excellence.

The bottom line is simple: women who are mothers must be seen, valued, and celebrated.

A woman, plus the number of children she has raised, should not be viewed as a burden or liability on a CV—but as an added set of skills, a profound life education, a lived experience of leadership.

No more invisible work. Fully seen. Fully valued.

And beyond all of this, there is one thing that has no price: love.A love that asks everything. A love that lasts forever—and evolves through lived experience. A woman is shaped by her children just as much as a child is shaped by their parents.

It is a journey no one is ever fully prepared for—but one that is worth the ride, worth the effort, worth living.

Cheers to all of you—women and men, mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, grandparents. We are all part of a whole, together shaping the world around us.