I’m a Mom, Not a Hero

If motherhood is the only way women can be seen as heroes, something is very wrong

We’re coming up on Mother’s Day, and that means the “mother as hero” rhetoric typically heats up.

I have the utmost respect and compassion for parents. As a mom, a co-parenting divorced mom, I know how hard a job parenting is. It’s harder than anything I have ever done and probably ever will do. That said, I am not a hero. My kids, now young men, may think I’m pretty cool as far as moms go, and have been generally kind about the ways in which I failed them — and fail I did. I don’t expect them to consider me a hero, but they can if they want. But no one else should.

Parents, moms or dads, single or married, are not heroes; we’re just people who decided to have children no matter what — our age, our health, our relationships status, our education, our income, our race, our religion, our gender. And once you make that decision, whether by birth or surrogacy or adoption or fostering, we are just doing the job we signed up for, and doing the job we signed up for does not necessarily make you a hero.

Mixed messages about single moms

A few months ago, GOP presidential hopeful Ohio Gov. John Kasich said, “single women with children are the real heroes in…