I took Gabby to playgroup today and found myself eavesdropping on some other mums chatting while my little one introduced Disney Princesses to life on the high seas on a pirate ship.

One lady was saying how she had just moved from over 50 miles away with her husband and not-yet 2 year old son. That in itself is a lot of work isn’t it? Her conversation-mate noted the burden of being the stay at home parent with the little one all the time, saying empathetically “This is like work though, isn’t it?”

Just-Moved Mum agreed, but somehow in the next breath felt like she needed to defend herself.

Not that she was under attack you understand. This was polite chit-chat between mums over a cuppa at playgroup. She started talking about returning to work and how childcare has prohibitive costs. Just-Moved Mum said she had already decided that at some point she needed what she decribed as a “little shop job” with a schedule to paralell her husband’s so that none of her hard earned money would have to spent on childcare.

She then had to race across the room to check on her son. And I realised that these mums hadn’t even exchanged names. I smiled sadly to myself, realising how many times I have been guilty of remembering a child’s name but never the mum’s.

Even without knowing one another’s names, these mums were having to minimise the colossal efforts of being a stay-at-home mum. Societal pressure has taught women their only worth and productivity is in a benign workplace. Except society also shouts very loudly about women being primary caregivers and homemakers. We are expected to be all over everything, everywhere, all of the time and never complaining about it, because we didn’t need or want wages anyway right?

I felt so sad that this exchange was so ordinary, because it made women that, without knowing them, I know work tirelessly for their families, so small. And I know this because experience, dark experience, has taught me that only those who work themselves into the floor think they are not doing enough.

Before I had kids, I used to work for our neighbouring county council, helping people ready CVs to get them back into work. I dreaded having to sit down with stay at home mums because they hadn’t been employed for years and I would have to turn every task of being at home into a transferable work skill, listed out as if being at home constituted their whole employment history.

All I can say is, mums of South Wales, circa 2014, forgive me. I’m an idiot. I didn’t know everything you do without a penny or a nod of recognition from the wider world.

My only excuse is that I did know that employment agencies hated receiving these kinds of CVs (they’d told me!) and that they often went into the bin, because it wasn’t “employment”.

But the other mum at playgroup was right. This is work. 24/7/365 with no damn sick leave. It is everything and it is forever. If Just-Moved Mum manages to balance her “little shop job” too, then she is a bloody hero with more on her plate than can be fair, even if she deeems it necessary. It will not be a “little shop job”. It is work. Everything we stay at home parents do is work and I implore all of you not to minimise your worth. The world cannot turn without those of us that go unpaid as we raise the next generation of good people.

I’m sorry if your work goes unnoticed by society. Society is a git at large. But your job, whatever it may be, is never little. Your name matters before your economic productivity. Do not feel like you have to make yourself small. Mums are everything. Just ask your little people. Who else matters?