Flowers? Scented candles? Brunch?
Nice Mother's Day gifts, sure. But what America's moms really deserve - and want - is their 25 cents.
You've already heard about the gender wage gap, how women make 82 cents for every dollar a man makes.
But wait until you hear how insanely inequitable it is for mothers - on average, moms in the full-time American workforce make 75 cents for every dollar a dad makes. And the coronavirus pandemic is making that gap so much worse.
Hold on, men who are already pecking out their nastygrams, mansplaining that the wage gap exists because moms stay home or go part-time while they raise your spawn, so that break in employment is actually what creates the Wage Gap Gulch.
Yes and no. Even as teens, women make less than men. At the start of this year, the median weekly wage for male 16- to 19-year-olds was $511. For female teens, it was $467, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The earnings increase on parallel tracks as men and women get more experience in the workforce, with women perpetually making less in all professions, from cops to cashiers to chief executives. Then, the gap widens to medieval inequities when both hit their prime and some women give birth.
Teresa Chavez is an occupational therapist in El Paso, Texas, with a master's degree in her field and six years of experience in a broad range of settings. Now that she's a mom of two, Chavez already sees a change - not just in the numbers on her paycheck but in the way employers talk about her, suggesting part-time jobs or tracks with fewer advancement opportunities so she can focus on the kids.
Wonder whether anyone suggests that to her husband, a high school teacher who is also a wrestling and football coach?
What's really infuriating is that Chavez - and so many women like her - didn't slow down one bit after she became a mom. She worked the day she gave birth, Wednesday. (Which also happened to be Mom's Equal Pay Day in the United States.) She did the interview with me from her hospital bed.
It's even worse for women of color. Latina moms earn just 46 cents for every dollar that White, non-Hispanic dads make, while Black moms earn 52 cents. Native American mothers get paid exactly half of what those dads make - 50 cents. And at the top of the maternal pay scale, Asian American and Pacific Islander moms still make less - 90 cents for every dollar on a White father's paycheck, according to the National Women's Law Center.
Those numbers "really wrap up a lot of inequality," said Emily Martin, the group's vice president for education and workplace justice. Women are being paid less than men for the same job, but women also are overrepresented in lower-wage jobs.
Sometimes, women chose those jobs because of the flexibility. Chavez works side jobs in her field on the weekends just so she can earn as much as her male colleagues, who are off on Fridays and get to rest over the weekend.
That was always life for Venorica Tucker, 72, who works as a server and bartender at froufrou events all over the Washington region.
Throughout her career, while she was also a mother and a grandmother, Tucker had to patch together gigs at big hotels and congressional banquet halls - a breakfast service, then a conference lunch, then an evening gala - to make enough to support her family.
Meanwhile, the server supervisors - called "captains" at banquet events - were the ones who commanded staff around, rested while guests ate and didn't have to work multiple gigs. They were almost entirely men, she said.
"In hospitality, like almost every industry, men have a tendency to fare better than women do," Tucker said. "I saw these signs that activists were holding up: 'One job should be enough.' That's right. And meanwhile, all us moms, we're all working two and three jobs."
And in the pandemic, this jury-rigged system of jobs, schedules, gigs, child care and school got blasted to smithereens. Moms in all professions had to leave the workforce to step in and keep their families together. Or their jobs in hospitality disappeared as pandemic restrictions kept restaurants closed.
The woman who founded Girls Who Code - Reshma Saujani - is promoting a solution she calls a Marshall Plan for Moms.
"Other countries have social safety nets. America has moms. It's time to compensate moms for all they do to keep our economy, our country, running," according to the plan. "The crisis ending doesn't mean back to normal. For moms, 'normal' wasn't working in the first place."
The plan calls for things such as direct payments to moms for their unpaid labor and pushes for passing policies on paid family leave, affordable child care and pay equity.
The plan organizers also opened an online flower shop that has a cheeky take on the Mother's Day 2021: You can send a mom a lovely bouquet of flowers for $15,000, representing the equivalent of what she loses - on average - every year to the wage gap.
Or, we can insist that America make the real change - cultural, political and legislative - that's necessary to stop penalizing the mothers who keep working harder and longer to make our families strong and our nation run.
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Petula Dvorak writes for The Washington Post.