The Mothers Who Kept the Window Open

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We arrived at a local high school auditorium with no more than 200 seats, and a stage smaller than most convention stages I speak on.

My oldest son, six years old, sat beside me, excited to see Neverland unfold in real life. We were in the second row of maybe eight rows, close enough to see the students’ faces and even to be in the spit zone.

It had been decades since I had watched the movie Peter Pan. And despite flying on the ride at Disney World last year, the plotline was not solidified in my memory.

In this stage production of Neverland, Wendy is swept away with the Darling children. There are swashbuckling pirates, children flying across the moon, the Lost Boys, childhood imagination, and the familiar tension of Peter Pan, the boy who does not want to grow up.

And don’t worry, they still had the constant tick-tock, tick-tock of the crocodile, though much to my chagrin, we never saw the crocodile in this version.

But the moment that stayed with me was not the sword fight or the whimsy, or even the clever way they made us feel like we were flying to Neverland through audience interaction.

It was the mother.

At one point, Peter’s mother, played by a high schooler, looks out the open window and then lays down on the windowsill, sad and longing. She says she has been there for more than 50 years, every single night, waiting for her son, Peter, to return home.

There it was, tucked inside a school production performed by teenagers. Profound emotions felt by a mother: Love. Loss. Hope.

Mother’s Day lands differently for everyone. Some will celebrate. Some will mourn. Some will be hopeful. Some long to be mothers and, for various reasons, are unable. Some have strained relationships with their mothers. Some delayed motherhood. Some chose another path. Some are raising children with deep joy. Some are raising them with deep exhaustion. Many are doing both at the same time.

We are all here because of a mother, but that does not mean Mother’s Day lands the same way for everyone.

In 1966, General Electric ran a magazine ad around Mother's Day for a dishwasher called the Mobile Maid. The ad copy described dishwashing as "the most monotonous, hand-scalding, dish-breaking, glass-chipping, never-ending, thankless job in the world" (General Electric, 1966). The promise was that a machine could finally rescue mothers from the part of motherhood nobody wanted to do. “Thankless,” is all too often sad, but true.

Mothers have always been working, whether or not anyone handed them a W-2. My grandmothers, my own mother, and my wife, as the mother of three, are all women I have watched across three generations in a single living room, and did not stop working when they came home. They were already home, and the work had not stopped. Cleaning, feeding, teaching, soothing, mediating, planning. 

This is not new. Mothering has always been hard. What is new is that we have spent the last century trying to make it easier, and somehow it feel as if it has gotten harder.

For most of human history, mothers did not raise children alone. They raised them inside a community structure of siblings, aunts and uncles, grandparents, neighbors, friends, and extended family. The work was hard, but it was distributed. A baby was passed from one set of arms to the next. A toddler had a dozen adults whose authority and affection she trusted. A new mother could go to the bathroom. I can attest to this tension, and I'm not a mom!

In her book Hunt, Gather, Parent, journalist Michaeleen Doucleff describes carrying her newborn daughter to a sink for a bath and being struck by how completely dependent the baby was, how limp, how unable to do anything for herself, and likened her baby to a turkey you're prepping for Thanksgiving (Doucleff, 2021). In the animal world, newborns stand within hours and can move to latch onto their mothers for food. In humanness, the full dependence lasts for years. That helplessness was always meant to be carried by more than one person. We do not live that way anymore.

The data is no longer subtle. A 2024 national survey by The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center found that 66% of parents in the United States say the demands of parenthood sometimes or frequently feel isolating and lonely, 38% report no support in their parenting role, and nearly 80% say they would value a way to connect with other parents outside of work and home (Gawlik et al., 2024). Mothers report these feelings most acutely. 

The market has been adjusting for decades. In 1964, only 9.5% of American three- and four-year-olds were enrolled in any kind of school or early care program. By 2011, that number had grown to 52.4% (Snyder & Dillow, 2012). The U.S. child daycare industry is now estimated at roughly $74.7 billion annually (IBISWorld, 2025). What used to be a grandmother, a sibling, or a neighbor down the street has become an institution that seems to be quickly rising as the cornerstone of child-rearing.

Policy is following the same trajectory. Over the past decade, more than 40 states have created or expanded some form of paid parental leave (A Better Balance, 2026). In January 2026, New York Governor Kathy Hochul and newly elected New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced a $1.7 billion plan to provide free childcare for two-year-olds across the five boroughs, with the goal of universal access by year four (Office of the Governor of New York, 2026). The program is the first of its kind in scale. Mamdani's own framing of the announcement is worth quoting: "Raising a child takes a village — and it takes a city government willing to step up and tackle the child care crisis head-on."

He is right about the village. He is also describing what happens after the village is gone. When the family, church, and community are no longer in the room, somebody has to fill the chair. Increasingly, that somebody is paid, scheduled, and unrelated to the family.

Two things have been quietly rising alongside each other.

Loneliness among parents is climbing, as The Ohio State data already showed. So is postpartum depression. A 2024 analysis of more than 442,000 births found that PPD diagnoses in the United States nearly doubled between 2010 and 2021, rising from 9.4% to 19.0% (Bruno et al., JAMA Network Open, 2024). The CDC has reported that the rate of depression diagnoses at delivery was seven times higher in 2015 than in 2000.

Some of that increase shows medical advancement including better screening, better language, less stigma, and more women willing to say the thing out loud. I am not claiming causality. But it is hard to ignore the trends. Loneliness is up. Postpartum depression is up. And the women carrying both at the same time are also the first cohort of mothers who came of age inside social media. They learned in middle school what it felt like to be measured against a curated feed. They are now learning, with a newborn on their chest, what it feels like to be measured against one as a mother.

The Neverland drama made this part powerful without words. A mother on a windowsill, waiting fifty years. That ache is not new. But the conditions surrounding it are.

Motherhood is happening later in life for many, and less often.

In 1970, the average American mother had her first child at 21.4 (CDC/NCHS, 2009). By 2000, that number was 24.9. By 2023, it had reached 27.5, the highest on record (CDC/NCHS, 2025). 

Family sizes shrank alongside the climb. Using a simple, Generational Prism lens (not a rigorous cohort study), the median Boomer mother had three children across her lifetime. The median Gen X mother had closer to two. Today's total fertility rate sits at 1.621 births per woman, the lowest the U.S. has ever recorded, and well below the 2.1 needed for population replacement (CDC/NCHS, 2025).

A 2024 Pew Research Center survey of U.S. adults under 50 who say they are unlikely to ever have children found that 57% cite as a major reason that they "just don't want to have children" (Pew Research Center, 2024).

There is a question hidden inside that number. Is the decline a story of convenience, with motherhood treated as one option among many in a crowded life? Or is it a story of difficulty, with mothering becoming so isolating, so expensive, and so culturally unsupported that the rational response is to opt out?

I suspect it could be both. I suspect the ratio is shifting.

This is what the Friction Doctrine looks like when applied to mothering. Each tool we built to remove the difficulty of the work has carried a quiet weight in return.

We invented ovulation tests, pregnancy tests, and fertility apps that catch the news of a new life within days. The same precision that brings the joy earlier also brings the grief earlier, with women now aware of pregnancies and miscarriages their grandmothers might never have known they had.

We engineered cars to get us further, which required car seats to be safer than at any point in human history. They are also a small construction project to install, a daily wrestling match to fasten.

We designed delivery and convenience services that put dinner, diapers, and groceries at the door within an hour. The labor was saved. The neighbor was never met, the family never came over to clean, the friend never came over to hold the baby and let the new parent have a moment of rest.

And we have multiplied our knowledge of the babies themselves. We track the milestones. We chart the sleep. We measure the pulse oximeter overnight. Even when we're not with our baby, we're watching them on a camera. And even those cameras now tell us if there are red flags we should be aware of.

We know, with more precision than any generation before us, whether our child is on schedule. Our daughter, our third, was ahead on nearly every fine-motor checkpoint and other important milestones, and yet she was significantly behind on rolling over. Our middle son fell off the growth chart early and went through years of needle pricks, lab work, and follow-up testing that ultimately proved worthless and was likely the result of an incorrect first measurement on his earliest checkups.

We have more information about our babies than any mother in human history, and we have, in many cases, mistaken that information for wisdom. The data tells you when to worry. It rarely tells you when to stop. It offers a precise sense of what is happening, and a false sense of being in control of it.

Back on stage, in Neverland we have to consider Wendy, the oldest girl in the Darling family. She never set out to be a mother. A bossy older sister, maybe, but she didn’t sign up for motherhood.

The Lost Boys saw an older girl, and they followed an instinct as old as childhood. They called her mother. They needed somebody to be one. They were fighting pirates and encountering mermaids in an imaginary land, unsupervised, pretending not to grow up, and they still needed a mother in the story.

In the very next scene, back in London, Peter's mother lay on the windowsill, fifty years into her watch. Waiting longingly for her lost boy to return.

The two images, side by side, showed me something that statistics cannot. Children look for mothers, even when they are pretending not to need one.

This Mother's Day will land differently for everyone. Some will celebrate. Some will mourn. Some will sit with what could have been. Some will hold a child they once thought they would never have. Some will set the table leaving an empty seat for a child that was taken too soon and will never return home.

What we have tried to make easier across the last half-century, we have, in many ways, made lonelier. The work was always going to be hard. The village was the part we could have kept.

Maybe the most honest thing any of us can do this Mother's Day, whatever our story, is to become a small piece of someone else's village. The grandmother who calls. The friend who drops off the meal. The neighbor who knocks. The aunt who stays for the week (call first, of course). 

The window is still open.