Let’s hear it for the moms!

Before we dive in, The Purse is teaming up with Yahoo for a story on how much your teen is spending on prom night this year! We want to hear about everything from prom-posal supplies to the cost of the corsage. Fill out this form if you’re interested in sharing your story! Alicia will be reaching out!

Alicia asked me this week if we were going to write anything special for Mother’s Day.

I promptly had a mini fit on Slack.

“Do we have to?” I whined.

“I mean, we don’t have to, but you bill it as a newsletter, in part, about motherhood,” Alicia shot back.

She’s not wrong. But also, I feel the same way about Mother’s Day that I do about Women’s History Month. All the media outlets feel obligated to overindex on women- and mom-related content for this brief window of time before they go back to regularly scheduled programming. And Mother’s Day might be worse than Women’s History Month because it comes with the onslaught of gift guides.

I’ve also been reluctant to write about motherhood lately because the topic feels more fraught than ever. I don’t want to write about trad wives! The right wing effort to push back the women’s rights movement to the Dark Ages is deeply depressing. And I really don’t think it’s fair that they are so loud with their fucked-up agenda that it’s silencing everyone else. God forbid I say that I love being a mom and someone confuses me for a pronatalist.

Somehow, in 2026, young women are still wondering if it’s possible to both have a career and a family. Arguably it’s harder than ever. The brutal combination of lack of paid family leave, sky-high child care costs, and return-to-office mandates creates a perfect storm where it feels as if there is no good choice for women.

This week, I was scrolling Facebook and came across a post in a moms’ group where a woman was talking about her struggle to get her four-year-old out the door and to daycare each morning before she has to be at the office at 8:00 a.m. sharp. She wrote about how hard it is some mornings when her little one doesn’t feel good or is moving slow, and she feels so stressed about getting to work. Did anyone have a solution? Hiring morning help isn’t an option, she said, and neither is changing jobs.

I feel such a pang of sadness recounting this story. The early days of the pandemic were so stressful. Moms were drowning as we tried to simultaneously work and parent without any support systems. Somehow, we came out on the other side of it with more flexible workplaces that made it (somewhat) easier and (slightly) more affordable for working parents to juggle it all. And it worked! Women’s workforce participation hit an all-time high in 2023.

That is, until recently, when companies began reversing course with strict return-to-office mandates.

At the same time, many of the benefits that we’ve fought for over the past decade are being clawed back. Recently, news broke that consulting giant Deloitte was cutting a wide swath of benefits that supported families, including a $50,000 reimbursement for IVF, adoption, and surrogacy expenses. It’s also slashing parental leave from 16 weeks to eight. (It’s worth noting that not all of Deloitte’s 181,000 U.S.-based employees are impacted by these changes. It’s just those who are “Center” employees, which includes mostly administrative—aka lower-paid—workers.)

Companies don’t have many incentives right now to make things easier for parents (or frankly anyone!), as a stagnant job market means employers are enjoying the upper hand and don’t have to roll out the benefits red carpet in an effort to attract talent. If I put on my conspiracy theorist cap for a minute, it’s easy to believe that there’s a concerted effort being made to sideline women at work, as nefarious forces roll back family benefits, slash jobs and blame AI, and flood Instagram with cozy reels of moms at home with their babies.

I don’t want this to be the prevailing narrative. After Emily Amick wrote an in-depth look at these Instagram reels that are “quietly trying to persuade women to quit their jobs,” Jennifer Cook of Mom Friend posted a Substack note about how she felt inspired to start making Reels that show a different side of working motherhood.

I unabashedly love following Jennifer on Instagram. She has the cutest little girl and the coolest job: working as a buyer for a chic Soho boutique. In her Instagram stories, she shows us snippets of her fun and busy life: at the playground, at the yoga studio, at a press dinner. But it’s not all perfect—not by a long shot. It’s a little bit messy and a little bit silly, and Jennifer regularly talks about just how tired she is or worried about the state of the world, which is all super relatable.

We need more Jennifers—more women presenting a positive view of moms with careers. And at the same time, we can’t stop fighting for a better world for the next generations of moms. I used to be all in on this kind of advocacy work. When I was at Refinery29, I was on a committee that pushed for the startup to provide maternity leave. (They rolled out a 12-week policy for new moms.) And when I was at CNBC during the pandemic, I sent an email to the NBC Universal CEO explaining why the company’s leave policy was insufficient for working parents. (They expanded it to include 10 caregiver days.)

I’ll admit that I’ve felt complacent about these issues lately. I’ve written about the lack of paid leave and the gender wage gap for so long, and in the past year or so, we’ve only seen things backslide. It’s exhausting.

But the alternative is that we let the bad guys win. We let the far-right portrayal of motherhood dominate pop culture, we resign ourselves to working for employers who don’t support families (or we give up our careers altogether), and we vote for politicians who don’t fight for policies that could fix this broken system.

I don’t like the alternative.

There’s no shortage of things to stress about these days. I know it feels a bit unfair to add one more to-do to a busy mom’s plate. But those of us who’ve had the great privilege of enjoying motherhood and careers—with all the highs and lows and challenges that come with that—have a responsibility to speak up and share our stories. They matter. Now more than ever.

-Lindsey

Moms in the news

Zoom also announced it was cutting parental leave from 18 to 22 weeks for birth parents, and non-birthing parents will get 10, down from 16.
“Globally, the gender pay gap remains at 20%, and this gap widens for those facing multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination. This is not accidental—it is structural. Across countries and sectors, women are paid less for the same work, and the gap widens after marriage and motherhood,” writes Jocelyn Chu, program specialist in economic empowerment at UN Women.
Maybe part of the problem is we’re making motherhood too difficult? “New motherhood is always a maelstrom, but the new new motherhood, it has lately been suggested, has become a tempest of a different, close-to-unbearable order,” writes Rebecca Mead for The New Yorker.
In her piece, Mead discusses Amil Niazi’s memoir, Life After Ambition: A Good Enough Memoir. I recently read Amil’s book, and it’s so good! Also, she’s another fun mom to follow on Instagram.
On a related note, friend of The Purse Corinne Low’s book has so much interesting data on modern motherhood, including eye-opening stats on how working mothers actually spend more time with their kids than stay-at-home moms did in our parents’ generations.
“As a queer, progressive mother of two, I know this conflict intimately. I’ve noticed how quickly I’ll make a joke about the stress of parenting, but hesitate to share when something about it feels deeply good.” Love this piece by Time contributor Samantha Mann, who eloquently writes about so much of what I’m trying to sum up here.
Alicia wrote about some of these complicated feelings for the 30-something set earlier this year.
And I wrote an ode to motherhood two years ago. I still stand by every word.

What else we’re reading

Lindsey and I have discussed that we think it’s extremely short-sighted for Democratic lawmakers to get in on the random rollback of taxes for specific classes of workers. My fave Annie Lowrey sums it all up in The Atlantic. If you are a salary-earning professional worker, you should probably be a little ticked off that our nation’s entire income tax structure now relies on your wages. -Alicia
I was wondering about the Ruti pants that seemingly every influencer and style writer on Substack is raving about, and so I was excited to read Totally Recommend’s take on them. I’ve decided I won’t be buying a pair. -Lindsey
Love this post on getting some cosmic perspective from Austin Kleon. -Alicia
It feels like everyone is sharing this piece in The Cut by Xochitl Gonzalez about whether we should all start smoking again because the world is going to hell. It’s a great read, but I hope the takeaway is we should all quit staring at our phones, not take up smoking cigarettes. -Lindsey

On our radar

Friend of The Purse Erin Lowry is hosting a comedy show on Sunday, May 10, at 5 p.m. in Manhattan. She and her fellow guests will explore the perennial question: How do people afford to raise kids in NYC? Purse readers can use the code HAHA10 for $10 off. More info here!
I’ll be on a panel about journalist creators next Friday at SABEW—if you’re there, too, say hi! -Alicia

Comment of the week

“I love how you framed the chef share and other outsourcing as ways you can have access to services that other people receive at no cost because a woman will traditionally provide them. Yes! Women are also looked down upon for spending money on hair or nails, yet there are societal pressures to look a certain way. And I always argue that men spend more on haircuts if they go every four to six weeks. There’s this pressure of society being a hawk over how women spend money. Thank you for sharing your story! Congratulations!”

- Marlena on Home Economics No. 51: Single, 29, and earning more than $500k as a data scientist in NYC

Stat of the week

70% of teenagers aged 13–17 say they are very or extremely interested in investing.

- Charles Schwab’s 2026 Teen Investing Survey

What else we published on The Purse this week

Don’t miss the great tips and recipes our second edition of Meal Plan.

Let us know!

We’re all jealous of the writer’s chef share, right?

What’s the opposite of rise and grind?

What systems have been working for you lately?

Best money we spent last week

I’ve been on a bit of a secondhand spending spree, and I was so excited to receive a pair of drip glaze ceramic table lamps I bought off of eBay. Lamps/lighting is one of the things I feel like I’ve put off investing in for our apartment, but we really need some more sources of light. (Our apartment doesn’t have overhead lighting outside of the kitchen and bathroom.) But this feels like one of the hardest interior elements to source for some reason. I keep getting overwhelmed looking at different options, but I love these lamps I somehow stumbled upon. ($184) -Alicia
I got a massage on Saturday night at Red Moon Wellness in Park Slope after a full day of studying for the CFP exam. It wasn’t cheap ($155 plus tip), but it was hands down one of the best massages of my life. Now I’m trying to figure out how I can make the expense part of my monthly budget. -Lindsey