the.com/motherhood

a job with no salary, no sleep, and no resignation letter that ever works.

means The state of being a mother, with all the caretaking, love, and responsibility that comes with raising a child.

from Built from "mother" plus the suffix "-hood," which marks a state or condition — the same "-hood" you find in childhood, knighthood, and neighborhood. That suffix traces back to Old English "hād," meaning a person's rank, state, or quality, once a standalone word. "Mother" itself is among the oldest words we have, with cousins across the Indo-European family — Latin "mater," Greek "mētēr," Sanskrit "mātṛ" — many possibly echoing the early "ma" sound infants make. So the word is, fittingly, ancient: a state of being named after the first word a baby tends to say.

DNA swap
Fetal cells linger in mothers' bodies for decades
Brain remodel
Pregnancy permanently reshapes gray matter
Pay gap
Unpaid labor would total trillions yearly
Heart strain
Blood volume rises nearly 50 percent in pregnancy
for instance

serena williams — won 23 grand slams, then won australian open 2017 while pregnant, returned to compete postpartum

cardi b — took maternity break in 2018 after giving birth to kulture, then returned to #1 on charts

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