*Bringing Motherhood Back Into the Circle | Maya Tevet Dayan | 6 Minutes on Friday | 29.5.2026*
This week I held a gathering with a group of mothers, all graduates of the Shalem Academic Center - meaning, all of them highly educated, career-oriented, artistic, opinionated, and funny women. And all of them are mothers. Some had given birth very recently. They invited me to speak with them about motherhood - about devotion and love, yes, but also about something that, to this day, most of us still shift uncomfortably around when it is named directly: labor. The labor of motherhood.
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So when we spoke, we did not ask how to balance career and motherhood - a misleading question that has managed to deceive entire generations of mothers. Instead, we asked how motherhood itself is a career, how it is part of the labor market, and how it is directly connected to money. A great deal of money. Because there is a very precise economy to maternal labor. Motherhood can be discussed in numbers. And from my point of view, that may be the most urgent thing we can do if we want to improve life for all of us - feminist economics.
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But what I really want to tell you is that throughout the evening, amid the beautiful clothes, the shoes, the carefully prepared dinner, and Jerusalem glowing in the background, there were also two babies there, belonging to two of the participants. Sweet, nursing babies, whose buffet, while ours was laid out across long tables, was simply their mothers. Their mothers’ bodies.
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And it was perfect, because through them I could demonstrate exactly what I was speaking about. In real time, I pointed to these two mothers, who throughout our gathering were simultaneously working for those babies. We are not used to saying “working for babies.” We say they nursed them. We say they changed their diapers, hugged them with endless love and delight, cleaned up what spilled out of them, changed their clothes, played with them, then rocked them to sleep while standing or walking rhythmically around the room. We have grown accustomed to describing motherhood with countless verbs - except for one. But the truth is that because these women were laboring for their babies all those hours, someone else was free to remain at work in an office. And the office functioned. And because of that, the company functioned. Services were provided, taxes were paid, the economy continued operating as usual.
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Of course, these two mothers did not notice this.
They did not notice that while caring for their babies, they were also working for the economy itself. They simply did their work among us, until eventually their babies grew restless. After several attempts to soothe them that did not succeed, and almost without any of us noticing, the mothers quietly gathered up the babies, the bags, the changing mat, the play mat, stood up, and disappeared from our line of sight. And silence settled over the room. The kind of silence that exists only in adult circles without children - like child-free hotels, or performances without children, or offices.
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A few minutes passed before I noticed. When I turned around, I found them. They had spread out their play mat in the corner of the room, outside our circle of chairs, and settled there on the floor.
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And that moment said more than anything I could possibly have spoken about that evening.
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Because they were doing what all of us do as mothers when our babies “disturb”,murmur, cry out, fuss, refuse to settle. They were preserving society’s quiet - not disturbing it with babies. It is so familiar. There will be those who say they behaved properly, politely, considerately. That there is no story here at all. And that is precisely why I linger on this moment.
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Because for me, this moment was the whole story. It happened during a gathering where we were trying to place maternal labor at the center, to look directly at it with open eyes. And yet, without thinking, they made the opposite movement - the movement all of us make: stepping away from the center of the circle, quietly tending to our babies, mothering quietly, moving babies and every trace of them away from the “adult,” “serious” work of the worlds of labor and money.
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Which is why, after that, nothing else really mattered anymore. Not how much I spoke, not the passages I read from *Feminism as I Taught It to My Daughters*, not the statistics or the numbers. What mattered was that I invited them to return to the center of the circle. They said no, no. I said yes, yes. They still hesitated. It took several long minutes before they finally did it - came back and sat down there on the floor. Still with the babies, the bags, the diapers, the tiny rattles. All of it. But now they were in the middle, inside the circle of chairs.
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That was the lesson. That was why we had gathered there. That was the question: how do we place motherhood at the center of this circle - the circle of the economy, the labor market, society itself? And that was the answer: entering the circle despite what we were taught. Despite having been taught that being with a baby is not polite, or considerate, in certain situations. And so babies, and their mothers, were pushed out of those circles.
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And then their facilitator photographed it. Because it was a moment that needed to be documented.
And for the same reason, I am writing about it now. Because it was a moment that needed to be remembered.
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Until more mothers enter the circle. Until motherhood begins to be counted as labor. As part of the economy itself, part of the labor market and its financial systems. Until it becomes clear to everyone that maternal labor is one of the foundation stones upon which the entire economy rests. Everything we know. War and peace and politics and the practical reality of all our lives.
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Three days later, I arrived in Lefkada, Greece, with another group of women who had come to study with me. Every one of these writing and learning retreats looks different, but they all begin the same way: we bring photographs of the women who raised us. We sit in a circle. We spread these women before us in their photographs - mothers and grandmothers and aunts, neighbors and mothers-in-law - bringing them back into the very place from which all of us were taught, politely, to step away and remain quiet. And it is always joyful and moving. It always feels like a repair. And also like a new story.
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Wishing all of us Shabbat Shalom,
*Maya Tevet Dayan*
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