The support system that every generation of mothers before you could count on was dismantled and sold back to you in pieces you can't afford. The village that would have helped you raise your children was scattered across the country by economic forces that needed workers more than they needed communities, while the confidence that should have been yours was systematically undermined by an industry that profits by convincing you that other women are doing it better. The time that previous generations of women could count on, time held in place by people who lived nearby and shared the load, was stolen when the village was scattered and no one replaced what was lost. And when you couldn't hold it all together, when you buckled under conditions that would have broken anyone, you were handed one final insult: the belief that you were the problem.

This is the motherhood heist. No, it's actually not a metaphor but a business model, an economic restructuring, a transfer of wealth from families to corporations that has been unfolding for decades while we blamed ourselves for not being able to keep up.

I have spent years tracing how power consolidates and protects itself, following money through networks that were never meant to be seen, documenting the places where the same forces show up again and again wearing different masks. The patterns are consistent enough to be predictable once you learn to see them: conditions are created that guarantee harm, the people who are harmed are blamed for their own suffering, and then they are sold solutions to problems that were manufactured in the first place.

When I started looking at motherhood through this lens, everything I had been feeling suddenly had a shape. The exhaustion that seemed to come from nowhere, the guilt that attached itself to every decision, the impossible math of time and money that never balanced no matter how many ways I rearranged it. It turns out these were predictable outcomes of a system working exactly as it was designed, and it wasn't my fault. None of it was.

. . .