God is a God of Mother’s Day—and all days. Whether mom is making $115,000 a year or a peanut butter sandwich, what matters isn’t what she receives, but what se gives and that she does it all with his presence in mind. On Mother’s Day and every day.

Chocolate. Spa gift certificates. Flowers. Fruit baskets. These are some of the most popular Mother’s Day gifts. It’s easy to see why a conscious Dad and his loving children might want to spoil Mom. She does a lot.

In fact, according to the Tenth Annual Salary survey by Salary.com, moms work almost 97 hours a week. When her duties—broken down into ten categories such as CEO, driver, housekeeper, and my favorite, psychologist—were evaluated together, stay-at-home moms “earn” a whopping $115,000 per year ($36,968 as a base salary and $78,464 in overtime). Moms that work outside the home earned $63,472 as a mom, on top of their day job. (Kind of puts perspective on a card and bouquet of flowers, but I digress.)

Given those hours, it’s no wonder a study last year by ForbesWoman found 92 percent of working moms and 89 percent of stay-at-home moms feel “overwhelmed by work, home and parenting responsibilities.” “We see [Mom] as the compilation of 10 jobs in one person,” Evilee Ebb, the general manager of Salary.com, told Forbes when the survey came out. “The breadth of Mom’s responsibilities is beyond what most workers could ever experience day-to-day. Imagine if you had to attract and retain a candidate to fill this role?”

Moms know this, and if their families don’t, usually she wants them to (if subconsciously). So it’s easy to understand the hype leading up to Mother’s Day. Indeed, even the creator of the holiday struggled with this phenomenon. At her mother’s prompting, Anna Jarvis began the holiday in 1908 as a day to honor a person’s mother. She promoted the holiday relentlessly until President Woodrow Wilson made it an official national holiday in 1914.

Read More

[Editor’s note: One or more original URLs (links) referenced in this article are no longer valid; those links have been removed.]