The work that never makes it onto a timesheet
Being a mom is not a job in the traditional sense. But try telling that to anyone who has survived a newborn’s witching hour, packed three different school lunches at 6 am, or held a crying child while answering a work call on mute.
Moms work across every boundary: working moms who carry a full career and come home to a second shift, stay-at-home moms whose days are invisible to the world but utterly essential to their families, single moms who carry both ends of the load without a pause.
The shape of the work is different for every mom but the weight of it is the same.
This Labour Day, as we celebrate the people who keep our economies and communities moving, we also want to celebrate moms among them.
Real moms. Real work. Real villages.
At Supermom, we asked some of the moms in our community and on our own team to share honestly about their journeys. The unpolished honest version of it all. Rebecca, our Chief of Business and People, is a mother of two boys holding together a full career while her husband takes a leap into building something new. She describes the quiet arithmetic of modern motherhood with honesty that is hard to read and impossible to dismiss. “I am very afraid that all the balls I am juggling now will just fall apart,” she says. “But I think parents today need to give ourselves a pat on our backs for taking that leap of faith in the beginning and working together to find that formula we pray so hard would work.” Her village. ageing parents, in-laws who shuttle the kids to enrichment classes, read bedtime stories in her place, and pick up on the quiet disappointments her children carry home from school, is what makes her possible. And she knows it.
Kai Xin, our CXMO, never planned to have three children. She wasn’t even sure she wanted any. But motherhood, she says, created space she didn’t know existed.
“Each child since then has expanded that space, not just in my heart, but within our entire family.”
She also holds the bigger picture clearly. Encouraging more families to have children isn’t simply about financial incentives. It’s about whether society is willing to make the weight of parenting lighter, together.
Charlene spent over a decade living abroad without a village. No confinement help. No extra hands. Just the quiet, exhausting reality of doing it largely alone.
“While you can survive motherhood alone,” she reflects, “you’re never meant to.”
Moving to Singapore changed things. It brought the return of family, familiar voices, and people who showed up and became her foundation. This Mother’s Day, she thinks about her village above all else. “Sometimes, the beauty of motherhood isn’t just in the children you raise. It’s in the people who quietly help raise you too.”
Queenie names what many moms feel but rarely say out loud: it’s not just money. It’s time. “On weekdays, I only get a few precious hours with my children. People often say time is money. But when it comes to our children, money can never buy back time with them.”
Joy came into motherhood without a plan. She found her footing in the presence of her own mother and one friend who had walked the path before her.
“Having someone who has walked the path before and someone who can say ‘I understand’ makes the challenges feel smaller and the joys feel deeper.”
She is proudest, she says, not of any milestone she has achieved, but of the grace she continues to give herself. “I remain a student of motherhood.”
Nurul began her journey during COVID, anxious and by-the-book, with her husband working offshore for half the year. She has learned, over time, to let go a little. To say yes to small adventures and choosing presence over perfection.
Her siblings and parents have been her anchor. And she is clear about what mothers actually need. “It isn’t just financial support, but real flexibility and stronger communities.”
Her advice to anyone standing at the edge of this journey is the kind that only comes from someone who has actually lived it: “You don’t need to have it all figured out. You’ll grow into it. It’s messy, exhausting, and incredibly beautiful.”
Finding your village
There is one thing in every one of these stories that has shaped each mom’s story: having a village.
A village looks different for each family. For some, that village is family: grandparents reading bedtime stories over video call, parents, in-laws, siblings. For others, it’s a friend who has been through it and picks up the phone at 11 pm. Sometimes it’s a community of moms who simply understand because they are living it too.
That is why Supermom exists. Not to tell you what to do or who to be. But to be one part of the village you are building, wherever you are on this journey.
This Mother’s Day, the work is worth honouring
Labour Day and Mother’s Day fall just days apart for a reason, it seems.
Both ask us to pause and recognise the work that holds everything together. The visible and the invisible. The celebrated and the quietly carried.
To every mom reading this, working, staying home, doing it solo, doing it with a village, or still figuring out what your village looks like:your work matters. All of it.
