Some Mother's Day thoughts to ponder

Happy Mother's Day to the more than 85 million mothers in America.

According to the U.S. Census, 43.5 million mothers between the ages of 15 and 50 have given birth to 98.8 million children over the years, including 3.9 million children just in the past 12 months.

About 36 percent of the moms who gave birth to those youngest children under age 1 were unmarried and 61.7 percent were in the labor force.

Of all mothers, 5.2 million are married, stay-at-home moms. And, of all mothers, 9.9 million are single mothers living with children younger than 18 -- up from 3.4 million in 1970.

Those are the "hard numbers" of Mother's Day. But we all know numbers tell only one part of the story.

Moms double as their children's doctors, teachers, pastors, body guards, best friends. Moms are listeners, advisers, nourishers of body and soul.

Mothers see behind our most ingenious masks. They praise our successes, forgive our sins, smack us into shape when needed -- sometimes even chase us out of the chaos of riots (witness Toya Graham of Baltimore) to save us from becoming the next painful death statistic. Moms are walking, talking human lie detector tests. There simply is no love deeper than a mother's love.

Moms are all of these things despite huge and growing odds -- even in this America that we call the greatest nation on earth.

In "Save the Children's" 2015 annual global motherhood rankings, the United States dropped two spots to 33rd place as smaller countries continued to outpace us in the treatment of mothers.

Women in the United States face a 1-in-1,800 risk of maternal death, the worst odds of any developed country in the world, according to the report. Stunningly, American women are 10 times more likely to die of pregnancy related causes than their counterparts in Poland, and an American child is as likely to die as a child in Serbia.

Urban mothers and children are far more vulnerable than suburban and even rural ones. Even in America's Capitol, Washington, D.C., babies in the city's poorest communities die before their first birthday at a rate more than 10 times higher than babies born in the richest part of the city.

The health disparity clearly traces to dollars and cents. Poverty. Especially poverty among women. Moms.

In another measure of the lives of mothers, Wallethub, finds that though women comprise roughly half of the American workforce, we still earn about three-quarters as much as men do and have far less upward mobility, as evidenced by the fact that less than 5 percent of Fortune 500 companies have female chief executives. Even new high-profile female CEOs seem dramatically underpaid compared with their male peers.

Marry Barra, the first female CEO of General Motors, is a case in point. Her initial CEO pay package was less than half of what was given to the man who had just vacated the seat. And President Obama has often talked of the gender wage gap, noting that women make seventy-seven cents for every dollar a man makes.

This year, WalletHub analyzed state dynamics across 12 key metrics to identify the Best & Worst States for Working Moms. If you guessed that the Southeast made up the bulk of "worst" states, you were right. Louisiana, South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, West Virginia, North Carolina and Kentucky were among the bottom 10 rankers. Tennessee, No. 23, was saved by having the lowest child care costs as a percent of the median women's income (which, of course, is partly a function of our low, low, low median women's income of $33,184, according to the National Partnership for Women & Families).

But, look, those pesky numbers have gotten in the way again.

It's Mother's Day. Hug your mom. Give her something fun or sweet or pretty. Let her know you -- if no one else -- appreciates her strength and persistence and love -- even her tough love.

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