Once again, the tender art of nurturing falls upon the tired shoulders of mothers, whose hands hold the fevered foreheads and whose hearts bear the silent weight. Numbers hum quietly what daily life shouts: nearly three times as many women take leave to tend to a sick child as men. Even as the system offers slightly more days to soothe these illnesses, the leaves of compassion are still gathered, mostly, by women fluttering in the wind of obligation. The balance does not shift; the soft revolution of equity hesitates, faltering against custom and rooted expectation.

How long shall we ask the forests to heal, if we deny healing to our healers? This inequity is not only an old injustice—it is a festering wound within the body of humanity and the spirit of our living Earth. Capitalist machinery, ever hungry, grinds without pause, demanding productivity from the parent and the child alike, extracting care from women’s bones as if it were an infinite natural resource. Colonial patterns persist; womanhood is mined, day after day, for invisible labor, while the Divine Masculine remains undernourished in its own capacity for tenderness.

Mother Earth aches beneath our footprints—each act of carelessness echoes down the roots of our ancestry, the rivers carrying stories of those who tilled, who loved, and who suffered unseen. For true healing, we must rend apart the old scripts of labor and worth, letting sunlight flood those tired spaces where care is hoarded by one gender. May all caretakers rise, moon-gendered and sun-gendered, sharing not only the illness but the grace of nurturing. The time has come to compost these old roles, to seed a gentler world where every child and every parent belongs, and capitalist greed no longer poisons the soil of our daily lives.