Mom-of-3's powerful post highlights the importance of realizing your own worth as a woman and mother

Motherhood is a difficult stage in any woman's life as their body, mind and relationships drastically change. They have to invest their time in raising the children and be involved in the daily activities of their life, school and everything else. Lo Mansfield is also a busy mother who has to do everything for her three children. The former delivery nurse lives in the Netherlands and is an online educator. She is also a caregiver for the two daughters and son she shares with her husband, reports Good Morning America. 

She is frequently the parent that spends the entire day with the children while her husband, Kelvin, works from home. However, that doesn't mean Mansfield isn't involved in a variety of activities, which she admits she tries to put into perspective at times and has to remind herself are equally as important as what her spouse or other parents do. She conveyed these emotions in a powerful Instagram post shared on December 12, 2022. "When my husband asked me what I did today, I told him 'Oh, nothing,'" she wrote.

Mansfield went on to explain that this statement is "a load of crap" given all the tasks she does for her three children on a daily basis. Referring to her youngest, she wrote: "I treated his body as the tiniest little gift, cleaning it and tending it and encouraging it towards growth and wholeness."

She also shared that she takes the oldest daughter to preschool, taught her middle child to hold scissors, and "al dente'd the macaroni and cheese pasta for the 100th time." Mansfield added: "Today I loved my family, hard. And that love looked like fresh diapers and mac n' cheese, a hand guiding a pair of scissors, a smile when the preschool door flung open. Unassuming, unglamorous, simple. But is sure as hell wasn't nothing."

She called attention to the seemingly never-ending duties stay-at-home and working mothers shoulder and the love and care they provide their families. However, their efforts are often dismissed as nothing and these women struggle to value their own selves.

Mansfield told the outlet: "This idea of the work of motherhood, and how we kind of quantify and qualify, it has actually been something I've personally struggled with for a long time, because I am an achiever and a doer by nature." Writing and sharing her own motherhood story has aided Mansfield, and she hopes her posts will give way to a bigger dialogue and potentially even influence cultural ideas on child care and the labor involved in child raising. 

She said: "Putting that out there just felt like almost my own desire to remind myself, like, hey, this matters. And the more we say it and the more we keep reminding others that this is valuable and it's meaningful, even if it's unglamorous or simple, the sooner we're going to get to the place where it's easy for all of us to believe it."

Mansfield recognizes that the value of child care might be difficult to comprehend in the same way that many people think of other sorts of jobs. She said, "I think that the reason some of this gets a little messy sometimes is because there's love mixed in and so, we can't quantify and we can't put a monetary value on love, and we shouldn't be trying to." 

At the end of the day, Mansfield's message to other parents is straightforward. "You are the right parent for your child. You might be a little bit broken, you might be a little bit grief-stricken," she said. "You might have done a really s--- job that day, you might have genuinely done nothing except keep your kids alive but that child is intended for you. You are intended for them. That is why they are yours."