Crumbs are a stay-at-home-mother’s constant companions. We brush away crumbs left by toast shoved hurriedly into little mouths before school. We gather up crumbs dropped from The Discourse and chew them as we cook and clean and drive and volunteer and raise up and lay down. We’re left with crumbs in the kitchen because living with children is messy. We’re left with crumbs in public policy and process because no one knows what to do with us.

Stay-at-home mothers like me make the right uncomfortable when we’re progressive despite, or in my case because of, our care taking. We make the left uncomfortable because wouldn’t it be best for everyone if we were at work?

The first time I heard Andrew Yang, I was sweeping my kitchen floor. I nearly dropped the broom when Yang spent a quarter of the interview talking about the value of care taking. It wasn’t that nonsense line that nearly every other politician has fed us. You know the one. It sounds something like,

What caretakers do is so valuable you could never put a price on it, like don’t even try, it’s impossible, so better not treat it like a productive enterprise at all. I mean…we don’t go around paying people to do charity do we? Wait we do? Huh. Well, still. Would you even love your children if financial incentives buttressed the infrastructure of society, ha ha ha, anyways.

Yang wasn’t pandering to stay-at-home parents. He was preaching their good word, acknowledging their real, economic value with his platform of human-centered capitalism and policies like Universal Basic Income.

I cried in my kitchen. Someone saw my work.

I’m not always seen in the two-income techtopia cities I’ve lived in. The professional mothers I’ve met have always been lovely—they are building meaningful careers and raising good children. I admire them. And still, we always get stuck on the first question everyone asks upon meeting. What do you do?

The exceptionally kind ones hear I am a stay-at-home mom and stick around to ask a second question. That second question is rare enough; I am a little surprised each time it happens. The ones who don’t ask a second question, or give me time to ask them a first, aren’t bad people. They just don’t know what to do with me. I can hardly blame them. I’m not really equipped with a vocabulary to describe my work—they can hardly be blamed for being equally ill-equipped in their reply. There’s nothing right for either of us to say. Nobody has ever given us the words.

When I became a mother, the big talking point was that motherhood was a role, not a job. Women I’d respected from afar for years explained — over Twitter and in interviews — that calling motherhood a job devalued it. I repeated the refrain myself plenty of times. And in theory, I get it. Because lots of mothers have professional jobs! They have their work in their career and their Work as a mother. But what if your work is also, well, your Work? What if what you do, even just for a little while, is mother? What if you choose to be a caretaker? What is the plan for that?

Sometimes the choice is seasonal, sometimes it’s permanent. A dear friend of mine is a lawyer; she had four years experience in a firm before she had her first child. She decided to stay home for the early years of her two children's lives. When her youngest child turned five, she looked for jobs. No one would hire her because of her work gap. They told her if she wanted to re-enter the workforce she should do a returnship for free with a firm for up to a year. Once the returnship was done, she’d start at an entry level job.

Faced with the choice to regress in her career or move forward with her children at home, my friend chose the latter. She stays home, raises her kids full-time, and does volunteer work in her community. Universal Childcare, the exclusive drumbeat of so many other candidates, wasn’t the answer for her. She wanted to be home with her children for a time. She needed a culture that saw her work at home as actual, career-edifying work. If we recognized the economic value of what she did those few years at home, she would have been able to add it to her resume. Instead, employers treated her like someone stumbling back from an ill-conceived extended stay on a distant toy-strewn island.

A culture of care for the caretakers, the culture Andrew Yang wove right into his platform, would have given my friend access to the words she needed for her resume.

But it also would have given her the words she needed to define her time spent working in the home.

Since Yang started running, I, a perpetual stay-at-home-parent, have been given words I never had before. I call myself a caretaker instead of “just a mom.” I feel less embarrassed about the work I do every single day. I recognize that what I am doing hasn’t removed me from society—it’s a crucial part of building it.

Yang, of course, wasn’t the first to make the argument for the recognition of mothers as an essential economic force. The economist Maxine Udall argued on behalf of the market value of all mothers, whether they worked in an office or the home,

But what about all that non-market work women are cranking out? The stuff for which they don’t get paid? Child care, child birth (production of the future units of economic production for those of you who like to think of children as durable goods). … How about mother’s milk that builds bodies and immune systems 40 different ways? None of that shows up in GDP. The purchased inputs to it will (for example, the food women eat and the milk they drink to produce milk), but to take inputs as the sole measure of women’s non-market productive activities forces us to assume that women add no value to those inputs, either by virtue of their managerial acumen (which will influence the mix and amounts in which they combine them, i.e., their efficiency) or by virtue of differences in production “technology.”

Hell yes, my breastmilk is production technology that should be valued by market and man.

We’re comfortable assigning cash value to all sorts of enterprises that don’t produce immediate profit. Look at every unicorn in the tech space right now. They all have multi-billion dollar valuations and not one of them makes a dime. But we don’t care! Because those sprawling start-ups? They have potential! And in America, we believe in potential. So we are going to create tax policy for them. We are going to invest in them. We are going to trade their stock and make money off of our hopes for their profitable future. Can Stay-at-Home-Parents get the same respect and policy nods if we re-brand our families as society sustaining start-ups?

Andrew Yang also recognized that while we live in a capitalistic society, full-time professional work isn’t the right or best thing for every parent. This is true for many solidly middle class women, yes. But is extraordinarily true if you are a mother of four who cleans hotel rooms but would rather be home supervising homework. It’s possible that if given the choice between universal childcare or a UBI stipend, that woman will choose childcare. But it’s also entirely possible that she will take the UBI, transition to working part-time and meet her babies at the bus every day. (This means we’d need to pay a bit more to attract people to difficult jobs like cleaning our shit (literal and otherwise) out of hotel rooms.) It would also give that mother the time and resources to participate in her home and in her community. It would enable her to be a decision maker, not just a bed maker. Isn’t that what we keep saying we want for mothers?

We need accessible, even universal, childcare for parents who desire it and require it. We need to create a culture where women who want to can take the time to be home with their children before getting back to professional work. But we’ve also got to stop acting like parents who choose to work in the home have opted out of their own lives.

When I heard Andrew Yang dropped out of the race, I was in the kitchen again. I didn’t cry. Now I’ve got the words for what I do, who I am, and what I deserve. And I’m never going to stop saying them.