18 | Only a Mother Knows

On Standpoint, Care, and the Limits of Understanding

Jan 22, 2026

My husband said, slightly annoyed, “May always emails me about your paperwork.”

May is his office manager. She is also a Chinese woman, like I am. She needs a few documents from me so that I can start teaching this coming semester.

I said, almost without thinking, “Oh—May is trying to be considerate. She’s a mom. She also gave birth in her thirties. She’d rather not disturb.”

“Oh,” he said. It dawned on him.

This brief moment felt oddly disproportionate: how could a colleague and I who barely know each other understand each other this well?

To answer this, I have to back up.

The past two months have been brutal. Some nights I oscillated between wanting to jump off a building and binge-watching comedies to numb myself. I didn’t tell my OB about the suicidal thoughts only because I never visited the clinic at night—I bet depression prevalence would increase if data were collected at night. Instead, a few friends stayed with me through messaging apps, keeping me company during late-night breastfeeding sessions, while I cried quietly in the dark.

This was not “baby blues,” at least not in the way it is often explained away. It wasn’t some mysterious hormonal surge. I was exhausted—structurally, systematically, completely exhausted. My body felt like a broken pickup truck with loads, out of gas, still trying to inch forward on a road towards a destination I could no longer see. The engine was dead.

The first night home from the hospital, I moved slowly toward the toilet, my vulva aching with every step. As I bent my knees, urine surged out without warning, splashing over the seat and pooling across the tile. I froze, and then slowly sat on the toilet seat.

For the week following birth, my nipples healed in hours and split in minutes in my baby’s mouth, over and over, day and night, without mercy.

I asked my husband resignedly, is motherhood all about pain?

Two weeks postpartum, my mother returned to China. My husband had to finish the semester before he could start his paternity leave. That meant two more weeks alone with a newborn. Then, just as I thought we had reached some fragile equilibrium, my husband got the flu: fever, sore throat, fatigue, headaches. Our three-year-old was on winter break too. Overnight, I became the sole caregiver for one sick adult, one toddler, one one-month-old infant, and myself—a postpartum mother breastfeeding around the clock.

That was when I broke down.

Things did improve, eventually. The sick adult recovered. The three-year-old returned to daycare. My husband took over her care and slept with her at night. The baby began sleeping in four-hour stretches. I found myself watching comedies and actually laughing—not just to numb myself.

Then, two weeks later, I got the flu.

My fever reached 103°F (39.5°C). My throat burned with every swallow, like shards of glass scraping down. And still I got up to breastfeed, because lack of continuity kills the supply permanently and because the antibody from my breast milk protects the baby. I felt barely functional, and still tethered to a body that another body depended on.

It was around this time that my father, far away in China, began texting me. “I’m concerned about your job.” “You have to keep your job.” “It’s a matter of survival.” “Stop joking around. Take this seriously.”

I read these messages with a mix of anger and disbelief. How could my own father understand my situation so poorly? How could he miss the point so completely, when a colleague from my husband’s department seemed to grasp it instinctively? Why didn’t he start his text simply with “How are you feeling”?

It wasn’t that May knew more facts. Neither May nor my father knew my daily routine, my fever, my nights.

The difference was not information. It was position.

May is a mother. She has breastfed. During a brief interaction some months ago, she told me she thought it took courage for me to decide to teach so soon. She herself had taken a six-month career break for complete rest, even with her parents’ help and a nanny. She knows—viscerally—that moms with infants need rest the most.

My father’s experience is entirely different. When I was born, his wife breastfed around the clock while his own mother helped at home. He rode his bicycle to continue his engineering work 8-6 Monday to Saturday—this was the schedule in China in the early 90s—while his wife struggled to keep herself and their newborn alive. When he imagines my situation—consciously or not—he can only see a familiar problem: career interruption. Months away from work. The risk of losing a job. From that standpoint, minimizing interruption feels like care. He thinks what I need the most is to secure employment.

Both of them care. But their care is shaped by different lives.

This is standpoint theory—our social positions give us lived experiences, which in turn shape our knowledge and organize priorities.

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I have also learned that standpoint theory applies even within the same household.

My husband is, without exaggeration, the best husband I know—better than the fictional ones too. He is attentive, loving, deeply invested in our family. And yet one morning, he asked me, gently, whether he could work Mondays and Wednesdays this coming semester.

I was upset at him even raising this question.

I had only recently stopped crying every night. The suicidal thoughts had quieted for perhaps two weeks. I was still recovering from a fever. I was about to start teaching the following week, two days a week. If my worst nights were 30 out of 100, my current days were maybe 70. Still no energy to exercise. Still headaches. Still a painful throat. Teaching would likely bring me down to 55. If he took two more full days of my time—days I could otherwise spend resting—I would drop to 40.

How dare he?

The anger surprised me with its force. And then, just as quickly, I understood it. He wasn’t being careless. He wasn’t being selfish. He simply isn’t me. He does not inhabit my body. He does not feel the cost of each additional demand in the same way. No amount of love can grant him direct access to that knowledge.

We often assume that intimacy guarantees understanding—that sharing a roof, a bed, a life should make perspectives converge. What a fantasy.

That is the quiet, uncomfortable truth standpoint theory reveals: proximity does not guarantee understanding, but unfamiliar experiences almost guarantee misunderstanding.

May understood my situation not because she is wiser or kinder, but because she has stood where I stand. My father and my husband, in different ways, have not.

Being a mother produces a kind of knowledge that cannot simply be simulated by goodwill, intelligence, or proximity. It must be spoken. And it must be believed.

Thinking back, I realize that there was no mother in my Master’s philosophy program. No mother in my husband’s Master’s program. No mother in our joint Ph.D. program. No mother in my husband’s workplace. No mother in my previous one. Either this is an astonishing coincidence, or there is something structurally wrong with academic philosophy. Workplaces without mothers are epistemically impoverished because there are things that only a mother knows.

This is Nothing But 30, where feeling meets thinking. Write simply; think deeply.

Thank you for reading!

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