Mother 's Day. You know what to do: Call, send a card, buy brunch or bring flowers. Even if your mother drives you batty, the woman has worked hard, and you owe her your life.

Because you are not a clod (because your mother raised you right), you will come through with gestures of appreciation for your mother on Mother 's Day. I am a daughter (Hi, Mom!) and a mother. I have a pre-school-age son and a daughter not yet 3 months old. I 'm on maternity leave from my job as an English professor at UW Eau Claire. Because I am a Wisconsin state employee working for the university system, my maternity leave is utterly unpaid.

Maybe it 's not fair to single out Wisconsin in its failure to support working mothers. There are, after all, only three states in the union -- New Jersey, Washington and California -- which mandate brief, partially-paid maternity leaves.

But must the Badger State leave new mothers in the lurch just because everybody else is doing it? Let the federal government succumb to peer pressure instead. Worldwide the only nations not providing for paid maternity leaves are Australia, New Zealand, Lesotho, Swaziland, Papua New Guinea and the United States.

Ours is not the only country in which a family 's middle-class status relies on the full-time employment of two adults, nor is ours the only country with a significant population of single parents. For all but the wealthiest families, unpaid maternity leaves are serious financial hardships.

And yet maternity leaves are necessary. If you don 't know why, then you 've never birthed a child or lived with an infant. Infants need their mothers, and mothers want their infants close by, mostly because those babies need to eat every 1-2 hours (later every 2-3 hours), around the clock, for months.

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends a full year of breastfeeding for babies ' health and brain development, so most informed mothers give breastfeeding a go. It 's no pleasure cruise. New mothers sit, day after day, night after night, shoulders hunched over their wee ones, nursing relentlessly. A burp, a diaper, maybe a brief drowsy sleep -- almost never a hot shower -- and then it 's back to the lactation station.

And so, this nation 's mothers continue to opt for taking unpaid maternity leaves for as along as they can manage it financially.

Single and divorced mothers, low-wage earning mothers and mothers who are their family 's primary breadwinners buy value-buckets of Similac and Enfamil and head back to the salt mines far too soon.

Wealthier mothers -- white-collar, professional women who are better able to afford full 12-week maternity leaves -- not only lose chunks of their salaries, but also pay a price for motherhood in deferred promotions and raises. Because these mothers make less money over the span of their careers, generally they earn fewer retirement dollars as well.

Will your flowers and brunch will be enough this Mother 's Day? Or should this be the Mother 's Day -- at last! -- on which someone from your mother 's world of work finally writes her a big, fat compensatory check?

Loomis lives in Eau Claire.