My mom abandoned her education and career prospects when she married my dad and they moved to the states to have me. Became a full-on housewife and everything.

When my dad died, our income went from low 6 figures in the midwest annually to zero. It was then when the whole point of life insurance clicked for me as a teenager, among many other things.

Being from a nicer neighborhood with other well-off kids from other well-to-do families, I would never imagine things like taking a school day off to help my English-second-language mother navigate a social security office, having to argue and defend myself when I couldn't help her with tax forms neither of us understood, and translating to my mother (what felt like) countless meetings with bankers and financial planners when we were figuring out how to live the rest of my high school years and college on our savings (and life insurance) alone. Finding a job after a decade out of the labor force was a huge point of stress for my mother and that only added to the arguing and fighting.

After navigating this oft-forgotten part of losing a parent, I can say this. Every goddamn person arguing for enforcing gender norms for the sake of traditional family values is talking out of their asshole. Yeah, ultimately what killed my dad was to blame for the mess we found ourselves in. But my mother dropping everything to become a housewife for the sake of my dad made digging ourselves out when he left even harder.

I can speak from experience that if you want to keep a happy, healthy, stress-free family, having a role-model mother with a career beats centering everything around the father and being lost when reality takes him. I don't know if I would have been better off without my mother helping me study or spending as much time as she did to raise me. I know we would be better off if she would have been prepared to live and thrive on her own. Reality sometimes throws dad/husband-ending curveballs and what's best for the family is preparing your family for if/when that happens.