Jodi Kantor, The New York Times reporter who, along with Megan Twohey, broke the Harvey Weinstein story, spoke here in Vermont back in February. Of all the ground she covered, one anecdote in particular snagged my attention. She remarked that doing something as simple as watching an old movie with her eldest daughter now meant having to constantly press pause in order to provide context for what was unfolding, and why it was problematic.

Would that have happened 10 years ago? Or even two?

These are our homes, our marriages; this is our mothering now. Mothers and wives are at the forefront of reshaping, recontextualizing, reminding, and not a small amount of revisionist history. As with gun violence, everyone seems all too ready to put their faith in the next generation to fix it, adding a whole new level of labor to the sandwich generation we already are : one whiplashed between the gender dynamics of our mothers’ Mad Men reality and our daughters’ March For Our Lives urgency. Which is perfect, really, because we didn’t have too much on our plates already.

#Metoo, Time’s Up, and industry-specific groups like Diet Madison Avenue are shifting interpersonal dynamics in ways both profound and mundane. The primary focus has been on the workplace, but working through these shifts is happening at home. For those of us who are partnered and have children, the impact comes in waves, like grief. We’re not only struggling with our own realities; we also need to wrestle with ingrained gender and power expectations in our marriages while attempting to raise our children in a way that will undo deeply entrenched beliefs around those same things.

Hey, no pressure.

So we women, we mothers, are used to the turned cheeks, the glazed-over eyes as we try to be understood as having something a bit more compelling to say than the mwa-mwa-mwa of Charlie Brown’s teacher. We are used to feeling your impatience and indifference; we learn it as girls. That we talk too much, that we have nothing to say, that we are frivolous. Girl talk.

We are used to it at doctor’s offices and in hospitals, where we are in pain, where we know something isn’t quite right, where we are scared. We hear it in the many stories of women’s pain being brushed aside and discounted, most recently in Ask Me About My Uterus by Abby Norman and Sick: A Memoir from porochista khakpour.

We are used to it in this country, where we are losing our babies and losing our lives because hey, we are just women complaining. A recent NPR and ProPublica investigation showed that mothers in the U.S. are about three times more likely to die during childbirth than mothers in Canada or Britain. And as jarring as that statistic is, it becomes exponentially horrifying when you consider that for every mother who dies, another 70 come close.

All because no one listens to us. No one believes us. No one takes us seriously.