What would the world be like if mothers got paid for just being mothers? What if they ran a meter every time they drove little Jimmy to soccer practice? What if they collected a fee every time they cleaned the house?

Sometimes we forget that our mothers do a little bit more than make us cookies to share with our roommates. Some regard a mother’s job as something inferior to a full-time career. Some mothers are not respected because they don’t dress up in heels everyday and go to the office. In fact, a USA Today article reported that a University of Connecticut and a University of Minnesota study found that one in five of the women surveyed felt less valued by society because they were mothers.

No woman should ever feel less valued because she has brought a child into the world. That’s absurd, among other things.

According to an informal study done by Salary.com, if mothers were to receive a salary every year, they would be pulling in six figures. An average stay-at-home mom would earn an estimated $131,471 annually, including overtime. That sounds pretty appealing doesn’t it? Too bad real life doesn’t allow money to grow on trees so our moms can get a paycheck.

Moms do just about everything under the sun. They transform themselves from cooks to housekeepers, from nurses to chauffeurs, from referees to teachers, and they still manage to find time to be a wife, sister and friend to others. Why shouldn’t they earn something in return?

Whoever decided that stay-at-home mothers should not be respected as working women has obviously never taken care of children. As opposed to measly 9-5 jobs, mothers are on call 24 hours a day. They never get sick days, and vacations involve carrying diaper bags and pushing strollers all over Disney World. The responsibilities and the amount of work that accompany having children needs to be re-evaluated. It’s hard – very hard.

The fact of the matter is that mothers do their job out of love – and that’s something you don’t find too often. I can guarantee that the guy taking your quarters at the tollbooth isn’t doing it because he has a deep love for you. He just wants to get paid. Mothers have different motives. They choose to bring children into the world knowing the vast responsibility that will come with the child. While receiving a paycheck doesn’t seem to fit, they should be rewarded somehow. Mothers never really receive anything tangible for the work that they do. I hope this is something we all have come to know over time – and tried to compensate for. When we were little it was all about picking daisies from the front yard and bringing them to your mom. Today, calling home every once in a while to see how your mom is doing would suffice.

I’m willing to put money on the fact that any stay-at-home moms who heard about this survey just smiled knowingly and went on with their day. If moms really cared about getting monetary compensation, they wouldn’t be stay-at-home moms. They never ask for anything in return. It’s really as simple as that.

It takes a special kind of woman to take care of children without a complaint. The survey done by Salary.com is nothing new. I’m sure mothers across the world have been aware of the money they could make if they weren’t staying at home with their kids. But it took a Web site to figure out the numbers because mothers just don’t care. Being a mother is worth more than any amount of money.

Don’t forget Mother’s Day is Sunday.