Last month I watched the most recent season of True Detective on HBO. If you’ve never seen it, it’s an anthology series where each season takes place in a different place, with a different cast, solving wildly differing crimes over a series of episodes. It’s well written and directed, with a smorgasbord of brilliant actors.

The most recent edition, True Detective: Night Country, takes place in Alaska, around Christmas, and stars Academy Award winner, Jodi Foster and boxer-turned-actor, Kali Reis as the police in charge of a set of truly bizarre and perhaps, otherworldly, murders. Throughout the episodes we discover much about the two main characters, including crimes they may have committed, the researchers who were murdered, the shady mining company, and some of the indigenous Iñupiat people of the town. It’s the final episode reveal of the murderer that really blew my hair back and had me talking to my tv.

>SPOILER ALERT<

As it turns out, the murder of the researchers wasn’t paranormal, it was revenge. We find out that years earlier, the all-male group of researchers had participated in the brutal murder of an Iñupiat woman who was about to whistle-blow on them and their connection to the mining company and falsified research. Her murder had gone unsolved for years. No one knew exactly what had happened to her, or, if they did, they weren’t saying. As we discover, a group of Iñupiat women, the women who cleaned the research station, found out what the researchers had done to one of their own, bided their time, and finally delivered a horrifying and primal justice.

I share all of this because no one ever thought about the cleaning women, because no one sees the cleaning women. They are fixtures. Landscaping. Unimportant and invisible.

The writer, Issa Lopez, understood how to put the killer(s) in plain sight where no one would see them. Make them women. Make them indigenous. Make them do the menial work that women do. She put a lens on the invisible women, and still counted on us not to see them.

It’s these invisible women that are our infrastructure. The cleaning women, the lunch ladies, the tellers, the administrative assistants, the file clerks - these are the people on which everything runs, and collectively, we don’t see them.

My mom was a cleaning woman.

She worked in a hospital, surrounded by doctors, most of whom were men, who rarely spoke to her, who she wasn’t supposed to speak to. Before she took that job, she had been a cashier at Wal-Mart for years. She worked hard. It was exhausting, boring and tedious work that slowly sucked the life out of her, and while we lived in a poor, rural area, my mom spent her whole life never making more than $19K a year.

I didn’t tell people what she did. It’s shameful to say that I was ashamed of her job,

Now, these years later, I have a better appreciation of women who do what needs to be done. My mom never went to college, but she was one of the smartest people I’ve ever known. She was brilliant with numbers and I’ve often wondered who or what she might have been with different opportunities, a different life.

But, she was a cleaning women.

She was one of the invisible ones. Along with other women who are school bus monitors, food prep workers (not the chef!), record keepers, social workers, home health aids, animal care takers, phlebotomists, court clerks and a host of other jobs that are almost exclusively occupied by women.

We don’t think much of these women, or about them, because we don’t see them. Maybe they occupy our view for a short moment and then they’re gone. We have no impression of them. They make no mark, and yet, our lives rely on them. We need them.

We need the women who make things run. Who clean up after us, who hand us our money, who file our documents, who make the connections. We need them because without them, we’d fall apart.

Look at them. See them. Acknowledge them.

LB Adams is the CEO of Practical Dramatics, LLC, TEDx speaker & coach, communication strategist, and author.