M is for Mother
Throughout my debut memoir, Good Girl, Bad Mom, you’ll notice something unusual: I choose to capitalize Motherhood. Mom, Mother, and Motherhood are always written with a capital M — not just when they’re used as formal titles, but everywhere.
It’s deliberate.
Somewhere along the way, I started thinking about how easily Motherhood gets minimized. The work is enormous, but so much of it happens privately, inside homes and families, where we don’t necessarily see it as work at all.
And I thought: Why am I writing something this significant with a lowercase letter?
So I stopped.
Capitalizing Mother is my small way of giving the role the weight I believe it deserves.
And there are economic consequences to how little we value Motherhood. Research from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research finds that Motherhood explains nearly 80% of the gender pay gap, and that each child under five can reduce a Mother’s earnings by roughly 15%, even when compared with women with similar experience and education.
We capitalize what we value.
Doctor. President. God.
So why not Mother?
Why Capitalizing Motherhood Matters in Culture + Policy
This isn’t really about grammar for me. It’s about what language communicates.
When we talk about Motherhood as though it’s something happening in the background of a woman’s life, it’s remarkably easy for the work itself to disappear into the background too.
But Motherhood isn’t background. It’s the backbone.
Think about the hours spent feeding, cleaning, driving, scheduling, researching, remembering, comforting, anticipating and keeping a family running. Much of that work isn’t compensated, and quite a bit of it isn’t even recognized as work. It’s part of what I call The Motherhood Setup: the combination of cultural expectations, Good Girl conditioning, and Invisible Labor that leaves so many Mothers overwhelmed — and wondering if they’re failing at Motherhood.
For example, the U.S. household care economy has been estimated at more than $1.2 trillion a year in unpaid caregiving. For a little perspective, Walmart — one of the largest companies in the world — generated about $713 billion in revenue in 2026. The estimated value of unpaid caregiving in the U.S. is nearly 1.7 times Walmarts annual revenue.
That’s “holy shit” kinda money, and it’s part of why language matters to me. What we name becomes easier to see, and what we can see becomes easier to count. And once we start counting the work, we have a much better chance of valuing it.
Loud Respect: Capital M for Motherhood
For me, the capital M is a small but deliberate act of respect.
I’m not under the impression that changing a letter is going to single-handedly change how our culture treats Mothers. But every time I type Mother, I’m making a conscious choice not to make the role smaller on the page than I believe it is in real life.
It’s one letter.
But it’s my letter, and I’m keeping it.
And the stakes extend well beyond language. Research from Pew found that working Mothers were twice as likely as working fathers to say parenthood had made it harder for them to advance in their careers. And that’s part of the larger conversation I’m interested in now.
How do we make the work of Motherhood more visible? How do we stop treating caregiving as something women should simply absorb into the margins of their lives? And what changes when we start giving Motherhood the cultural and economic significance it actually has?
Because ultimately, this is about worth—about who gets named and noticed, and who gets dismissed. Capitalizing Mother certainly isn’t going to solve all of that, but for me, it’s one small way of refusing to make Motherhood smaller than it is.
So here’s my invitation: try it. Write Mother with a capital M in your own journal, emails, or posts. See how it feels. Notice whether something shifts when you see the word written with the weight the role deserves.
One capital M at a time.
***
A Love Letter to Every Imperfect Mom
If you’ve ever wondered whether you’re doing Motherhood “right,” whether everyone else is handling it better than you, or whether some of the thoughts and feelings you’ve had make you a bad Mom, that’s exactly why I wrote Good Girl, Bad Mom. It’s part memoir, part manifesto, and very much the story of what happened when the Good Girl I’d spent my life becoming collided headfirst with Motherhood.
And, spoiler alert, I did not handle it gracefully.
ORDER NOW— it’s exactly the read you didn’t know you needed.
She is the creator of The Motherhood Setup, a framework for understanding how the Motherhood Fantasy, Good Girl Conditioning, and Invisible Labor collide to leave so many Mothers overwhelmed. Her work asks what changes when we begin to make the invisible visible, Count the Work, and recognize Motherhood as both a joy and a job.
Explore Dr. Dowling's work on modern Motherhood
- Do You Need a Life Coach—or Just One Really Good Coaching Session? - Oct 5, 2026
- Decision Fatigue: Why Your Brain Feels So Overloaded - Sep 28, 2026
- Good Girl, Bad Mom: For Every Mom Who’s Ever Felt Imperfect - Sep 25, 2026