Motherhood knocked me on my ass almost immediately.
Within weeks of my son being born, I was having panic attacks—sometimes more than one a day. I had postpartum depression and anxiety. I felt trapped, overwhelmed, and completely bewildered by the fact that I wasn’t experiencing new Motherhood the way I thought a “good” Mom would. Instead of being flooded with selflessness and immediate adoration for my new role, I was grieving my autonomy and wondering what in God’s name I’d gotten myself into.
I used to cry in the shower.
Actually, the shower became something of a sanctuary. It was protected time, one of the only places where I could be just Danielle instead of Mom. I’d stand under the water for as long as reasonably possible, knowing that when I turned it off, dried my hair, and walked back out the door, someone would need something from me again. And here’s the kicker: I had help. My Mother-in-law lived with us, and my husband had three months of paternity leave. I was surrounded by support, which only made me feel like more of an asshole for struggling as much as I was.
What was wrong with me?
That question, in one form or another, followed me through the early years of Motherhood and eventually became part of the reason I wrote Good Girl, Bad Mom: For Every Mom Who’s Ever Felt Imperfect.
Because I wasn’t only struggling with Motherhood. I was ashamed that I was struggling with Motherhood.
There’s a difference.
What Is Good Girl, Bad Mom About?
Good Girl, Bad Mom is a memoir and manifesto about what happens when the woman you’ve spent your entire life becoming collides headfirst with Motherhood.
For me, that woman was a consummate Good Girl.
Long before becoming a Mother, I’d learned to be responsible and reliable. I liked getting things right. Approval mattered to me more than I probably understood at the time, and somewhere along the way, being good became tangled up with being worthy. If the people around me were happy with my thoughts, feelings, and choices, I was doing good. I was good. Disappointing someone, making the wrong choice, or admitting to a feeling other people might find uncomfortable? That was much harder.
You can imagine how well this worked out once I became a Mom.
Because suddenly there was an entirely new standard of “good” to live up to, except this one involved another human being and came with roughly 47,000 opportunities a day to screw it up.
I thought a good Mother would be patient. She’d be grateful. She’d happily put her own needs aside because anything for baby! She’d be tired, of course, but she wouldn’t complain too much about it. She certainly wouldn’t mourn her career, independence, spontaneity, or the woman she’d been before becoming someone’s Mom. She’d pivot gracefully into Motherhood and feel fortunate to be there.
I did not pivot gracefully.
And Good Girl, Bad Mom grew out of what happened next.
The Good Girl Becomes the Good Mother
It took me years to understand that I hadn’t left my Good Girl conditioning behind when I became a Mother. I’d simply brought it with me.
Or, as I say now:
The Good Mother is basically a Good Girl with a diaper bag.
Think about it. She’s endlessly capable and self-sacrificing. She can handle it. She shouldn’t need too much. And she certainly shouldn’t have the kinds of thoughts or feelings that might make anyone question how much she loves her children.
That last one really got me.
There were so many things I didn’t think I was allowed to say in those early years. That I felt trapped. That I missed my old life. That I resented how much of myself Motherhood seemed to consume. And perhaps the most shameful admission of all: sometimes I just didn’t like being a Mom.
Ok, now notice what I didn’t say.
I didn’t say I didn’t love my child.
That distinction took me years to unravel, and it eventually became one of the central ideas in Good Girl, Bad Mom. We’ve created a strange cultural equivalency between loving your child and loving the experience of raising your child, as though one must automatically prove the other.
But why?!
I love my son beyond measure. I can also dislike the labor of Motherhood. I can find parts of the job boring, relentless, irritating, exhausting, or downright maddening and still be a deeply loving Mother.
No one likes their job all the time, just as no one likes anyone all the time. So why on earth would Motherhood be exempt from this very basic human reality? Once I began separating how I felt about the job from how I felt about my child, something shifted. Maybe every difficult feeling I had about Motherhood wasn’t evidence that there was something wrong with me.
Maybe some of it was evidence that Motherhood is really freaking hard.
Motherhood Is a Joy. But it’s also a Job
This became another major idea in Good Girl, Bad Mom:
Motherhood is a joy. But it’s also a job.
For some women, Motherhood may feel like a calling. For many of us, it’s one of the great loves of our lives. I adore my son and feel profoundly lucky to be his Mom.
I also drive him to school.
I make appointments, communicate with teachers, buy clothes he’ll inexplicably outgrow eleven minutes later, research activities, manage schedules, monitor his emotional well-being, keep track of what’s happening academically, worry about things that haven’t happened yet, and spend an unreasonable amount of my life figuring out what another human being is going to eat.
And this is at age nine, people. We’re well past diapers. (It does not, sorry to say, “get easier.”)
And here’s what, admittedly, really pisses me off: Culture seems perfectly comfortable calling Motherhood “hard work,” but stops short of calling it a job! I find that fascinating because a job, by definition, involves responsibility and a steady continuum of tasks performed in pursuit of an outcome. If that doesn’t describe raising a human being, I’m not sure what does.
In the book, I became so preoccupied with this idea that I created an actual job description for Motherhood, breaking the work down by stages from newborn through young adulthood. Part of it is tongue-in-cheek, because if I didn’t laugh about Motherhood, I’d spend considerably more time crying in the shower. But I was also deadly serious.
There is an enormous amount of labor involved in raising children, and much of it is difficult to see. Researchers have even begun studying this “cognitive labor”—the invisible thinking work that keeps family life running.
Let me explain.
It’s not only doing the thing. It’s knowing the thing needs to be done. Remembering when it needs to happen. Anticipating what might go wrong. Researching the options. Making the decision. Following up. And then, quite often, doing it all over again next Tuesday. (OMG….you mean this never ends?!)
And research suggests that this invisible thinking work may be particularly taxing. A 2026 study published in PLOS ONE found that Mothers experienced invisible tasks like planning and organizing as more burdensome—and more unequally distributed—than visible household tasks. The researchers also found that carrying more of this mental load was associated with higher levels of anxiety and depressive symptoms.
That’s Invisible Labor.
And when we don’t count it, something interesting yet, irritating happens: the work disappears while the exhaustion remains. So the Mother is left standing there wondering why she’s so freaking tired when, from the outside, it may not look like she’s doing all that much.
And so, as I wrote in Good Girl, Bad Mom, I became increasingly convinced that Motherhood is Invisible Labor masquerading as a personal choice.
The Motherhood Setup
Another interesting find, as I was editing the book I kept bumping into some of the same ideas.
First, there was The Motherhood Fantasy, a term I began using to describe the idealized version of Motherhood we absorb long before we actually become Moms. Second, was my lifelong Good Girl conditioning, which had trained me to believe I should be able to handle whatever was expected of me. And then there was the staggering amount of Invisible Labor I encountered once I was actually raising a child.
I wrote about all three in the book, although I didn’t yet understand them as one interconnected framework.
That came later.
I now call it The Motherhood Setup:
- The Motherhood Fantasy says, I should love this.
- Good Girl Conditioning says, I should be able to handle this.
- Meanwhile, Invisible Labor is sitting there like, This is an enormous amount of work.
And that combination creates what we experience as Motherhood Overwhelm.
But the part I find most interesting, let’s be honest, downright enraging, is what happens next. A Mother doesn’t necessarily question the expectations she’s inherited or even recognize the full scope of the workload she’s carrying. Therefore, she doesn’t question the cultural set-up. She questions herself!
Why can’t I handle Motherhood? What’s wrong with me? Maybe I’m not meant to be a Mom?
That’s the question I was asking while lying on my bed in the middle of a panic attack with my husband trying to reassure me that someday life would feel normal again. It’s the question underneath the tears in the shower. It’s the question buried inside all my shame about having help and still finding Motherhood so difficult.
AND it’s the question I’d eventually like Mothers to replace with another one:
What am I actually carrying? (Yessssss…ask THAT!)
Because those questions lead in two very different directions. One assumes something is wrong with the woman and the other gets curious about the conditions surrounding her.
I’ve written more deeply about The Motherhood Setup and how these forces work together, but its roots are in Good Girl, Bad Mom. The book is where I was wrestling with the individual pieces. The framework came when I finally saw how they fit together.
Who Is Good Girl, Bad Mom For?
I wrote this book for the Mom who loves her kiddo and still wonders, What the hell happened to my life?
It’s for the Mom who’s looked around at other women and assumed they’re handling Motherhood better than she is. Maybe she’s lost her temper and replayed it in her head all night. (Me!) Maybe she’s overwhelmed by how much everyone needs from her and carrying around a hefty dose of Mom guilt because she chose this life, didn’t she? Shouldn’t she be happier?
It’s for the woman who misses herself. And it’s especially for the Mother who occasionally fantasizes about checking into a lovely hotel room alone, ordering room service, and telling absolutely no one where she is. Text me.
Mostly, though, I wrote Good Girl, Bad Mom for the woman who has taken a perfectly human Mothering moment—anger, resentment, boredom, ambivalence, exhaustion, the desire to run screaming from the house—and turned it into evidence about her character.
What kind of Mother feels this way?
You know what? A human one!
That doesn’t mean every behavior gets a pass. God knows I’ve said things I wish I could take back. Motherhood has given me ample opportunity to apologize, course-correct, and stare directly into the abyss of my own imperfections. Lucky me.
But imperfection and inadequacy aren’t the same thing.
And I’m no longer convinced that Mothers should spend their lives confusing the two.
What I Hope Mothers Take From Good Girl, Bad Mom
I didn’t write Good Girl, Bad Mom because I shockingly figured out how to be a perfect Mother. I wrote it because Motherhood forced me to confront ideas about myself I’d carried for years, particularly the belief that being ‘good’ meant getting it right.
Motherhood made that impossible.
There’s no getting all of this right. To the chagrin of my inner good-girl. There are too many variables, too many emotions, and an actual developing human being on the other side of the equation who, inconveniently, has opinions of his own.
What Motherhood has given me instead is a much greater tolerance for being human. And increasingly, it’s also made me interested in something beyond my own personal growth. You see, for most of my career, I’ve worked with women around the individual: Who are you? What do you want? What isn’t working? What would make your life feel more like your own? And I still care deeply about those questions. Sometimes those questions take time to work through. And sometimes there’s one thing you’ve been circling for months that could benefit from one really good coaching conversation.
But Motherhood has made me ask another set of questions too.
What are women being asked to carry? How much of that work remains invisible? And why, when Mothers become overwhelmed by it, are we so quick to teach them how to cope instead of getting curious about the conditions making them overwhelmed in the first place?
That’s where my work is going now.
I want us to name the work of Motherhood more accurately. I want us to count it. I want to keep questioning the cultural expectations that make women believe they should be able to do an impossible amount of work without buckling under the weight of it. Even my decision to capitalize Mother and Motherhood comes from this larger desire to make Motherhood more visible and give the role the significance I believe it deserves.
Because when we name the labor, we reduce the shame.
And if there’s one thing I hope you take from Good Girl, Bad Mom, it’s a little less shame.
Danielle xx
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