I have a theory about why so many smart, capable women become Mothers and suddenly find themselves wondering:
Why can’t I handle this?
I know because I spent years asking myself that exact question.
I became a Mother at forty, after spending most of my adult life with a pretty strong sense of who I was. I had a doctorate in psychology, a coaching practice I loved, financial independence, long workouts, leisurely mornings, and the freedom to wander the aisles of Whole Foods reading the backs of jam jars should the mood strike.
Then I had a baby.
And while I loved my son, Motherhood knocked me so completely on my ass that I barely recognized myself.
I was overwhelmed. Overstimulated. Having panic attacks. I missed my work and my independence and felt ashamed that I wasn’t handling Motherhood better, especially because I had help. My husband had three months of paternity leave and my Mother-in-law lived with us.
If I had that much support and still couldn’t handle Motherhood, what did that say about me?!
Turns out, maybe less than I thought.
Years later, while writing my book, Good Girl, Bad Mom, I began to see something I couldn’t see while I was living inside it. There were three forces working together, and their collision helped explain why Motherhood felt so overwhelming, and why I was so convinced the overwhelm was evidence of my own inadequacy.
I call it The Motherhood Setup™.
What Is The Motherhood Setup?
The Motherhood Setup is a framework I created to explain why modern Motherhood feels so overwhelming and why women are taught to believe that overwhelm is their fault.
It looks like this:
Each part matters on its own. But the real power of The Motherhood Setup is in understanding what happens when the three interact.
Because the workload of Motherhood doesn’t arrive in a vacuum. A woman brings a lifetime of cultural conditioning with her. She may already believe that being good means being helpful, capable and pleasant. She may have absorbed the idea that a Good Mother naturally sacrifices for her children and finds profound fulfillment in doing so.
Then comes the actual work.
So. Much. Work. (!!)
And instead of looking at the sheer volume of what she’s carrying and thinking, This is an enormous amount of work, she turns the question inward.
Why wrong with me?
That’s The Motherhood Setup.
Good Girl Conditioning: “I Should Be Able to Handle This”
Good Girl Conditioning was the first piece I recognized because, well, I knew her intimately.
I am a recovering Good Girl, after all.
Long before I became a Mother, I’d learned the psychological safety of being good. Be responsible. Have the right answer. Make people happy. And try not to disappoint anyone while you’re at it.
Lo and behold, I had gotten very good at being good.
Then I became a Mother and, rather inconveniently, brought all of that conditioning with me.
This is what I mean by Good Girl Conditioning: the spoken and unspoken training many women receive that teaches us to be agreeable, impressive and low-maintenance. Over time, worth becomes tangled up with performance so that if you’re productive, pleasing and pleasant, you’re good. And if you’re messy, needy, disapproving, or disappointing someone, you’re failing.
So she learns to abandon herself to keep the peace — and calls it being a good Mom, a good wife, a good woman. You see, Motherhood offers the Good Girl an entirely new arena to prove herself. And, as I eventually realized:
The Good Mother is basically a Good Girl with a diaper bag.
(Yikes!)
The Motherhood Fantasy: “If I’m Doing This Right, I Should Love This”
Before I had my son, I thought I understood that having a baby would change my life. Spoiler alert: I did not.
My actual expectation was that there would be a brief adjustment period, perhaps three to six months, and then life would more or less return to normal, except now there would be a baby added to it. You know, like a baked potato.
Turns out, the baby was the main dish.
And my old life?
Yup. The side dish.
Underneath my admittedly questionable understanding of restaurant-to-Motherhood ratios was something much bigger. I had absorbed an idea about how Motherhood was supposed to feel.
I use the term The Motherhood Fantasy to describe the cultural story that if you’re doing Motherhood “right,” it should feel natural, relatively effortless and spiritually fulfilling.
A Good Mother would instinctively know what her baby needed. She’d happily sacrifice. Sure, she’d be tired, but she wouldn’t complain all that much because she’d be so deeply fulfilled by the experience that whatever she lost wouldn’t seem terribly important. Except (!) real Motherhood is also repetitive, demanding, disruptive, boring, breathtaking, funny, exhausting and, on some days, incredibly frustrating.
I love my son.
I also miss parts of the woman I was before becoming a Mother.
And both things can be true. But the problem with The Motherhood Fantasy is that when your actual experience doesn’t match it, you don’t even think to question the fantasy.
Instead, you question yourself!
Invisible Labor: The Work We Don’t Count
Then there was all the work I was doing that I didn’t fully understand as work.
Feeding. Washing. Scheduling. Researching. Planning. Buying birthday gifts. Remembering the school thing. Making the appointment and then remembering the thing I needed to ask once we got to the appointment.
I was carrying something I couldn’t name while simultaneously being EXHAUSTED by it.
(How dare I.)
Eventually, I found language for what I was experiencing: Invisible Labor.
Ohhhhh.
There was a name for the hundreds of tiny tasks running through my brain. The anticipating counted. The emotional management counted. Remembering that we’re almost out of toothpaste while simultaneously listening to a story about Minecraft counted, too.
And there is real data behind the unequal distribution of caregiving work.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics American Time Use Survey in 2025, among adults living with children under six, women spent an average of 2.8 hours per day on primary childcare compared with 1.7 hours for men. And that’s primary childcare, meaning the care itself is the main activity being performed. The BLS separately measures “secondary childcare,” when an adult is responsible for a child while doing something else.
Which is an interesting category when you think about Motherhood. Because how much of Motherhood happens while you’re doing something else? Once I had language for this work, I could see it differently. And that realization has stayed with me ever since:
I call it: Count the Work.
Because what a culture chooses to count tells us something about what it chooses to value. We count hours worked, wages earned, jobs created and economic output. But so much of the work Mothers do happens outside those traditional measures, which makes it remarkably easy to overlook.
I think we need to start counting it.
The remembering. The anticipating. The planning. The caregiving. The emotional and logistical labor that keeps children cared for and families running.
Count the Work is a call to make the invisible work of Motherhood visible, because once we can see the work, we have a much better chance of valuing it. And once we value it, we can begin to ask how we might better support it. Language really matters. I’ve written before about why I capitalize the M in Mother, and the impulse behind The Motherhood Setup comes from a similar place: what we name, and how we name it, shapes what we’re able to see.
How The Motherhood Setup Actually Works
This is the part I find most interesting. The Motherhood Setup isn’t simply a list of three difficult things women experience. The three forces reinforce one another.
Good Girl Conditioning tells a woman, I should be able to handle this. The Motherhood Fantasy adds, If I’m doing this right, I should love this. Then Invisible Labor shows up with 47 things nobody noticed she did before breakfast.
And therein lies the setup. The cultural expectations shape how she interprets the workload.
If she feels resentful, perhaps she’s selfish. If she needs more help, she wonders why she can’t manage what other women appear to handle. And if she misses her old life, career, body, freedom or identity, she may feel guilty for wanting any of it when she’s already been given the extraordinary gift of a child.
We have names for some of what this can eventually look like: Mom guilt. Mom burnout. Mom rage. But I’m interested in what happened before we got there. What has a Mother been carrying, believing and expecting of herself for months—or years—before her exhaustion or anger became the thing she thought she needed to fix?
And yet, she keeps looking at herself, when there may be something much bigger happening around her.
A 2026 Pew Research Center study of 2,242 working parents found a striking gap between the flexibility parents say would help them and what many workplaces actually provide. Seventy-one percent said flexibility in when they work their required hours would be highly helpful, while only 25% reported having a great deal or fair amount of that flexibility. Among parents with a child age five or younger, 59% said onsite childcare would be highly helpful.
Sometimes a Mother’s struggle is telling us something about the conditions she’s trying to function within.
And yet, The Motherhood Setup keeps pointing her back toward herself:
Maybe I’m just not good at this. Maybe I’m a bad Mom?
Why Naming The Motherhood Setup Matters
I didn’t sit down one day and invent this framework. The pieces arrived one by one while I was writing Good Girl, Bad Mom and trying to understand my own experience.
- First came Good Girl Conditioning.
- Then Invisible Labor.
- And finally, The Motherhood Fantasy.
Shortly before the book was published, I was on a call explaining these ideas when something clicked.
Wait.
These aren’t three separate things.
They work together.
Oh! I had a framework.
And suddenly, so much of my early Motherhood made sense. The resentment. The endless remembering. The pressure I put on myself to be capable. Even the strange belief that having help and still struggling somehow made me especially deficient.
For years, The Motherhood Setup had pointed me back toward myself:
Why can’t I handle Motherhood?
But once I could see what was happening, I could finally ask a much more useful question:
What am I actually carrying?
And that distinction really matters to me because language gives shape to experiences we might otherwise interpret as personal failure.
When we name Invisible Labor, we can begin to count the work. Once we recognize Good Girl Conditioning, we can notice when our worth has become entangled with how much we can handle or achieve. And when we question The Motherhood Fantasy, we make room for a more expansive experience of Motherhood, one that can include extraordinary love alongside exhaustion, resentment, ambition, joy, boredom, gratitude, desire and about 717 other things depending on the day.
And look, sometimes seeing it is only the beginning. If there’s one part of your life you keep circling, something you’re trying to change, decide or simply understand, you may not need six months of coaching. Sometimes one really good coaching conversation can help you figure out what’s actually going on.
But however we get there, perhaps most importantly, The Motherhood Setup gives us a way to examine the conditions surrounding Mothers instead of continually examining Mothers themselves!
Because sometimes we need to name what we’re carrying in order to stop blaming ourselves for the weight of it.
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