Authors Trisha Ashworth and Amy Nobile interviewed a diverse group of 100 mothers all over the country and found a surprisingly similar trend: many had a difficult time feeling like they were "a good mom" and their happiness was clouded by guilty little secrets. Many mothers described their anxieties and identified themselves as “challenged” more than “happy.” In their new book “I Was a Really Good Mom Before I Had Kids,” the pair document real mothers’ stories of struggling with exceedingly high expectations, pinpoint where the craziness stems from, and offers solutions for mothers to come to peace with motherhood.

Here’s an excerpt:

The Fake-Cupcake Problem
If you’re sitting down and reading this, then you must not be having the worst day ever. Or maybe you are. Whatever kind of day you’re having—you couldn’t love your kids more, or you couldn’t be more eager to jump in your car and speed away—we’ve been there. Between us we have five kids, two husbands, two dogs, three-quarters of a career, steadily improving skills at negotiating with toddlers, and way too much stress. This book got started on one of those nights that followed one of those days—dog poop tracked into the house, wild children in the aisles of Target. Laser-eyed, we watched our clocks until 4 p.m. Then we each poured ourselves a glass of wine and picked up the phone to call each other.

As we talked, our kids tattooed one another with permanent markers and played in the dog-food bowls. Whatever—it really didn’t matter. We discussed our days, and within ten minutes we’d laughed, cried, whined about our husbands, wondered what happened to our sex drives, snapped at the kids, wished we had passions, and questioned why we sometimes felt like bad moms. Were you a bad mom if you screamed at a four-year-old for getting up twelve times in one night? Were you a good mom if you stayed up late baking fifty cupcakes for the next day’s ballet recital? Would passing off store-bought cupcakes as homemade really be a terrible offense?

Meanwhile we were trying to turn the three ingredients in our respective refrigerators into some semblance of dinner. And our husbands, who’d finally come home, were looking at us cross-eyed for yet again being on the phone. Granted, blabbing while the kids trashed the house might not have looked so good from their position. But immediately hanging up to resume our roles as moms would not have been a good idea, either. These phone chats were our salvation.

“Oh, Really? You’re Having a Hard Time?”…Click.
Why did we need these daily chats? Because we needed to vent. Badly. Our husbands didn’t understand the fake-cupcake problem. Nor did our mothers. Nor did our kids.

Our chats started five days after one of us (OK, Amy) had her first baby. It wasn’t pretty—massive exhaustion, recurrent mastitis—and what did one of her closest friends do? She pulled that dirty motherhood-perfectionist trick.

“Oh, really? You’re having a hard time? I always felt great. That never happened to me.”

Click.

So we began talking to each other. Our lives weren’t identical. Years earlier, before motherhood, we’d both established careers, but one of us was now a stay-at-home mom, and the other a part-time working mom. Still, we felt exactly the same way: questioning our choices, grappling with guilt, and wondering if the other mothers we knew were struggling to keep it together, too.

Once we started being honest about how we felt, it was addictive.

The truth is, we did so much talking to each other and felt so much better afterward that we started to think we should write down some of what we were saying. One of us had a public relations background and the other had had a career in advertising, so we wiped off our whiteboards and brainstormed about all the issues that moms today face. Our goal: to try to understand phenomena like the fake-cupcake problem by reverse-engineering them back to their component parts: 2 cups guilt, 1/2 cup competition, 2 tablespoons judgment, 1/2 teaspoon trying to live in the moment, et cetera.

Here’s what we came up with:

As mothers, we put way too much pressure on ourselves.We have an unrealistic image of what a “good” mom is.We secretly compare ourselves to other moms, who seem to have it all together.We think we need to be perfect all the time.We feel alone.Our lives feel out of balance.

We also had some fairly major questions:

What happened to the people we were before we became moms?Why did our marriages change when we became parents?Why, no matter what choice we make, do we constantly feel that we’ve made the wrong one?Why do we feel guilty all the time?How come nobody talks about how hard motherhood truly is?

Then we started to wonder if we, in particular, were just more insecure and screwed up than most mothers.

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