Years before I became a mother, I was a doctoral student studying identity transitions, and the transition to motherhood.

I added a few open-ended questions to a survey for new mothers, expecting what researchers usually expect — a sentence or two, maybe a handful of longer responses.

Instead, nearly everyone wrote essays.

They wrote about their bodies, their marriages, their loneliness, their ambition, their confusion about who they were becoming. They wrote about feeling invisible and overwhelmed and changed in ways they didn’t fully understand.

At the time, I felt grateful for the richness of the data and totally taken in by the stories.

What I didn’t fully grasp yet was that they were responding to something much bigger than a research question.

They were responding to being asked.

​
---------------------------------

Motherhood is everywhere, and yet it is invisible. It is flattened into the logistics of sleep schedules, lunch packing, drop-off lines and bedtime routines. Women are seen only as a role and it’s function.

We talk about it as if it’s operational. As if it’s a set of systems to optimize.

But what so many women are living inside of is not logistical strain. It’s identity expansion. It’s relational labor. It’s emotional and developmental work that is constant and rarely named.

And when something enormous is treated as small, the people inside it begin to feel small too.

In my groups, I see this shift all the time.

A woman comes in saying she feels behind, scattered, not doing enough.

And then she starts talking.

About the mental load she’s carrying.
About the decisions she’s making on behalf of her family every hour.
About the invisible calculations she runs constantly in her head.

Over time she finds her expansiveness and the enormity of her work as a mother. She is allowed to hold multiple identities at once, and in that space, she feels so much more free.

She realizes that she wasn’t “lost” in motherhood- but that she had been minimized. And finally she is able to take up more space.

What the research says

1. ​Burnout research shows that emotional exhaustion increases when high demands are paired with low recognition. It isn’t only how much work there is. It’s whether that work is seen. Caregiving is high-demand, relational work. What it often lacks is acknowledgment. When effort feels invisible, exhaustion rises.
2. ​There is also strong evidence that perceived meaning buffers stress. When people can place their effort inside a larger frame of purpose, strain becomes more tolerable. This is not about doing motherhood perfectly. It’s about restoring proportion. When we flatten motherhood into tasks, we remove both recognition and meaning. When we widen the frame, something steadies.
3. ​And research on narrative therapy consistently shows that putting complex experiences into words improves clarity and reduces stress. Language organizes what feels overwhelming. Taking the time to tell your story is regulating.

Altogether, this data reminds us that if motherhood feels exhausting, it doesn’t automatically mean you’re doing it wrong. It means you are doing high-demand, relational work inside a culture that barely names it.

You are carrying constant decisions, emotional attunement, invisible planning, and long arcs of development that don’t provide immediate feedback. Of course that can feel depleting.

Research helps here because it makes the pattern visible. When motherhood is flattened into logistics, recognition drops, meaning narrows, and experience goes unnamed. But, when it is allowed to be as complex as it actually is, something steadies. Not because the work disappears. But because it fits inside a frame that makes sense.

And, if the strain partly comes from compression, then the counter-move is expansion…

Tip of the Week

Who am I becoming in this season?

Instead of asking what you got done this week, ask:

Who am I becoming in this season of motherhood?

Set a timer for five minutes and try one of these:

• Write three bullet points that begin with “I am becoming someone who…”
• Record a short voice memo to yourself.
• Text another mother and answer the question together.
• Jot down one honest sentence at the end of the day.
• Send me a reply here and let me know!

You are not trying to fix anything.

You are giving your experience language.

And language restores scale.

If this resonates, this is exactly the work we do inside my group. We slow down long enough to let motherhood be as complex as it actually is. We make space for ambition and exhaustion, boredom and awe, responsibility and desire.

When the experience is named, women don’t shrink. They expand.

If you’ve been feeling flattened lately, there is space for you here. This is my last cohort for 2026, so if you are interested, just reply to this email or fill out an interest form here.

I’d love to know: Did you feel like you lost yourself? Or were you just made small by others?

Talk soon,
Anne

​
​