Good Moms Feel the Worst
By Jessica Sorci, LMFT
My client, a single mother of an 11-year-old girl, shared with me in therapy last week, a new iteration of how her self-sacrifice as a mom is driving her to a breaking point. “I took my daughter to Target after school, even though I was exhausted, and bought her another basket full of expensive hair products because all the other girls seem to have moms who buy them those products – and I got her the boba she was begging for, dropped her off on time for her dance class – because I skipped my own scheduled workout – only to be met with another freaking meltdown when I simply asked her to empty the dishwasher that evening. I’m trying so damn hard to be a good mom and she’s completely ungrateful. I end up yelling at her and then I feel like a really bad mom.”
My client is a highly conscientious, caring mother, who comes to therapy every single week, working hard to examine her own internal world as she strives to give her daughter the kind of mothering she herself never received. Sure, she’s barking up the wrong tree when she’s looking for an “atta girl” from her tween. But still, my client’s intentions and efforts unquestionably fall into the “good mom” category, right? If we pretend for a moment that there is such a thing as good moms and bad moms, we’d likely all agree that bad moms aren’t the ones seeking parenting support and going to intensive IFS therapy. Bad moms don’t really think about what terrible moms they are. Good moms are the ones who feel the worst.
Something specific and painful goes on in mothers around all their efforts to do motherhood well. In 2025 moms don’t just strive for good enough – they aim for perfection – and they blame themselves for every problem and disappointing outcome that inevitably crops up. We have immense expectations and unconscious fantasies about how our children will fulfill us, informed by our own unmet needs. The truth is, most of our unmet needs come from our own childhoods – and they can’t really get met through motherhood. That’s a hard pill to swallow.
Mothering even the easiest kid will stir up disappointment and shame, whether it has to do with the way your birth experience went or that your kid has a learning disability or because they start smoking weed. When moms feel things like grief, disappointment or humiliation pertaining to motherhood, they reflexively compare themselves to other moms and assume there’s something wrong with them. There’s not. Every single mom has grief and shame.
The truth is, being a mom is really hard.
Moms are asked to hold polarized cultural mandates: you should want to have kids and you should enjoy mothering and also create and post about extraordinary childhood moments for a ravenous, fault finding audience of (largely) other moms. At the same time, moms are supposed to be accomplished in their own right – on some sort of enviable path of self-actualization, looking good, feeling happy and modeling pseudo-feminist “superwoman” capacities for our children, who we should spend a lot of quality time with, sandwiched between our ardent, zealous rounds of (post-worthy) “self-care.”
Our baby-centered definition of good mothering is unhealthy and inhuman. When our definition of goodness effectively exiles moms’ authentic pain and longing, moms become managers doing jobs, cut off from their juicy vitality and inspiration. By abandoning critical swaths of their own emotional truth, they run out of fuel and burn out. They work so hard at being good, the job itself breaks them and then they feel truly awful.
I wish all moms knew that grief and shame are normal. Motherhood actually includes inescapable emotional vulnerability that needs to be integrated into our conversations and normalized by our communities. Motherhood is full of encounters with both grief and shame, disappointment and of course, hard work. Good moms just feel sadder and more alone when they attribute every emotional pothole to their own failure and badness.
I like to ask the moms in my maternal mental health psychotherapy practice about what it is they’re really longing for. “What is it you’re wanting? And if you got it, what would it bring you?”
Inquiries into the depths of a mom’s longing help her remember that she has an existence separate from being a mom and that her existence has its own formula for feeling good. Investing time and attention into learning and honoring that formula breathes new life into mothers. Working with Mom Parts, an approach inspired by Internal Family Systems Therapy, gives moms an opportunity to notice and speak compassionately on behalf of parts of themselves that otherwise get exiled and pushed out of awareness. When moms are invited to acknowledge and express all the varied parts of themselves, even the parts feeling grief and shame about motherhood, our definition of goodness gets restored to wholeness.
About the Author
Jessica Tomich Sorci, LMFT
Jessica Tomich Sorci, LMFT, is a Level 3 Certified IFS (Internal Family Systems) Therapist and a Certified Perinatal Mental Health Professional with advanced training in Intimacy From the Inside Out (working with couples using IFS). She brings a wealth of compassion and knowledge about reproductive mental health to the clinical training and supervision of therapists as well as to the healing journeys of mothers. Jessica is working on a groundbreaking book (to be published by Hachette Balance in 2026) on the topic of IFS and motherhood. Her teaching blends her love of IFS with her extensive background in creative expression and spirituality to create one-of-a-kind trainings and workshops that reach people’s hearts and open their minds.
