No matter a mother’s age, where she lived, or how many kids she had, we heard the same themes. “I feel too guilty to hire a babysitter.” “I’m so stressed my head is going to pop off.” We also heard a lot of stories like, say, the one about a mom in the kitchen at 7:15 a.m., having been awake for two hours, trying to bake cookies in time to pack them in preschool lunches, marinate fish for dinner, and vacuum crushed Cheerios off the floor. This mom is maxed, on autopilot, and almost certainly in a funk. She’s also too busy to do the one thing that would make her day a whole lot better -- stop to ask herself, “Am I doing too much, and why?”

Asking this simple question is the first step in realigning expectations and thus becoming a happier mom. We’re the first to admit, expectations aren’t that easy to corral. But the good news here is that, unlike the whims of a three-year-old, expectations are technically possible to pin down and control. The goal is to align your expectations with your reality. If we expect to make dinner seven nights a week, if we expect to home-bake the cookies, if we expect to never lose our tempers, if we expect to never need time for ourselves, if we expect to be happy every single day, we will set ourselves up for failure.

Truly, we found that no matter where a woman fell on the motherhood “angst” scale, all roads led back to expectations. Unhappy mothers had untenable expectations. Happy mothers had realistic ones.