Mother's Helpers

Trisha Ashworth and Amy Nobile feel your pain

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It takes most moms 22 minutes before they start really telling the truth, according to coauthors Trisha Ashworth and Amy Nobile. “At first, the moms we interviewed would say, ‘Everything is great. I love my husband. I am so blessed,’” says Nobile, recalling the process of gathering material for the book I Was a Really Good Mom Before I Had Kids. “After 22 minutes moms finally gave themselves permission to open up and then it became, ‘I haven’t taken a shower in days. It’s so much harder than I thought it would be. I don’t know who I am anymore.’ ”

Ashworth and Nobile met 12 years ago in New York and became fast friends. Some years later they both moved to Marin—Nobile lives in Kentfield, Ashworth in Ross—and started families. Here, their paths diverged. Ashworth, who’d created advertising for companies like Pepsi, Levi Strauss and American Express, decided to stay home after she had her first child. “I put a lot of pressure on myself to be perfect,” she says. “I had in my head what a stay-at-home mom was, and it was very hard to live up to that.” When Nobile, a PR specialist who had worked with Visa and Jamba Juice, had her first baby a few years later, she decided to keep working: “I had this rosy vision about opening my own office and working while the baby napped. I tried as hard as I could to make that vision work, and it was just so difficult.”

From these cracks in their respective idealized views of motherhood, a new intimacy was born. “We really started to talk about our situations honestly and it eased the pain and made it more bearable, and I started to enjoy parenting a little more,” Ashworth says. They were on to something. “When no one is talking,” says Nobile, “you are building up a lot of guilt and issues. The pressure grew to the point where finally Trish and I sat together and said, ‘What is going on? We do so much; why do we feel like bad moms so much of the time?’”

The answer, they discovered, had a lot to do with having choices. “We grew up with the notion that we could do it all and that we should do it all,” Ashworth points out. “It raises the bar to an impossible ideal.”

Still, everyone else seemed to be doing so much better. Was it possible that other women were conflicted and overwhelmed, that maybe all the other moms weren’t walking around feeling blessed every second? They decided to find out.

“We began by thinking that maybe it was just in our area here,” says Nobile. “But when we interviewed women around the country, we found the same thing. Whether it was in Minnesota or Marin, one kid or five, the issue was overblown expectations.”

Enter I Was a Really Good Mom Before I Had Kids: Rewriting the Rulebook for Modern Motherhood, a book that reads like your fantasy moms’ group, the kind where every member is honest and funny and agrees that 1 p.m. is a perfectly reasonable time of day to drink wine. The book includes sections called “Dirty Little Secrets” where moms admit the kinds of things that would make Dr. Laura apoplectic, such as “I would trade my husband for a housecleaner” and “I let my six-year-old watch Access Hollywood with me.”

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