Welcome to SHE’S A BADASS.

This is a blog about radical honesty over toxic positivity. This is a blog about what happens when we stop pretending motherhood is “easy” and start telling the truth.

You’re not failing at motherhood. Motherhood is failing you.

This is Part 4 of the Invisible Mothers series, exploring the hidden labor, emotional architecture, and cultural expectations shaping modern motherhood.

In Part 1, I named the impossible – admitted that the system itself is designed to break you. 

In Part 2, I made invisible labor visible – 78+ hours per week with no boundaries, no pay, no off-switch, no backup.

In Part 3, I talked about what chronic stress does to your brain and how that links directly to your mom exhaustion.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. The Moment It Was Named
2. The Invisible Inheritance: Family and Culture
3. Why Patterns Are Invisible: What Neuroscience Says
4. The Patterns You Might Recognize
5. What Becomes Possible When You Finally See It

PART 1: THE MOMENT IT WAS NAMED

I started going to therapy a few years ago. Not because of self-love, but because of a simple sentence my partner told me with a dread in his eyes: 

“I don’t think you will survive till your 40s.” I was 38 at that moment. 

I knew he wasn’t blaming me. He was just afraid, really afraid. But for the first time I have also realized that all the self-help, meditation and “taking care of myself” was just not visible. Where I saw progress, he saw an exhausted woman on the edge. 

Yet I wasn’t prepared what therapy taught me. It wasn’t the first session, or the second, or the third. The biggest breakthrough came, when I promised myself going in each month for at least half a year. Not managing what I thought I NEEDED to solve, just checking in regularly and letting stuff come on its own terms. 

What I uncovered there changed my life so dramatically, I thought for a while I was losing all sense of what is real. What I know now, is that I finally put down my rose-colored glasses. 

On one particular session, something really unexpected happened. I remembered a memory from my teenage years. A day when both my parents disappointed me at once. It was one of the most important days of my life at the time – I was going in for a really tough entrance exams to one of the top high schools in our country. 

My parents drove me there that day. And they managed to make a fight about what I should be wearing. I just stood there, at 4 am that morning wondering how is it possible that the same day I needed the most support, they were fighting about whether I should wear some fancy clothes or go casual. 

What happened next doesn’t matter. What is important is that all my life I thought I have made peace with that day. I rationalized it, I made sure I can count ON MYSELF even in tough situations. What I didn’t know was that memory (and the belief I have created about myself that day) has stopped me from seeing things (and people) as they really are. 

During the therapy session years later, I finally allowed myself to see that this single day acted as huge gateway (almost like a physical barrier) not allowing me to be angry at people who I loved the most and who have been disappointing me consistently. And once I saw that, all the emotions came flooding in. 

I could actually see and feel (and let go!) of all the unexpressed anger that has been living inside of me for decades. I have even described this to my therapist as a fucking huge warehouses of anger. 

For the first time in a really, really long time it felt GOOD to cry. It felt GOOD to be angry. It felt GOOD to grieve. Believe me or not, I cried for two weeks straight. I cried while washing the dishes, I cried when I was cooking, I cried when I was doing nothing. Because I could finally SEE all the patterns. Something shifted in my brain (and body) and suddenly, I was able to recognize what has been stopping me. And what has been hurting me. 

My brain literally organized all the patterns I have been living in for DECADES into clean and concise categories. 

The relief that came with that was and still is, priceless.

2. THE INVISIBLE INHERITANCE

The thing that nobody tells you about inherited patterns is they don’t arrive dramatically. There’s no moment where someone sits you down and says: here is the script you will spend the rest of your life performing. There’s no handover, no warning.

They arrive in ordinary moments. In the texture of daily life. In what you watched and absorbed before you were old enough to question it. What a woman does, what a mother carries, what love requires.

My mother worked hard. She carried the exhaustion of a full-time job and came home depleted. She complained — a lot. And somewhere in the middle of all of that, without anyone explicitly deciding it, the responsibility started shifting. To me.

I was a child running a quiet internal calculation every single day: what does she need from me right now, and how do I make sure I don’t become one more thing she has to carry?

Psychologists call this parentification. It’s when a child takes on emotional or practical responsibilities that belong to the adults around them. It doesn’t require bad intentions. It doesn’t require neglect in the dramatic sense. It just requires a gap (between what the adults in the house can carry and what needs to be done) and a child sensitive enough to see the gap and fill it.

I was that child.

And here’s what parentification teaches you, deep in your nervous system, before you have the language to understand what you’re learning:

Your needs come last. Your exhaustion is less important than theirs. Love looks like anticipating what someone needs and providing it before they ask. Asking for help is a burden. Being capable is how you earn your place.

I didn’t learn these things in the classroom. I learned them by being nine years old and deciding to clean the house so my mother wouldn’t have to.

Decades later I was still doing it. Different house. Different people. Same calculation.

You cannot fully separate what came from your family and what came from the culture,  because the culture shaped your family too. The expectation that women absorb everything without complaint. That girls are responsible and helpful and invisible in their needs. That a good daughter, a good partner, a good mother, puts everyone else first.

PART 3: WHY PATTERNS ARE INVISIBLE – WHAT NEUROSCIENCE SAYS

There’s a reason you can’t just decide to stop over-functioning.

A reason why even the most self-aware, genuinely trying mothers find themselves repeating the same patterns they swore they’d broken. Knowing something intellectually doesn’t automatically change your behavior.

The brain builds neural pathways through repetition. Every time a behavior is repeated (especially in childhood), when the brain is most plastic and most hungry for pattern recognition, that behavior gets encoded as a pathway.

Think of it like a forest path. The first time you walk through a forest, you’re pushing through, making your way. The second time, there’s a faint trace. The tenth time, it’s a clear path. The hundredth time, it’s a road. Eventually it becomes a highway.

That’s what a pattern is. Not a choice and let me say this clearly – not a character flaw. A road the brain built because it was walked so many times it became the default route.

What makes inherited patterns particularly difficult to see is that they were built before you were old enough to question them. Before you had the actual cognitive capacity to look at what you were absorbing and say “Wait,  do I actually agree with this?”

The patterns didn’t get filed in your brain under “things I was taught.” They got filed under “reality.”

This is what neuroscientists call the default mode network – the brain’s background operating system. It runs constantly, beneath conscious awareness, processing the world through the lens of everything you’ve already learned. When you automatically take on the invisible labor without being asked. When you feel guilty resting. When you say “I’m fine” before you’ve even checked whether you are, that’s not you choosing. That’s your default mode network running a program that was written decades ago.

The wellness industry will tell you to just change your mindset. Reframe your thoughts. Choose differently. Think positive. Affirm. 

But you cannot think your way out of a neural pathway. You can’t decide your way off a highway your brain has been traveling for thirty years.

What you can do (and this is where neuroplasticity becomes the most important word in this conversation), is build a new road. Slowly. Deliberately. With repetition in the opposite direction.

The brain that built the pattern can rebuild it. This is not a life sentence. But it is a process that starts with seeing the road you’ve been on.

4. THE PATTERNS YOU MIGHT RECOGNIZE

When my brain reorganized everything after that therapy session, when it sorted decades of behavior into clean categories, here is what I saw.

Maybe you’ll recognize yourself here too.

Over-functioning

Doing more than your share. Not because you want to, but because somewhere along the way you learned that love looks like doing everything for others. That rest is something you earn, not something you’re entitled to. That your value lives in your output and the moment you stop producing, you stop mattering.

The tricky part? Over-functioning doesn’t feel like a pattern. It feels like responsibility. It feels like just being a good mother. It feels like if you don’t do it, nobody will. And you’ve been proven right enough times that the belief is now completely self-reinforcing.

But here’s what you don’t see.

The people around you stopped helping because you always handle it. You taught them that. 

And you’ve never stopped long enough to find out what happens when you don’t.

The invisible needs

This one took me the longest to name.

It wasn’t that I couldn’t identify my needs. I had myself covered. I was capable, self-sufficient, responsible. I didn’t need much, or so I believed.

What I actually was: okay with breadcrumbs. Scanning for threats instead of asking for more. Every time something went wrong, my first instinct wasn’t I need support. It was what did I do wrong? What do I need to fix?

Because the core belief, running quietly underneath everything, was that I am responsible for myself. And for everyone else. And when something breaks, it’s probably my fault.

My needs? Nobody actually asked. And on the rare occasions when I was struggling, I didn’t reach out, because I was convinced I was just too much.

The therapy didn’t only uncover that my needs were invisible, but that I didn’t know I was supposed to have them. 

And when I started to understand that, when I could feel something was missing, I still had no idea how to name it. No language for it. No practice asking. Because asking had never been safe.

Knowing you have needs and knowing how to ask for them are two completely different skills. I had neither.

The guilt reflex

You rest for twenty minutes and feel guilty. You say no to something and spend the next three hours second-guessing it. You do something purely for yourself and feel like you need to justify it – to your partner, to your children, to the voice in your head that sounds suspiciously like every cultural message you’ve ever absorbed about what a good mother looks like.

You absorbed a definition of good mother that has no room for a real person inside it. A definition that equates selflessness with goodness so completely that having needs at all feels like a moral failure.

The guilt isn’t telling you that you did something wrong. It’s telling you that you’re clashing against a rule you didn’t consciously choose but have been following your entire life.

The performance of capability

The guilt reflex happens internally. This one happens out loud.

I’m fine. I’ve got it. Don’t worry about me.

Said in a hundred different ways, in a hundred different situations, to a hundred different people, while quietly drowning.

Because asking for help was modeled as weakness. Or burden. Or both. Because the women you watched growing up carried everything alone and called it strength. Because somewhere in your nervous system, needing help and being a burden became the same thing.

So you perform capability. Even when you’re running on empty. Even when the performance is costing you everything. Because the alternative – actually admitting that you need something – feels more dangerous than the exhaustion.

The cycle perpetuation

This is the hardest one to look at.

Because it’s not about what was done to you. It’s about what you might be doing (without meaning to) to your own children.

Not through neglect or malice. But through the simple, completely unconscious act of modeling what you know.

Your daughter watching you say “I’m fine” when you’re not. Your son watching you take on everything without asking for help. The cycle doesn’t perpetuate through bad intentions. It perpetuates through normal days.

Seeing this is not about guilt. It is about choice. You cannot choose differently until you can see what you’re doing. And you cannot see what you’re doing until you name it.

PART 5: WHAT SEEING THE PATTERNS ACTUALLY FEELS LIKE

I want to be honest with you about what seeing the patterns actually feels like.

It doesn’t feel like relief. The relief comes eventually. But not at first.

It feels like the floor dropping out. Like suddenly every interaction you’ve ever had, every relationship, every moment where you over-functioned or swallowed your anger or performed capability you didn’t have – all of it reorganizes itself in the light of what you now know. And that reorganization is disorienting in a way that’s hard to describe.

I cried for two weeks. I have cried a lot in my whole life. But it was different this time. I didn’t spiral. I didn’t feel sorry for myself. I was angry, but the anger actually felt good. Yes, it hurt and it was exhausting at times. But it was also the most alive I had felt in years.

I was able to stay angry at the people I loved, which might look like a place you don’t want to be in. Yet my anger was surprisingly not destructive, it was honest. For the first time I could feel it, name it, and not immediately bury it under rationalization or love (or fear) and the desperate need to keep everything intact and everyone safe.

What I didn’t expect when the first huge wave of anger passed, was that I got rid of several internal critics at once. I stopped arguing with myself about whether I should be able to handle things. I stopped second-guessing myself. Once I saw that the over-functioning was never a choice, the self-blame lost its grip.

And finally, I started being able to identify what I actually wanted. Slowly, clumsily and with a lot of trial and error. But the blankness started to have edges. My needs started to become visible, first as vague discomfort, then as something more specific. 

The best part? I started putting myself first. Not because of selfishness. But because it was simply the right thing to do. 

None of this happened because I decided to change. It happened because I could finally see the road I had been on. And I also started asking for help in the right place.

There is one sentence my therapist loves to ask with genuine curiosity and I am starting to love that wording too:

“It’s amazing sometimes how much we think we have under our control.”

For the past decade I was really afraid that being rightfully angry at the people I love will mean I will lose them eventually. What I didn’t realize was that I was slowly losing myself in the process. 

What if the patterns you’ve been fighting aren’t character flaws? 

What if they’re not even yours? 

What if the first act of breaking the cycle is simply seeing it?

You can’t choose a different path until you can see the one you’re already walking.