The waffle was a turning point for Kristin Maschka.

As the California-based career woman turned stay-at-home mom found herself scolding her husband for not knowing how their preschool-age daughter liked her waffle prepared, she realized it was time to remodel her ideas about parenthood.

Now, the past president and a national spokesperson for the organization Mothers & More, a nonprofit group that helps mothers of all backgrounds connect and find support, is author of "This is Not How I thought It Would Be: Remodeling Motherhood to Get the Lives We Want Today" (2009; The Berkley Publishing Group).

We talked to Maschka, who has a 9-year-old daughter and runs a consulting business, about the need to remodel our ideas about motherhood and the challenges of adjusting to the role once fantasies about parenthood meet reality.

Q: There are so many books for mothers — career moms, stay-at-home moms, work-from-home moms. How is your book different?

A: One of the things that makes this different is it really treats the challenges that mothers and fathers face today as interconnected issues because I don't believe you can solve one piece of the puzzle without looking at all pieces of the puzzle.

The other thing that I think is different, and it's coming true as I get out there and talk to people about the book, is the way in which the father's voice and experience is drawn into it. Mothers who are married cannot remodel on their own. This is a remodeling project that has to be tackled together, and surprise, surprise, fathers are dealing with a lot of these challenges, too, but are largely ignored.

Q: There's been a lot of talk recently about mothers as gatekeepers, that part of the reason women are feeling overwhelmed by family life is because they want to control everything and don't allow their partners to help. So aren't they to blame for some of the problems you talk about in the book?

A: A lot of mothers you talk to are on the surface aware that they're talking control of things.

I think what's going on that we have a tougher time acknowledging is the assumptions we have about what a good mother is supposed to be doing. We hold ourselves to this invisible standard that we can't even articulate, and then we blame our husbands for not knowing what that standard is.

The cultural assumptions I've adopted in my head are very different than the ones my husband has adopted about what a good father does.

What happens is, mothers wonder, "Why doesn't he know that he has to make the waffle soft?" and he's thinking, "She's insane. How am I supposed to know that?" So we blame each other when we really (need to) acknowledge that we're operating from different sets of assumptions.