She finally caught up with all the other moms out there who understand that bonding with their babies, interacting with them, and caring for them with love and kindness and without the ubiquitous presence of a phone or camera to capture every move is the real way to be a mother to one’s children.

Josi Denise, a 27-year-old mommy blogger from Evansville, Indiana, started chronicling her family’s life three years ago. Now she’s hung up her laptop, shut down the editorial machine that grabbed 50,000 unique views per month, and scrapped her $1500-per-blog-post writing career, saying it’s a “relief” to be “authentic” again.

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Blogging had consumed her life, she told ABC News, and as her blog grew in popularity and her opportunities for “sponsored” posts grew over time — and with them, the financial rewards — Denise confessed to staging various aspects of her life just to get a great blog post out of it. Birthday parties, family vacations, other special events — all were staged — as were the smiles, the laughs, the happy and bubbly pictures of her life with her husband and three young children.

Surely there were real smiles and happiness in there somewhere?

“[Ninety percent] of the fake nonsense I used to share on the Internet as a mommy blogger writing about my fake life and oh-so-happy marriage, they are pure bulls**t,” she wrote in a post that detailed how she was stepping off the hamster wheel of incessant blog writing.

So much for “The American Mama,” or least its online version.

To read more about the very real challenges of today’s mothers, click here.