When 25-year-old mom Hannah Harper won American Idol on Monday, it was a slightly bittersweet occasion, because the Season 24 finale took place just one day after Mother’s Day. It was actually Harper’s first Mother’s Day separated from her three young sons, who were 1,700 miles away in Willow Springs, Mo.

“I cried a lot,” Harper admitted backstage after her Idol victory. “I can’t wait to be home with them. All day, I was just pretending like it wasn’t the day. It was hard.”

Harper became a frontrunner early on this season, when her startlingly vulnerable original audition song about her postpartum struggles, “String Cheese,” resonated deeply with viewers — becoming one of the most-watched clips in American Idol history, with more than 100 million plays so far. The song especially resonated with judge and fellow boy-mom Carrie Underwood, and in a torch-passing moment of sorts, Harper is now only the second female country singer to win Idol, and the first to do so since Underwood triumphed in 2005.

“That’s some big shoes to fill, huge shoes to fill. I feel honored to carry that badge, but also stick to my stomach knowing that I have to carry that badge,” Harper admitted. She revealed that Underwood gave her advice about juggling motherhood with country stardom —  “She’s got it down now; she’s got cribs on her bus” —  but also acknowledged that male singers don’t usually seem as concerned about that, or at least aren’t asked about that sort of work/life balance in interviews. (For instance, last year’s winner, proud girl-dad Jamal Roberts, rarely fielded such questions.)

“It is totally different. It is very different,” Harper pointed out. “My husband [Devon Mendenhall] has had to sacrifice everything so that I could be here, and we basically just had to reverse roles — which has been confusing for everyone, because a man is not ‘built’ to do that. He’s had to give up his entire life, his work, to be Mr. Mom. And he’s stepped up admirably and done a great job. I could never repay him for all the things that he has sacrificed. I think that more importantly, my boys needed that in life, because men having a father-son relationship is so crucial for the kind of man that they grow up to be. I love getting to watch it, and I don’t regret any of it. I hope that he feels the same way and he’s still excited to do it, but there’s no way I could do it without him.”

photo: Eric McCandless

Some alpha-males, sadly, would not be OK with this sort of gender-flip, or would come to secretly (or not-so-secretly) resent their partner’s success. So, Harper was quick to express her gratitude for Mendenhall’s endless, ego-less encouragement.

“That man has never made me feel like my flame should be any dimmer than it needs to be. I actually wrote a song [about Mendenhall]. It’s called ‘My Hero, A Simple Man,’” Harper said. She also noted that while many female Idol  contestants have deferred their music dreams to focus on family, like last season’s Breanna Nix or this season’s third-place finalist Keyla Richardson, she was fortunate to have such an incredible support system — which, unfortunately, isn’t always the case for ambitious mothers.

“As much as I would like to say that [this American Idol win] was my own doing, if I didn’t have a village of people behind me, there’s no way that I would have been able to,” she stressed. “Most moms in the work field have to fight to try to find a babysitter. I was blessed with people who were backing me the entire way that allowed this to happen, but finding your village is important. And it should be a priority for all moms, because you need help. You need help. It’s so hard to do this by yourself, especially single moms like Keyla — she has worked so hard to get here and she has paved the way on her own, but still has done it with grace.”

Just as Harper began her Season 24 journey with a personal song about her domestic life, “String Cheese,” she ended it with Monday’s finale-night original, “Married Into This Town,” making her the only top three contestant to perform her own material live on the show this season.

“One of my very first writers’ rooms was with a couple guys and I was getting to know them, and [Nashville veteran Scott Stepakoff said], ‘Tell us about where you’re from.’ And I told them a little town of 200 people called Bunker, Mo.,” she said of the song’s inspiration. “He was like, ‘But your paper says Willow Springs,’ and I was like, ‘Well, I married into Willow.’ And he was like, ‘Well, that’s our song. I don’t need to know anything else about you. We have to write that song.’ … So, I wrote a love story about that.”

“My Hero, A Simple Man” and “Married Into This Town” are on Harper’s Facebook page, along with many other originals that haven’t yet been officially released. (She explained that she was “kind of scared” to perform more of her own compositions on Idol, because she wasn’t sure about “the publishing side of things.”) But suffice to say, she has “a good catalog to choose from,” and as long as her husband and village are behind her, she’s planning to make her kids proud, as she prepares to record her debut album.

This mother’s day has come. As Harper told reporters: “I’m ready.”