Are You In A Mom Fog? With Hannah Keeley

Losing keys and cell phone, feeling scattered, it’s something we like to call ‘mom fog.’ But what if mom fog is more of a gift and an invitation? And what if it’s okay to make life fun in the fog? America’s top mom coach Hannah Keeley joins The AllMomDoes Podcast host Julie Lyles Carr of a look at our brains and our days when we become moms and are trying to do all the things all the time.

Show Notes:

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Transcription:

Julie [00:00:15] Hey, friend. Thanks for joining me today. You may remember if you’ve read my book, Raising an Original, that I tell the story of frantically being on the phone with my friend, trying to get all my kids in the car to get into ballet and soccer and all the things. And I kept running back in the house, searching through drawers, dumping out my purse, looking in the diaper bag, all because I couldn’t find my cell phone. I could not find my cell phone anywhere until it dawned on me that I was actually on my cell phone talking to my friend about how wild I was becoming trying to find said cell phone. If that is not an example of mom fog, I don’t know what it is. And I thought I was really unusual. I thought it was really special. But now I’ve heard from several of you that you’ve had some the very same experiences. So that is part of why I’m so excited to have Hannah Keeley on today. She is considered America’s number one top parenting coach. Mom coach. She has a whole lot to say about helping us get our brains back when it comes to this mom line. Hannah, thank you so much for being with me today.

Hannah [00:01:17] Oh, my goodness. Julie, I feel like we just hit the same high. Same thing happened to me. I’m on my phone freaking out with my daughter. And she’s like, “What is wrong?” Like, “I can’t find my phone.” She said, “You’re on it.” Yeah, I get it. I get it. The struggle is real, my friend.

Julie [00:01:36] Absolutely. I’m glad that we are in the same sad sorority that makes me feel a little bit better.

Hannah [00:01:42] So it can be ahappy. It can be fun.

Julie [00:01:44] It can be happy. Okay, You’re right. You know what? You’re right. The same happy sorority. Let’s do that. Well, Hannah back us up. You’re a mom of seven. I’m a mom of eight. I think we could talk about that for a long time. All of the adventures and excitement that goes around that. How did you launch into realizing that you had some things that might be able to help moms out, help them be able to think about ways of looking at their parenting experience? What was that trajectory like for you?

Hannah [00:02:11] Well, honestly, I kind of had to hit rock bottom. I’m just being real with you, Julie. You know, after a few kids, I had this ideal view that life was going to be a certain way after I became a mom. And then I realized it was struggle. It was messy, it was disorganized, it was cluttered. It was I mean, we were broke as a joke. Drowning in debt. I had anxiety, depression, like you name it. It was real. I remember just one day I was just so overwhelmed and walked in with a load of laundry to dump on the seven other piles on the floor to fold later. And I caught a glimpse of myself and girlfriend. I was way too young to look so old. There’s like, no zest, no life and I just like balled. I just, like, crashed on the floor in the laundry right there. I started ball in my eyes like ugly cry, you know, like tears the whole number, right? I was bawling and just crying out to God. God, send some help. Please help me. Like some miracle. Right? And I wanted the clouds to roll back and angels to descend and trumpets to blow. And God hand me a check or something, you know? I remember He very clearly. I just felt it in my heart heard Him say, “Get up and fold your laundry.” And the thing is that led to me like I was a behavior therapist before I decided to quit work and stay with my kids. And I’m thinking, wait, I help people with this. Why can’t I figure this out? Right? And it didn’t make any sense. I really started digging in studying the mom brain at that point because I wanted to know what was going on. Why couldn’t I focus? Why couldn’t I finish what I started? Why would I walk into a room and forget what I was doing? Why would I leave my coffee on the hood of the car as I drive away, like all the things right? What I discovered really helped me understand how to coach myself and how to coach moms better and so grateful. It’s funny you could look back at some of the pain in your life. Like I’m sure people are listening right now. And if I ask you, was there a pain that you went through in your life that you would not trade because of who you became as a result of it? I guarantee everyone would have something, right?

Julie [00:04:27] Right.

Hannah [00:04:27] Out of that, I’ve been I was able to really transform my life by working with the way my brain is wired, been able to help other moms. And it’s been a walk, but it’s been a good one.

Julie [00:04:38] I love that. And I want to come back to some of the specificities on that mom brain and what happens to us. But I want to just take a pause here in this moment. You know, I really feel like you’re right, Hannah, in a lot of ways, when we hit a point where we feel so overwhelmed, we are looking outside of ourselves for somebody to come riding in and rescue the thing. If Mary Mays would just show up on my front doorstep, then all things would be better. And yet, in some ways, in combining that with a message of reliance on God, which we know we want to rely on God, but I think we often are looking for God to send someone instead of seeing what He might do within us and assign us to do to kind of pick ourselves up with His grace, to pick ourselves up. Do you think that particularly as women, we might be a little bit more attuned to looking outside of ourselves instead of understanding that God can imbue strength that through Christ, we have the strength to get back up and fold our laundry? I mean, I know we have a hard time sometimes asking for help, but then kind of feels like other times, at least for me, I keep waiting for somebody to show up and fix it. Do you think that is unique to women or what is your experience?

Hannah [00:05:47] Oh my goodness. I think it’s very prevalent and I’ll tell you why. Like a speech. Philippians, Philippians 4:13, we all know it, you know, straight through Jesus. Like we have strength for all things I can do all things to Christ who strengthens me. However, if you look at the classic amplified version, it says something so…just like that breakthrough where you really understand what He’s talking about, it says, “I am self-sufficient in Christ sufficiency” and reading that we have to understand this is a partnership. God will not do what He has called us to do and we can’t do what He does. So this beautiful partnership is co-creating our life. And I think those times when we want someone else to save us or we want permission or we want to make sure someone is guiding us, what we’re doing is we are free to take 100% responsibility for things. Because if we take 100% responsibility, then who is in charge of the outcome?

Julie [00:06:46] We are.

Hannah [00:06:48] But see if like, Oh, I got my husband’s permission or I got this person to say it’s okay, or this person told me to do it, or I do this the way this person said, now we can kind of shove the responsibility over and we don’t have to carry it. But we are well able to do this thing. So if we’re waiting on God to take over, he’s like, “Sweetheart, I’m waiting on you to get up.” Like He cannot steer a parked car.

Julie [00:07:16] Right, Right. I think that is really powerful in that connection to that sense of realizing that we’re going to have to own the outcome. Yeah, that can be some scary, scary territory to think through. I love to break that down.

Hannah [00:07:30] But also it can be invigorating.

Julie [00:07:32] Yeah. Yeah.

Hannah [00:07:34] It can be exciting, right? Honestly, Julie, we can’t change anything we’re unwilling to take responsibility for. Yeah, we really can’t. So we can either gripe about it and live with it, or we can stop griping about it and do something with it. So I think like that means, you know, it may feel hard, but you can do this. You just have to take the first step. We don’t have to know what the pathway is going to look like, but we can always take the first step.

Julie [00:08:03] I love that. And I think that encouragement, it seems to me there are so many times in Scripture where when Jesus is interacting with people, He’ll say, “Well, you want to be healed? Okay, I need you to I need to stand up.” You need this? Okay, well, I want you to do X, Y, Z.” And I think maybe that’s part of the generous lesson of God to us is to say, I’m going to empower you. I’m going to let you see how this works. So I just love that. Now, God also put together our brains, which have some really unique wiring and get really uniquely wired in the face of motherhood and caregiving and all the things. So in this journey, when you hit rock bottom and now you’re on your way out. One folded T-shirt and one pair of sweat pants at a time. What did you begin to learn about what happens to us when we have these kids? I think that colloquially we always talk about and then I got pregnant and I don’t know what happened to my brain or when they brought me that newborn and we adopted and, you know, whatever. And all of a sudden I had no idea where my keys were anymore. So talk to us about what happens when we take on this mantle, this ministry, this responsibility of parenting and what it does to our circuits.

Hannah [00:09:16] Absolutely. Actually two things take place. First of all, they have done longitudinal studies of a woman before pregnancy and after pregnancy. And there are anatomical differences in her brain. She actually loses gray matter as a result of pregnancy. Now, you would think, wait, why I would God have me lose my mind literally when I need it the most? It just doesn’t make sense because, I mean, we can look at it on an MRI scan that there is actually a shrinking of gray matter. So it’s like, why would that happen? But what happens is because our brain is so brilliantly wired, it keeps us safe, right? Our brains job is to keep us safe, not make a successful, but to keep us safe. Now, when we have children, now what happens is we have an expanded cognitive awareness field because now our brains don’t just have to keep us safe. It has to keep our children safe as well. So now it’s almost like sometimes I’m like, Why is my phone so slow? What is going on? Nothing will load up and one of my kids would say, “Let me see your phone.” And then they’re like, “Mom, oh my gosh, how many apps do you have open?” Yeah so our brain becomes like, all these apps are open because it’s constantly scanning the environment for potential dangers. Now that we’re responsible for children, which is great, awesome. Thank you, God, for instilling in me that new sense of awareness that I think something’s wrong with my child when they come home from school. Your husband doesn’t sense it, but you’re kind of like, I think something’s bothering them or you grab your toddler’s arm right before they run out into traffic. Like you have this mother’s intuition. That’s you can see that in a brain scan. Well, so now our brain has changed. Which means we lose the power to focus like we used to, to complete tasks, sometimes to complete sentences and it feels so frustrating. Not just that. But also our lifestyle has changed. So I called them MVPs and SCPs. MVPs are multiple variable professionals. That’s like moms like me and you. We got a thousand things going on at one time, multiple variables that are coming at us, and we still have to maintain some sense of professionalism in how to manage our life, right? There’s a toddler putting toilet paper in the toilet. There is one who has just thrown cereal across the floor. There’s 18 toys out. Another, you know, just this all over the place. We have to manage that. So now our entire environment or how we process information has changed. And then there’s SCPs which are singular constant professionals. People who can have a lunch at 12 and actually have it. People who can write, people who can initiate something and complete it and high above around it. That’s how they process. Moms don’t always have that ability to whether they’re working in the home or outside the home. So when we have these problems, Now I’m binge eating. Now I feel scattered. Now I feel overwhelmed, I feel discouraged, I’m anxious. Let me search for something to help me. What happens is they start to use these programs or books or listen to these like instructional people who are SCPs, and then they try it. They try the budgets, the diets, the workouts, the declaring programs and they don’t work because it’s not engineered to work with their mom brain. And then they get discouraged. Now it’s like another layer of mom fatigue syndrome, which now we’re walking around in this mom fog. But that’s what’s happened with your brain. So you’re cool. You’re like, you’re exactly how you’re supposed to be and you didn’t fail. These diets or programs or budgeting software, you didn’t fail that it failed you because it wasn’t designed to work with the way your brain is wired.

Julie [00:13:21] I think that is profound. And, you know, originally Hannah when we started this podcast. We’re now in our sixth season, which I can’t believe it when we started it, we called it the Modern Motherhood Podcast and I really liked that name. We underwent a rebranding to make it align with Allmomdoes.com, which is a great resource for listeners to go to for articles and encouragement and all that kind of stuff. But what I liked about calling it the Modern Motherhood podcast is, I’m not saying moms today have it tougher than other moms have had it back, you know, 100, 200, 300 hundred years ago. But what I am saying is the amount of stuff we’re all trying to keep up with today to me feels unprecedented. When I would talk with my own mom about her raising of my brothers and I, it wasn’t that she didn’t have a lot on her plate because she did and she was busy. But at that time it wasn’t…If I was playing softball, I went to a practice a week and I had a game on a weekend. It was not I had to have batting practice, I had a pitching practice, and then I had to go to two different practices for this, that and the other. And then we were going to be in a playoff that might render us to this, that and the other. And then we had to make the decision if we were going to actually be a traveling to like that kind of stuff just wasn’t going on. On top of just the general mothering my mom was trying to do. I also think even within the context of our homes, when I look back at pictures of my grandparents homes, when I look at the pictures of the house I was raised in as a kid. Were they nicely furnished? Sure. Did they have some little décor? Absolutely. But we weren’t doing gallery walls. We weren’t staging bookcases, which I love that stuff. But I’m saying it’s just yet another iteration of what to keep up with. What do you think is different today? We’ve got wiring that is good. That’s for survival. That’s been around for a long time since God started this whole little experiment with humans. But what do you feel is unique in today’s world that even some of the things that we might be saying, oh, well, here’s here’s a collective wisdom from moms from years past might not exactly much like what you’re saying with some of these programs and things that people try that doesn’t quite align with the responsibility and all of the tasking that’s on moms today.

Hannah [00:15:34] So with the way the mom brain works, think about it. We already know we have an expanded awareness field. We’re constantly picking up on things in our environment. Now, imagine a hundred years ago, there’s limited things in the environment, so you’re coping better right now because of social media, because there’s constantly like now our attention span has shrunk to like was two and a half seconds now? Because there’s so many things we’re bombarded with through social media, now it’s so easy to get distracted now for a mom more than anyone else on this planet. And now she’s thinking, I must have ADHD. I have focusing problems. I have no willpower. It has nothing to do with that. It has everything to do with the way your brain is wired. And now because of it, you’re constantly looking for distraction. And here’s social media saying, I got you, babe.

Julie [00:16:27] Yeah, yeah, yeah. All kinds of things like that that I think are unique to this generation. So, help us unpack. How do we cooperate with the way our brains are wired? How do we get to a place where maybe we recognize a little earlier that the cell phone that we’re looking for is actually in our hand and we’re talking on it. How do we achieve a certain level of both acceptance and peace and yet not to feel so scattered Hannah? Because I just I don’t know if I can ever make peace with how scattered I sometimes feel.

Hannah [00:17:01] Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Well, you know, in my book, the first step I give is massive action. It’s just we have to decide, do I want to continue this or do I want a change? Because that is something will always come as a result of that. Now, massive action does not mean let me go Google and find something to help me. It means making a personal decision that this is my life and I choose to take the responsibility to create the life I desire. Now we can do that, we can all get to that place where no I want this to change. But that’s where we get kind of scattered because we don’t know what to do with that desire to change. But what I encourage people to do before you decide, okay, I’m tired of this. I want something different. I want to be able to keep my home better. I want to be more present with my children. I want to get out of this anxiety. Whatever that looks like is get to a place where you understand you’re not broken. Nothing’s wrong with you. I think a lot of moms carry around this idea that they’re just a mom. Like what they do is unimportant and it’s not noted and it’s not worthy and it’s not valuable. And I screw things up and I do everything wrong. And I just can’t ever do enough. Like all of these ideas. We will perpetuate those ideas in my mind until it becomes our identity. And they were just walking through life and in a posture that is so beneath what we’re able to accomplish. So once we get to that place, we’re like, you know what? I’m not broken. I’m good. This is exactly how it’s supposed to be. And now out of that, I’m going to make a decision to take massive action and I’m going to create something new. But we have to get to that spot where we’re not holding this condemnation over us like something’s wrong with us.

Julie [00:18:49] Right. Right. What are some of the indicators we should look for to even show us that we need to be talking about making this decision to take massive action? Because sometimes it feels like to me and sometimes these are places in communities like online, sometimes it’s in our small group Bible study, sometimes it’s in some kind of chat or coffee time with other moms that there’s almost sort of a nascent acceptance of It’s chaos. It’s going to be chaos. I’m always going to come in third, fourth, fifth place in terms of priority to myself and to my family. Self-care is out the window. It’s in some ways Hannah, it almost feels like the approach that some of us take to overcoming this mom fatigue syndrome is to kind of lean in harder to it. Does that make sense? Like not show up at all kind of thing? So how do you navigate that? Like, how do we even know when we’re on the cusp of just sort of letting this mom fatigue take over and start running the narrative?

Hannah [00:19:50] Yeah, well, I call it bad mom syndrome. All the movies. Bad Mom. It’s almost like glorifying and hey, look at what a train wreck I am. Look at this. My kids are falling off things and I’m drinking a bottle of wine at five and I don’t care. And oh, my gosh, all that. That to all the bad moms out there, you know, it’s almost like this glorying in this identity of I’m a bad mom because we hold a subconscious idea that we can’t change it. And so now we’re trying to convince ourselves that it’s normal. Now, I’ve got that connection with other moms. Like it’s meeting some of those basic needs, right? For connection, significant, safety, all of these needs. But we have to get to a place, Julie, where we’re like, but is this really getting me the results I want? Sure it looks dramatic on social media. It looks funny. You’re laughing about it. Other bad moms are like, Yeah, right back at you and you feel camaraderie, but when you go to bed at night. And you’re there and the house is quiet. Do you really are you really excited about that position, about that identity, or is it plaguing you? Is it plaguing you in a sense that like, you know, there’s something better? You know, there’s more you know, there’s peace. You know, there’s productivity. You know, this could be an amazing time in your life. But because you don’t think it’s accessible, you’re trying to find a home with other women and this place where it’s just like the self-deprecation.

Julie [00:21:26] So I get to that place where I start recognizing, well, I’m not doing the things I want to do. I need to stop guilt tripping myself. Guilt tripping is not action. I think for a lot of us, we don’t realize that in a strange way, we can think guilt tripping ourselves is some kind of step or activity, but it’s not. So we’re listening to our good friend Hannah. We want to take massive action. We want to work with the way that our brains are wired. What then? And how do we navigate that very slender lane between beating ourselves up, creating expectations that are unrealistic, comparing ourselves to all the perfect moms over on their Pinterest boards that are all color coordinated or veering over into the ditch of the moms who apparently have just kind of thrown it all in and given up. How do we move from taking responsibility and deciding we’re going to create massive action into what that practically looks like in our day to day?

Hannah [00:22:22] Yeah, absolutely. Well, Julie, what’s amazing is both extremes you mentioned are Pinterest and Instagram or TikTok. Because that perfection is something you’re looking at on your phone. That bad mom syndrome is something you’re looking at on your phone, but neither one really exists. Now, that’s the crazy thing. Like we think there’s one extreme or the other, but what we don’t realize is there’s no perfect and there’s no glorifying in the bad mom. There’s none of that. It’s just a perception that someone is trying to put out there to the world and you hook on to it and you call it real. That’s not real. Reality is you and your life. Your position as a mom and what you want to create. Now, if you’re easily influenced by social media. That’s where you’re going to try to get this picture in place. But what if you put that aside and you just sat with your thoughts and said, if this part of my life could be something that was exciting and full and free and gratifying and glorious, what would that look like for me? Not what would it look like on a reel or what would it look like on a TikTok? No, what would it look like for me and the thoughts that I carry and my identity when I’m alone? When I go to bed at night? When I wake up in the morning? When I’m sitting around the kitchen table? What do I want that reality to be? And when we come to grips with that, then we have a starting point.

Julie [00:24:02] Right? Right. And you said a word earlier that is almost a Pavlovian trigger for me in the years that I worked with women in ministry and in my own life. Because you talked about her mission. It is so fascinating to me that as women, we often really struggle to give ourselves permission to think about what we really want outside of exclusive of all of the imaging, all of the messaging that we get. And some of that is on social media, some of that is sitting in the pew, some of that is from our mom or our grandmother or mother in law. You know, from teachers at school, whatever, all that comes from, that place of beginning to ask ourselves, what do I really want? I found in my own life on occasion. And I’ve certainly found with women I’ve minister, too, is this resounding answer sometimes of, I don’t know. So do you have some questions that can kind of guide that for the woman who says, “Okay, Hannah and Julie, I hear what you’re saying. I truly don’t even know where to begin. I don’t even know anymore what I want because my life has been so dictated by meeting the needs of everybody else.”

Hannah [00:25:10] Right. And that is actually a beautiful place to start, is in the not knowing. Because sometimes we create a picture of what our life to look like that was just really adopted from somebody else. But that is actually a beautiful place. So where I would go with that is, perfect, now we get to create it. So what would you love? What would you enjoy? I was coaching some of the other day and and they were just dumbfounded at the idea of being instead of doing. Because we’re human beings, we’re not human doing. So it’s like, okay, if you if this could be fun. That’s what it’s another question I love to give people. If this could be fun, what would that look like for you? And now we have a place to start that’s organic, it’s authentic. It’s not something we adopted from someone else or or grandma gave us or our husband told us we had to live is something that we get to create. We get to manifest. And it can be amazing because God wants to give us the desires of our heart. But sometimes we are not still enough to know what our desires really are. I remember getting to a place where it’s like, Well, this is the kind of mom I should be. This is kind of wife I should be. I kept on trying to fit into something, right? But then I decided, what kind of mom do I want to be? What kind of mom do I want my children to remember as they get older? What kind of wife do I think I could really like embrace? And I got to decide that. And it became fun raising kids in the middle of the mess, in the middle of the chaos. I could look around and I could have gratitude in that place because it was fun. It’s an adventure. Life is either an adventure or it’s nothing. So many times we’re waiting to get to a point, like as soon as they’re potty trained, as soon as they’re back in school, as soon as they’re out of school, as soon as they’re out of the house. Like why? What do you think is there that’s not available here? Because when we get to control our state, we get to decide.

Julie [00:27:13] You know, I think that permission to have fun when we talk about motherhood is really interesting. We have had a guest on recently, Jillian Benfield, and she put something on Instagram that I thought was really poignant where she said, you know, I’m having to learn that life is not an emergency. You can have some difficult things that happen, but not all of life has to be an emergency. And this idea of if we’re taking our motherhood seriously and our career seriously and our marriage’s seriously and our faith seriously, then there’s just not a lot of wiggle room for fun anymore because fun just can throw everything off track. Fun can take the schedule and throw it out the door. And yet we know from John 10:10 that Jesus says that He came to give us life and give it to us abundantly. And I feel like not trying to insert anything to what Jesus might say or His words, but abundance to me seems to have an element of fun to it. When I look at some of God’s creatures on the 8 million documentaries I love to watch, it’s so fascinating how to see how animals have fun. Animals know how to play is something that in that moment I can say God really did put that in His creatures, that desire for fun. And yet I don’t think we often start with the idea of what would be fun here. I think it’s a great, compelling place to start. Now, what do we say to the mom who’s like, “I hear you guys, but listen, life is a serious business and I feel like I’m called to lay my life down. We see examples of this in Scripture. Why should I be in charge of my life? How is that me being subject to God? How is that being malleable for where He might want to lead me? How does all of that work? Because I know people who make these ten year plans and they’re mad if God doesn’t do it their way, I don’t want to go to that side. How do I take this mash up and accept responsibility? Think about my thoughts, think about how I’m thinking, and yet leave room for God to guide.” How do you do that in your own life?

Hannah [00:29:08] But I think laying our life down, we really need to look at what that is, because when God talks about that at His word, He talks about taking up your cross. He talks about crucifying the flesh. This isn’t denying fun. This is denying the flesh. And that means denying that. I’m going to follow my senses more than I’m going to follow my faith. Because it’s not like ratifying the flesh means as soon as we get something that doesn’t work out, we freak out. It means something doesn’t go our way. We get angry. It means we have an urge. We fulfill it. Like that’s not crucifying the flesh. Crucify the flesh means I live by faith. Who says it’s not fun? Jesus said, “If you can’t come to the kingdom like a little child, you’ll never get there.” And I think that kingdom mentality is that mentality of God is working on my behalf. I am safe, I am loved. I am free and in that place there’s no martyrdom. Like we’ve already laid down our life and we decided to accept Jesus as our Savior, is that we’ve decided I want to live for You. I want that eternal life. And that’s not just eternal life or the sweet by and by. That’s abundant life here in the suite here now. So we get to live heaven on earth. Don’t tell me that’s not fun.

Julie [00:30:32] Right, Right. You know, I’ve said for a while now, and I think particularly this might be true for those of us who have larger than average families, is people really watching what to see, what it looks like. And for any of us, though, no matter the number of kids you have, I think one of the greatest witnesses that we can have when we can be mindful of it is how we are interacting with our kids at the grocery store, how we’re talking about our family life, how we’re doing those things. Because let’s face it, in a world that’s looking for hope and is looking for the next big thing or is looking for whatever those people who present to us that they are contented in who they are, that they are having a good time, that they know how to roll with stuff. Those are the people I think we’re so often drawn to. Why not make sure that as part of our actual testimony? I think often we think our testimony begins with something really hard, which is often a part of our story for sure. But wow, this beautiful place on the other side. Well, Hannah, I just love hearing about mom brains. Mom fog, sounds like mom fog is not necessarily something that we really have to fight? It’s really just an indicator to help us evaluate how we’re living our mom life and how we feel about things. And maybe it is okay that I sometimes, often can’t find my cell phone. Where can listeners go to find out more about you, the work you do, the coaching, the books, all the things?

Hannah [00:31:55] Absolutely. Go to Mom Fog like you can find me on Instagram. Hit me up there. I answer all my messages since, but go to Momfog.com As the place to start because your life should feel above that. Your life should feel free. It shouldn’t be like waiting to feel that way. You can have that now. I’ll never forget this one, Mom. She got started with Mom blog and she enrolled in our university and she said one day she was wheeling her grocery cart out to the car as she stood on the back of it, started writing it and laughing and her son said, “Mom, what are you doing?” She’s like, “I just feel so free now.” She wrote, and she said, I was taking life so seriously. It was so hard. But then after going through mom fog, I was like, Wait, this can be fun. I just love that story because God wants you to enjoy your life.

Julie [00:32:47] So you can enjoy your kids. Enjoy your life. And why do we sometimes feel a sense of guilt if we are enjoying what He’s given us? I don’t know. But I know we can all use that help. All right, so check out momfog.com. Hannah, I so appreciate you being here today. Just a delight to talk with you. And listener, please take a minute and just grab the link for this episode. Send it to someone that you know, would love hearing this, would be encouraged by this. Also be sure and check out allmomdoes.com and AllMomDoes on the socials and I’m on all the socials @Julie Lyles Carr. You can find me there and I like to hear from you and respond as well. See the next time on the on the AllMomDoes podcast.