Catholic Mom Calm

The morning I recorded this, I sat at my desk for more than an hour doing basically nothing. I didn't pray or plan, I dinked around in my email, I ate something for breakfast I wasn't planning to eat, and by 8am my brain had decided I'd already blown the whole day. I wasn't being lazy. I was in a freeze stress state, and it took me over an hour to even notice. We talk a lot about anger and anxiety...

This one is a little heavier than usual. Our business is on track to finish the year at about half of last year's sales, and this fall that's meant saying no to braces for one of my kids and to the ski lessons all their friends are taking... and then having to say "we can't afford it" out loud, in front of other parents. I call chapters like this walking on the water, because Peter was fine as lon...

Someone left me a one-star review saying I shouldn't be teaching cognitive behavioral therapy because I'm not a licensed therapist. She's right that I'm not a therapist, and I'm honestly not upset about it... but it made me want to answer a question a lot of you are quietly asking. Am I depressed? Is my anxiety too much anxiety? How would I even know? In this episode I break down what cognitive be...

Emma Hilger is a Catholic mom of three little ones, and she wrote a board book of rhyming affirmations for moms after a hard day when she realized her six-month-old didn't care what words she was reading to him... so what if they were the words SHE needed to hear? I've wanted to talk with her ever since I saw her Kickstarter, because I think every mom needs a book like this. We talk about why "I'm...

Maybe your mom doesn't seem to want time with your kids, or your in-laws would help but live too far away, or every visit comes with a comment about your family size or how you parent. Maybe you've watched a friend's mom swoop in after a new baby to cook and clean and hold everything together, and felt the sting of not having that. I've been doing this parenting thing mostly without family help to...

You took the bath, went for the walk, said the prayer... and you still feel depleted. Sterling Jaquith explains why: when you trash-talk yourself all day, every bit of self-care pours into a cup full of holes. Plus the day a new friend saw her unfinished basement, and she chose not to poke a single hole. WHAT WE COVER IN THIS EPISODE: Why being mean to yourself all day drains you emotionally and p...

Mother Teresa wore whatever shoes were left until her feet were deformed, and Catholic moms often share that story like it's a calling for all of us. Sterling Jaquith, Rita Johnson (Health and Hormones) and Denise Jelinek (Weight Loss with the Holy Spirit) talk honestly about why caring for yourself isn't vanity, why your kids are watching how you do it, and how it can become a form of worship. WH...

I just got back from two weeks away (the Fulton Sheen conference in St. Louis and then France with my 15-year-old daughter) and I brought two big things with me to pray about in some very holy places. I asked for clarity every single day, and I kept thinking He'd surely talk to me on the 10-hour flight home, because airplanes are where I so often hear Him. He didn't. When I crawled into bed at 11:...

Getting kids out the door is a banana circus. That's what I told my daughter in the driveway the other morning, after somebody forgot a lunch and we had to turn around and come back. It's going to be a circus no matter what I do, because children bring chaos and no amount of systems fixes that. The only reason we're never late to school is that I just start the circus earlier than other people do....

Here's something I find fascinating. A lot of us are living a balanced life with a brain that's a hot mess in there, and so a life we're actually executing really well ends up feeling terrible. You got everybody fed and you made it to all the things on time, but your mind spent the whole day telling you how far behind you are, and that is what drained the battery. That's not a commitment problem....

I said it kind of offhandedly on a coaching call. "I want to be a blanket of peace in my home." And the moms would not let it go, so I have been sitting with it ever since. Here is what I mean. You have the ability to take your own emotional state and blanket a whole room with it. You already do it. Sometimes what you are laying over the kitchen is frustration or stress or that sharp voice, and so...

Anxiety never comes from the Lord. So the second I feel that tightness show up in my chest, I already know something true about myself. I am thinking about my life in a way that God does not want me to think about it. Period. Because if I were thinking about it the way He wants me to, I would be at peace. This episode is one question I want you to start asking faster than you are asking it right n...

I am team planning. I am team house systems. We teach it in the membership and it is the very first thing we tackle in the Catholic Mom Reset, because looking at your next 90 days and making a plan is genuinely a gift to your future self. But if you took all of it away tomorrow, dropped me in a different house in a different town with no idea what the next 90 days held, I would be okay. I could wa...

"People love change. They just hate transition." I heard Matthew Kelly teach that years ago and I think about it every single August. Because right now I'm getting a hundred emails from the school, two of my boys walked out today in socks with giant holes in the heels, and there's a lunchbox in this house that will not zip. If your body is fritzing out over start dates and supply lists and shoe si...

Almost everything you believe about your kids' schooling is an opinion, not a fact — and most of those opinions are quietly manufacturing stress in your body. In this episode, I walk you through why your feelings about school come from your thinking, how I choose school for my six kids with detachment (we're doing three different things this year), and the one trick I use to stop emotionally proce...

The internet is very loud about AI right now, so I want to tell you exactly where I stand in July of 2026, both personally and as a company, so you can start forming your own opinion. For the most part I'm team AI. I also think it's going to create some genuinely scary things in our society, the same way the internet and smartphones did. Both can be true. My favorite thing about it? It cuts throug...

It's Friday night, I'm home alone, and I'm recording a completely ridiculous episode. No coaching, no reframe, just me wanting to talk to someone about episode one of the new Elle Woods show on Amazon Prime. My husband took the kids to the beach, I opened Prime, and this little show whisked me right back to being a '90s Seattle grunge girl. Fair warning: this one is pure nostalgia. If you grew up...

I just got back from driving six kids and two dogs (including an eight-week-old puppy) from northern Idaho to northern Wisconsin, and the trip left me with a takeaway I didn't expect. I am so in love with my ordinary, day-to-day life. Watching cousins become friends and swimming and puppy chaos was wonderful, and it made me more grateful than ever for the life I've built at home. So in this episod...

It usually hits right about now. You started summer with high hopes, pushed through the chaotic first couple of weeks, and now you're yelling more, feeling stressed, and wondering what happened to the magical season you pictured. Sterling Jaquith says it's not because you lack a plan. It's your window of tolerance, and summer quietly shrinks it. Drawing on a concept from her book Catholic Mom Calm...

Sterling Jaquith caught herself feeling a very particular brand of summer jealousy. Friends whose parents are stable enough, healthy enough, and trusted enough to take the grandkids for a week or two. And watching that feeling rise was a perfect window into something we all do: we never question why we feel good, but the moment a negative feeling shows up, we start poking at it, and the poking spi...

We're handed a script that summer is supposed to be fun and relaxing, beach days and popsicles and bucket lists. Then the fantasy meets the reality of little kids off their routine, eating sugar, tracking sand everywhere, and a lot of moms find themselves feeling something they didn't expect: angry. Sterling Jaquith says that's not a sign you're doing it wrong. It's cognitive dissonance, and it's...

  Every summer it happens. You pack up the little kids, drive to the beach or the grandparents, and somewhere around day three in an unfamiliar Airbnb with no blackout curtains and a toddler who won't sleep, you wonder why you thought this would be fun. Sterling Jaquith has a reframe that changes the whole thing: stop calling it a vacation. In this evergreen episode you can come back to before any...

It's a wild claim, and Sterling Jaquith makes it anyway. After asking her email list what they're struggling with right now, she read more than 200 responses, and reading every single one she kept thinking the same thing: oh, I could help her feel so much better about that. Not because the hard things aren't real. They are. But because underneath every one of them is the same skill, the number one...

We all say we want our lives to be better. But what if most of us don't actually want to do the one thing that would make it better? This episode is the mirror-moment question, plus a summer update on closing loops, a 30-second way to make decisions, a new puppy, and the letter that changed how she thinks about holy water. WHAT WE COVER IN THIS EPISODE: Why no amount of thinking makes a decision f...

Six kids home for summer, a pilgrimage to France, a schooling decision on a deadline, and a Goodwill trip that produced an accidental gel bead gun. Sterling Jaquith walks through what's actually on her plate right now and shows the move that keeps her calm in the middle of it: stop trying to engineer a simple life, simplify your thinking instead. WHAT WE COVER IN THIS EPISODE: Why "just live simpl...