Author Jen Hatmaker.

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Speaker 1: Hi. This is Laura Vanderkam. I'm a mother of four, an author, journalist, and speaker. And this is Sarah Hart Hunger. I'm a mother of three, practicing physician and blogger. On the side, we are two working parents who love our careers and our families. Welcome to best of both worlds. Here we talk about how real women manage work, family, and time for fun, from figuring out childcare to mapping out long term career goals. We want you to get the most out of life. Welcome to best of both worlds. This is Laura. This is episode one hundred and forty two. We'll be interviewing or I'll be interviewing Jen Hatmaker during this episode. Jen is the author of several books, most recently Fierce Free and Full of Fire, which is a bit of a mouthful, but it's a fun read. She talks about some heady issues in there, in terms of being your best self, sort of claiming your ambition of whatever size, that is, getting over various barriers that are holding us back. But she does it in such a fund style, so I'm sure a lot of our listeners are going to love reading that. And she's just a fascinating person. People who are familiar with her life, as I talk about in the interview, not many people who have had careers both as a pastor and as an HGTV television personality. So we go into all that, and I hope you'll enjoy listening to that. Speaking of fun diversions, Sarah, what have you been doing lately to divert your attention during this quarantine? Fun? Yeah, I feel like, well, I was just listening to one of my other favorite podcasts. So podcasts have been a big theme for me because I've been taking walks outside and I think, like many others, I'm finding that lighter material is definitely hitting home right now for the most part. Like I actually did read a pretty heavy book recently. My gosh, now I'm blinking on what I just read. Oh yeah, The Topeka School by Ben Lerner. It took me a really long time to get into it, but then it did have that sort of immersive feel where you're like in this other world, even though it was a very dark and gloomy world, and I enjoyed it. But I think, my well, you know what my next pick is, I've begun The Courtland Boys, which is actually perfectly light. I'm sure there are also darker themes that are going to be delved into, but the style is very It's just readable, like it's just one of those books, like I wanted to read it between my conference calls and was like, oh damn, I have to start my call. So, by the way, that's Laura's books if anybody wants to And she did not tell me to place this, but that is actually what I'm reading, and I'm really enjoying it. And we are watching some TVs. We just finished This is Us, which I think the season ended a few weeks ago, but we're like totally behind. You know, my husband's work schedule has been a lot lighter than it normally is, so it's kind of funny. We've been enjoying just having a little bit more bendwidth to like watch shows at night and talk and that's been nice. Have you watched anything or read anything juicy? Not really. I mean I've read a couple books, some about big sort of nonfiction themes. So I read Elizabeth Colbert's The Sixth Extinction, which is about extinctions through history, so not really about viruses, but related sort of natural disasters. I read homodauis that Juvel Harari. I forget his name exactly, but you know he wrote the book Sapiens, So those, yeah, follow up about what future humanity will be? Like what else? Those are not light about A month ago now, I read Michelle Obama's memoir Becoming, and you know, I was like the parts of memoirs where people talk about their childhoods and young adulthoods, like, you know, you could kind of know her story after she became famous, so it's like that part whatever, But it's more fun reading about her growing up in Chicago and being a young person there. So I enjoyed that. Does that have an audiobook that she narrates, because I feel like that would be cool. That might be. I don't know, i read it. I don't. I haven't been doing all that well with audiobooks I have. I'm way behind on all my podcasts just because I am not doing any of the things that I would have been doing that I matched with podcasts. So probably I should listen to more of them, but I just it's not part of what I'm doing anymore. I'm running outside instead of on the treadmill, so I'm not listening to them. On the treadmill. I'm not driving anywhere, so there's there's that time is gone. You don't like to do podcasts when you run outside? Now now I want to be able to hear stuff. I don't know, people, cars, whatever, I just don't can always do the one headfoon one. I have to work on that because I definitely I'm still alive and pretty much all my outdoor running has always been the outdoor running has always been with something in my ear. So even even going way back before, it was like cool to do it. I mean that's why. Like I listened to another Mother Runner when they were, you know, the very one of the few podcasts around, and I was like, wow, this pairs really well with like running eighteen miles or whatever I was doing back then. Yeah, well, maybe I'd feel better about running eighteen miles if I was listening to podcasts. And maybe I have to get on that. My husband and I boys have been watching The Crown. Ooh, that's like kind of educational. Yeah, so maybe they need to listen to Queen Elizabeth's speech or something to get the modern take on it. But all right, well those are I guess what we're diverting ourselves with now and now we'll talk with Jen Hatmaker. Well, Sarah and I are delighted to welcome Jen Hatmaker to the program. So Jen, can you go ahead and introduce yourself to our listeners. Yeah, and thank you for having me on today. I'm so happy to talk to another person and I'm not related to you. We're so great during COVID nineteen lockdown. So we may write hopefully when we are not in lockdown, when Jen's book comes out. But I'm recording ahead. Yes, real people, Yes, absolutely, like, Oh, there's a person's face on the screen. How nice. I live in Austin, Texas with my big family. I've got my husband, Brandon. I've been married for twenty six years. We have five kids, so we have in two in college, two in high school, and one in middle So it's just a circus up in here every single day, of course, And you know we're getting a lot of togetherness right now. I'll tell you that togetherness is a double edged sword. Really, I don't know howard of Yeah, and you've worn a lot of professional hats over the years. I was looking through the list of your various gigs. There's probably not a huge overlap between people who have been both preachers and h TV television personality, So maybe you can know, right, Yeah, we'll talk a little bit about your your evolution. I'm such an interesting category. Every time I release a new book, my publishing team faces the same conundrum, which is, we don't know where this book belongs in a bookstore. Like I'm not a tidy I don't have tidy categories at all. But yeah, I've I've been in ministry my husband as well. We started a church here in Austin, and then weirdly we had an eight episode series on HGTV. We renovated a one hundred year old farmhouse. But primarily the overlap is that I generally just I serve women, and I serve them in a lot of capacities. So sometimes that looks like books. Sometimes it looks like podcast. Sometimes it just looks like entertainment because I mean, my gosh, we've just got to be able to laugh. Sometimes it looks like spiritual leadership. And I just decided a few years ago that I didn't have to pick, that I didn't have to pick between being funny and being sober minded, that I didn't have to pick between being entertaining and being instructive, and so I just do it all and people just have figured it out at this point, like, oh, we get a little whiplash with gin and that's just okay. Yeah, and some interesting whiplash in terms of the communities you're part of. And I think one of the things you address in the beginning of your new book of Fierce, Free and Full of Fire, which we're talking about today, is that you are both deeply embedded in the evangelical Christian community. You're also in the progressive activist community, and anyone who follows politics knows that the overlap between these two is somewhat limited as well, very very tiny. So we're seeing each other, Jenna and I can see each other. She's making a very small, small stick with her fingers. Yeah. How does how does that feel? I mean, is it sort of perpetually that you know, feeling a little bit strange in both circles? Yeah? Yeah, you nailed it. And I would say, you know, just to be fair to identify probably correctly, I'm not really deeply embedded in the evangelical world anymore. That was a world that that's kind of where I built my career. But there is I've sort of been on a divergent path in the last I'm going to say ten years when I had I was unable to reconcile the conflict and tension I felt inside that circle. However, you know, if I'm not necessarily connected to that branch of the tree, I still have this like deeplease spiritual side that includes spiritual leadership and pastoral leadership. And then to your point, also, I am an activist. My husband and I run a foundation. We globally fund initiatives all around the world with our community. I'm an ally for the LGBTQ community, I'm an ally for people of color, and I'm a supporter of Black Lives Matter. And so I'm just kind of I run the gamut here and I just had to decide. And this is kind of the center point of Fearce, the book we're talking about, which is just that if I have to keep shape shifting to please the intended audience, which for me changes a lot because I I run in a lot of lanes, then I am going to one hundred percent disintegrate. So instead of trying to keep the peace in whatever room I'm in, I'm going to just have to be myself. I'm going to have to figure out deeply who I am, what I care about, what matters to me, how I am created this sort of thrive and lead and be that person no matter where I'm at, and that to me has been the path to freedom. Yeah, and so in her book, Jen is sharing some of her journey on this, and also you know, advice on why we should all try to be our authentic selves and why the world needs our authentic selves and you know, so this is this big idea. And then one of the things you start talking about at the beginning of the book is personality tests. So how do personality tests help us in our quest to be authentically ourselves. I have led women for a couple of decades now, and I'm forty five, and so what I'm noticing is that a lot of women, even my age, even older frankly, are saying, hell, I don't even know who I am. Like you're asking me to be myself, to be the core center of who I am, and I don't know who that is. Like, you know, I have spent all these years just tending the flock and making sure everybody else was thriving. And so we start out at the beginning of the book, like, well, let's just start with who you are, not necessarily what you do, not necessarily what you care about or what you believe in, or we'll get to that, but let's start with just who you are, how you were formed, how you flourish on this earth. And so we kind of start there, like deeply going into personality spaces. Now, personality inventories are imperfect one hundred percent. You know, these are these are guides. You know, they're not templates. And so however, I just have discovered in my life they've been a real useful tool for me when I just kept noticing that something on the outside was not matching something on the inside. That I would have these either feelings or a tension point or whatever, an emotion that I was carrying on the inside, but that didn't have permission to live on the outside. So anyway, personality inventories helped me. Are you familiar at all the enneagram? I am? I don't know for sure which one I am, but you found one that totally seemed to explain you. Right. It was weird, it was it read me my mail. It's called the enneagram E N N E, A, G R, A M. And again, none of these are perfect, but that particular tool really unlocked some doors for me, not just in just decoding who I really am and how to sort of structure my life in a way that I'm going to flourish, but also how to be married to this person I'm married to, and I learned what his number was and how those two numbers connect and my kids and my community. So I hope that Fierce takes women out of the starting blocks right there, that they can say, let's before we start adding in all these people that are in our lives and our work and our passions and our convictions, let's begin right at the core of who we are and start there. Yes, let's start there. Now. For podcast listeners, we're going to pause right here to take a quick bad break. We're back with Jen Hatmaker, who is talking about her new book, Fierce, Free and Full of Fire. We've just been talking personalities. I know you discovered something interested which I had as well. You know, I didn't know that I could be an introvert because I, you know, talk to people like I don't hide any height. I talk to people for a living. And so yet it explained to me why every time I was forced to like stand in a row and like meet fifty people at a time, I wanted to go hide in the bathroom. It sounds like you may have had a similar, similar experience, one hundred percent the same. I included that in that same chapter because a few years ago I read the book Quiet by Susan Kine. Have you read it? I have? I mean it rocked me to my core because I'm like, you have a very public life, so I and I love people. I just had I had a poor definition of what it meant to be an introvert, which I thought it meant very reclusive and very perhaps shy and not necessarily wanting to have a lot of meaningful conversations. And of course that's not what it means at all. So when I read Susan's book The Power of an Introvert in a World that Can't Stop Talking, I felt like I was looking at a mirror. I never nobody had ever told me that some of the limits on my capacity had to do with introversion. I just felt like I was a bad person. I thought, well, if I'm just not willing to be completely available right at all times, that's my work. You know, I'm a leader. I'm even a spiritual leader, and that adds another layer onto the shoods of our life. So then that learned discovering that I'm pretty much a textbook introvert, it freed me up in so many ways. It gave me a little bit, honestly, permission to structure my work life a little bit differently, so that I was building in areas where I could recharge and refuel in quiet, sort of alone, and it served me so well. But again, I think this is why it matters that we know who we are. This work, that sort of digging out, the mining of our personality, it's good work. It means something. It's not just for like obsessive self reflection. You know, we've had enough of that. But rather I think it serves us and really deeply informs what we do and how we do it, how we love, how we connect with people. And so yeah, introvert here big times. So this is why my family's laughing at me right now as we are sort of in isolation, and we'll see where we're at when this comes out. But they're like, mom, this is your best life. I'm like, well, before I just like to be home, definitely. I've been training for this my whole life, exactly exactly. And then part of you know, we get to know ourselves, and then part of feeling more free in the world is breaking free of some of the limitations that we may put on ourselves. And you talk about how women in particular maybe try to take up less space partly because of concerns about body image, for instance, that you know, this is one of the ways we limit ourselves, that we are, you know, obsessed about that as opposed to obsessed about you know, broader things we might change in the world. And you've you've had quite a journey in terms of your own body image. I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit with us, because I know a lot of our listeners are struggling with the same thing. It's interesting. I've got my launch team who's putting this book out, has been reading it now for a couple of weeks, and so I've got you know, two thousand people, two thousand advanced readers right now, and that chapter is hitting hard, the body chapter for women, because it's just ubiquitous. We are just not alone in this sense of self loathing and body shaming and just a general sense of unhappiness with what we look like and what others think of what we look like. And I spent quite a bit of time really unpacking that for the reader, because this is the intended result of an industry hell bent on making sure we hate ourselves so that we continue to pump billions of dollars into all these quick fixes. And it's interesting too when you take a longer view of body image, because historically you and I both know what pretty is right now. You know, there's a look that's out there. We all know what it is, but that's just right now, and that's also just right here. You know, pretty has The idea of pretty has meandered through enormous fluctuations throughout history. And sometimes it's round and squishy and soft. Sometimes it's like lean and hard and androgynists and whatever it is right now, and so it's a moving target. It's not fair. The game is rigged. This is a rigged system. And so I have learned a lot from practitioners who are very gently teaching us a different way to relate to our bodies and how to learn embodiment and how to be kind to our bodies. One of my favorite teachers is doctor Hillary McBride, and I quote her liberally in that chapter and she suggests, and I love this, This has fundamentally changed something inside of me. But you know, she says, we are terrible to our bodies, both physically and emotionally. We're mean. And so she says, our body is not an it. It's not an it, it's not the separate, unfortunate container just walking us around on this earth. She suggests, calling our body a her or a she, that she is just as much a part of who we are as our minds, as our hearts, as our convictions. And so I have taken to thinking of my body as a sheet and speaking to her as such, like she did a great job today, and she walked me through a lot of hard things today and kept me calm and kept me kept me sound and grounded. And so this kind of gentle talking to our bodies in a way that appreciates all she's done for us every single day, getting us through another day. It's really changing my mind about how I see myself. Yeah, now I love that too, And to think about my body as she and thank her for sort of the amazing things she's she's done. And another part that really spoke to me in your book, you talk about being mindful of your yeses, one of my five favorite ideas that you talk about. Now you have five kids. I also have five kids, but mine are mine are a little younger than yours. We haven't gotten to this point yet. But when your kids turn thirteen, you take them on a trip where you get to say yes a lot. Yeah. So what does that look like? What are these yes trips? I love telling that story embedded in that chapter of How to Correctly Choose our Yeses and our Nose because women are a mess about this. We are handing out way more yeses than we're interested in actually handing out. It's making us angry, and it's we're just sort of unraveling at the seams. And so I start that chapter out by telling this great story which when our oldest son was approaching thirteen. How old are your kids? Twelve, ten, eight, five and a baby? Okay, okay, so right where you are literally yes, Like, oh wow, we're in the weeds like every day, and so we're going to have to figure out how to do something special with each kid, just one on you know, one on one time is hard to come by in a big family. And so our oldest kid was approaching thirteen, and we decided that when every kid turns thirteen, one parent like that gender parent. So Brandon's taking the boys and I took the girls. It's going to take that kid on a surprise trip and they will not know where, and they will not know when, and they won't know anything about it. We will just yank them out of their beds and put them in the car and drive them to the airport and we take about a three or a four day trip with them, and we call them Yes trips because we just decided that they were going to be sort of extravagant and permissive and not necessarily extravagant in terms of being expensive. Just like, Mom, can we order room service at eleven PM? Yes? Can I have French fries for dinner? Yes? Can I have coke for black Yes? Like, if it is within the realm of possibility and it wasn't dangerous, we're like yes, we say yes. My last My last trip was last year, my last thirteen year old and she said, Mom, I want to get We were in New York City and she said, I want to get my eyebrows threaded. I'm like, let's go. So I'm like, this is a yes trip, and I told her this is one hundred percent yes. But you don't get to say no. You don't get to feel the first thread and go, oh, I changed my mind. I'm done one thread. That this beautiful family tradition. And so every kid who knew it was coming, they never knew when. So like two weeks leading up to their thirteenth birthday, they are on pins and needles and just one of my favorite memories of being a mom that that sounds wonderful. I mean there's one on one trips or even one on one like afternoons that's all you got. Totally are great. You know, being able to say yes to these things is wonderful. And part of that is been saying no to the that we don't care about. And so, what's what's your advice for for getting better at that for people who tend to say yes to things that they don't Actually, I've packed that. I absolutely packed that chapter with resources and ideas because the truth is, I think women are overextended because we're incredibly capable. So people are just going to continue to ask us to do things because they know we can, and they know we can pull it off, and they know we can accomplish it. And so this we cannot count on our environments to slow their role. This is going to be our work, right. We're the only ones who are going to be able to hold any sort of boundary on our time and energy sort of exertion. And so I have a couple of rules that I put in there that have really served me well that I learned from other teachers. One is that Greg McCowan wrote a book called Essentialism, and he said, this is fantastic. He said, Okay, as you are considering all your options, and I say, we have a thousand options for every one hundred spots, right, get really really laser focused on what is my goal? What do I want here? What am I good at? What do I really really want to say yes too? And how do I want to get there? And what do I want to do? And then with that goal in mind, like very very specifically evaluate every incoming request by either rating it by rating it from zero to one hundred based on how much does this opportunity meet my goals and if it's in ninety or above, you say yes, and that's a good yes, that's an easy yes. But if it is an eighty nine or lower, you change its score to zero and you cancel it out. And so he says, in this way, you are sort of reserving your energy and your time for your highest level of contribution, and you are saying yes to the very, very best opportunities. I love this because I typically say yes to everything in the eighties because it's close, it's close, it's close, and or and I feel a sense of obligation somewhere in the eighties, or like I I should do this, or even I should want to do this. And so that ninety percent role has deeply, deeply affected me to be able to say this is not my highest point of contribution. I'm going to say no. And the good news is like my seventy eight is somebody else's ninety five. Let them have it, Like, let them have it. The short version of this, this is the shorthand bit that I tell my people all the time, is this, when you are considering an opportunity, if it is not a hell yes, then it's a no yeap. And so that's the short version of that long story where if it's not a hell, if it's like a kind of yes, or like a medium yes, or I guess I ought to yes, it's a no. So let's talk about honesty, because you advocate radical honesty in this book, the different people in our lives and getting clear with what we want, what our desires are. That sounds scary? Yeah? Is it scary? I mean, how do we how do we get past that? That if we're honest, we'll will learn things we don't want to know or well, and that you know, we will upset people. I mean, this is one hundred percent true, and so I want to honor the fact that it is indeed scary to live that way. And we have been conditioned early on that it is essentially up to the women in the room to make sure that everybody else is comfortable right, and to adjust the dial to the tone of the room to avoid interruption or challenge or tension or disagreement. And so, you know, we learned early on that we were expected to maintain the correct temperature in the room that somebody else already said. But the obvious downside of that is that we have to silence our own voices, our own convictions, our own gifts, our own influence, and we have a right to those things. We have a right to our own agency and our own authority, and our own ideas and any tension that those create. That's an important challenge to the status quo, which, of course, by the way, still favors the same categories of people all the time. And so I think we have to challenge this instinct. But I want to acknowledge the fear, because it's true. There is a cost to telling the truth in all facets of our lives. It is disruptive. When women finally tell the truth about who they are, about what they need or want, about what they believe. That sends shock waves along the little worlds we have helped create. It's true, but I suspect that women who are living in that place of sort of silence and submission probably feel how I felt to some degree for years, which was hamstrung and fraudulent and even and I mean this gently, but even cowardly. And I thought, this is not how I want to live, This is not the mark I want to leave on this earth. And so I just came to the point where I thought, I'm supposedly keeping the peace, but I don't have any peace. And also I'm keeping the peace, but I am robbing some other communities of peace because I am unwilling to come alongside of them like I feel convicted to. And so yes, there is a cost built into telling the truth, but I will walk every reader through it. I put so many tools and resources in the hands of every reader, like scripts, actual language and conversations that I've had and that I can model and walk readers through the process of integration and of telling the truth and of finally showing up and then ultimately being free and true and real. And I am telling you the work is worth it. It is worth the cost, It is worth the tension because the endgame is such liberation and honesty, Like I just cannot even put a price tag on living that that way. Yeah, And one of the other things that is worth doing the work that you talk about is finding your people that they help make this journey toward radical honesty of knowing who we are, knowing what we want in the world just more pleasant in general, more fun. And you know, a lot of listeners in this podcast are very busy with work with family. How do we go about finding our people and nurturing those relationships. Yeah, this is the point of loneliness, honestly, and sadness that feels really common to the community of women right now. And it's interesting because we're expected to do right now what generations before us really weren't, which is be like the pinterest worthy mom and have this thriving, beautiful career that is meaningful and impacting the world and tending to beautiful like homes. And we're kind of expected to do everything. And at the same time, we're most distanced and disconnected from our extended families, from our parents and our siblings. We don't live necessarily where we grew up or where our families are. Neighbors in general are less connected, and so we're expected to do more with less connection. And so it's no wonder that women are drowning in loneliness and they're not alone, they really really aren't. And so I think the first thing I want to say to women is you're not doing anything wrong. You are just expected to do so much right now that we used to kind of have a village around and now we don't. And so one of the writers that I reference in there calls it we have villageless lives, and so I just really challenge the notion that really close and meaningful relationships are secondary or optional. There's a lot of data that tells us that connected, meaningful relationships are positively more than any of more than any other factor literally on earth. The key to either living a life of like meaning and flourishing or living a life of sort of loneliness and sorry like this is if this is the one place we spend our energy, it's the right place. And so I put a lot of options in front of people. This is how to find people. And here's the thing. I think what women are gonna have to The hurdle they're going to have to jump is the risk. And women have been burned before, or they're afraid, or they're new somewhere, or they're in transition in some way, and so it feels risky to be vulnerable with somebody to sort of take a little step out onto a relational ledge to see if it'll hold. But there's no other way. There's just no other way. There's not a shortcut, there's not an easy, guaranteed rout around. We're just gonna have to decide if being lone only is worth being safe or if the risk factor, the vulnerability is worth it. And I contend that it is. And so I don't think we have to build communities where we have twenty five best friends in the world. You know, one is enough to absolutely change the game, one that you can count on. And so I have such love in my heart and such empathy for women who feel lonely, and I hope that the tools from Fierce will really encourage them to step out there, to get out there. One thing that I say inside the book is instead of waiting for community, provide it and you'll end up with it anyway. And so we can be the first one to raise our hand and say I'll go first. Easier said than done, but good advice exactly. So, Jan we always end our interviews with a love of the week, which is something cool that is in our world right now. I can go first, so you can have a minute to think. But what I am loving right now are is the magnolia tree in my front yard that is blossoming. And I am currently only seeing my magnolia tree because we are not leaving the house. That's right. But if there's going to be a time where I can't leave the house now is a pretty good time with seeing beautiful blossoms of spring. So how about for you? Great, that's so great. I probably have too. And this is obviously going to also be quarantine related, because that's just the life you and I are living right now. Maybe this I hope this is obsolete by the time this comes out, but we have, just by way of absolute necessity, rediscovered the joy of a really hard puzzle. So my thousand pieces good to me. I sat with a couple of my kids a couple of days ago for three hours and I mean focused on the puzzle and it was so fun to kind of be with them and watch them do that. And then I am also back to your earlier question. I'm on Zoom right now with my friends and we are doing happy hours at five o'clock on our Zoom screens, and it just feels to me it's not just seeing my friends, which is so meaningful because all I've seen are these people that live here. But it reminds me that human beings will do what it takes to connect with one another, to encourage one another, that we will get creative, that we will get innovative, that everything that has ever mattered, still matters, and we'll find a way to it. I mean, it may look different than what we've been used to, but I have just been so encouraged watching humans be beautiful right now and finding a way to connect and to love each other and to make each other laugh and bring each other joy. And so I suspect that we are going to emerge from this strange, unprecedented season of social isolation really stronger, and that we will be really proud of the way we sort of laid down our differences and our arguments and found a way to come together. It's been a real marvel to watch, and I'm proud to be a part of it. Well, let's hope, let's hope that's the outcome of all the absolutely all right. Well, this has been Jen Hatmaker, who is the author of the new book Fierce, Free and Full of Fire, which I know our listeners will love, So please pick up a copy of that. Thanks for having me on. Well that was great, And now we have a listener question who writes in I have a topic that may seem silly, but I promise it's a genuine concern for me. No silly questions. This is all good listeners. You can write in with whatever you want. Sorry, those Laura's little aside there all right, She writes in to Sarah, I'd love to hear how you and Laura manage your friendship, specifically keeping up with your connections to your friends. Here's a bit of background to give some more color to my question. I'm a full time working mom to a fifteen month old and I'm expecting baby number two. So she's been in the pregnant newborn baby phase for a while and will be for a while. So her problem is twofold one. Either her friends are in different stages of life, so for instance, they have older kids and thus have more freedom, or maybe don't have kids and so it's hard to coordinate schedules, or second, she's just not keeping up with the regular stay in touch communication. For instance, she'll have friends who'll text her at all times during the day, but then her work life is such that she can't respond to texts very quickly, and then she's like, okay, well I'll respond at the end of the day, but then it gets away from her. In two, three, four days later, the text is still sitting there. So I feel like my friendships are suffering because of this, She says, how can I be better? Should I block out time each night to just respond to text? Do you have any hacks? And finally, can you please reassure me that this is just a phase of life and when my kids get older, I will have a social life again. Yeah. I think this is a great question because it's relevant now during these times when our socializing is a little bit more virtual, and it will be relevant later because I'm sure people are going to be enjoying these episodes for years to come. Right, Okay, so I have a few thoughts. First of all, you know, you mentioned that the newborn and baby phase like lasts a while, but actually, I guess, having come out through the other side, Laura's still in it, so maybe she doesn't remember this part. But it actually it is kind of fast, like you know, before you know it before once a year is up, that newborn is becoming a one year old, and as time goes your friendships, the ones that really last, they're going to weather you know, a year or even two years of things being crazy, Like the ones that don't matter they might not and then who cares? But the ones that really do matter, Like I think of my close college friends or even a couple people I've been in touch with since high school. It doesn't matter. And if a year or two goes by because one of us had some kids that are young and we have less bandwidth, then that's fine and we can catch up later. So I would just remember that, even though it feels like forever now, there's always opportunity to catch up on those real friendships later on. The second thing I have to say is I think that you know, even if it's not that frequent, making intentional time together, whether that's a virtual zoom call that you're doing during this COVID period, you know a lot of people are doing that with groups of old friends that actually hadn't been together in person for a while, or like with my group of college friends, only about half of us have kids. But at the same time, we made it a priority to get together in person and we try to do it once a year. Does it mean that we're not, you know, sharing every little thing every day, Sure we don't. I mean we're all in different locations and in different phases of life. But when we do get together, we still feel a real closeness. And then when big things happen like the coronavirus. We sort of are still familiar enough in each other's lives that we can have an impromptu zoom happy hour and it still feels completely meaningful and we feel like we haven't missed anything. So I would just, you know, don't don't feel like just because there isn't a high frequency that your friendships are lost. And then finally, you know, the once a day responding to texts. I think that actually is kind of a nice idea. I myself do not do a good job batching. My husband will attest he likes to pantomime knocking my phone out of my hands sometimes because I'm not very disciplined, and I will get sucked back into a group chat when I probably would be better off doing more badging. But if badging works to you for you and you can do it, consider that like a nice little wind on. Perhaps at the end of the day, or if you're pumping, save it for a pump session, or you know, fit it in where it seems like it fits. What do you think, Yeah, I text a lot of people while uh pumping or nursing. That seems to be a time that I mean, Otherwise I mean on my phone anyway, it's hard to hold a book, and so if I'm reading, I'm reading on my phone, and so it's easy to have conversations as well. You know, you also might consider if you could nudge some of your closest friends into different forms of communication. So if texting is easier for them, then for you, maybe you could ask if you could do slightly different things. I mean, if you could like FaceTime them for five minutes in the evening to catch up on everything, as opposed to the text back and forth through the day. Maybe that would work for you, or you know, call while you're walking to the train or whatever it is, that you can work out a way to communicate with them in a slightly different way if the text just doesn't work. But yeah, I would second that point that it is a phase, like you will discover more time for hanging out with friends as your kids get older, and which is great. I mean there's a dip. People who studied sort of friendships through life that there is a dip when people have young kids and are very busy with work and with family matters, and then as time opens up, it's something that you can rediscover and so you just kind of have to keep those friendships going, maybe not on full blast during that time, but if you can keep just a little bit going, then they will be able to go back up once everyone's got a little bit more bandwidth. All right, Well, this has been best of both worlds. We've been talking with Jen Hatmaker about her book Fearce Free and Full of Fire. Get it all out, all the f's and we'll be back next week with more on making work and life fit together. Thanks for listening. You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com or at the Underscore shoe Box on Instagram, and you can find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. This has been the best of both worlds podcasts. Please join us next time for more on making work and life work together.