To endings - and embracing what's next

After 10+ years of production, The Mom Hour podcast wraps tomorrow.

Hi friends,

Tomorrow,

Sarah Powers

and I officially sunset The Mom Hour podcast, which has been publishing since March of 2015.

That’s more than ten years of recording episodes together, continuously: in over a decade we’ve never missed a Tuesday episode and we’ve published more than 800 hours of content in total.

That’s over a decade of sharing our thoughts and feelings about motherhood, scenes from our family lives and glimpses of our kids’ milestones; smaller, vaguer hints at their struggles.

The podcast took both Sarah and I through huge changes in our parenting lives - my youngest was in kindergarten when it started, and will start her junior year of high school in the fall - and along the way we’ve covered the spectrum of topics, from birth and breastfeeding to potty-training to dealing with visiting college kids and returning-home young adults. We’ve also both gone through big shifts in our personal lives since starting the podcast, from moves (both of us) to divorce (me) to entering the midlife years.

And while The Mom Hour was always more generally about the motherhood experience than our specific families, we still tackled all the topics you’d expect to hear about in a parenting podcast through the lenses of our own lives during ten years’ worth of ages and stages. Establishing boundaries, deciding what to share and what to hold back, and being OK with being a more and more out of it when it comes to the newest parenting research, trends, and gadgets, has been more taxing than I think I’ve always realized.

So while both Sarah and I have had some emotional moments in the lead-up to the end, I’ve been surprised by how overall buoyant and free I feel today, on the eve of the last episode airing.

A selfie of each of us recording our last ep. Yes, my mic is stuck in my bra.

Sarah and I talked a lot about our individual decision-making processes to get to this point when we announced the end back in February. In that episode, we answered some questions we anticipated listeners might have about why we didn’t sell the podcast or partner with a larger network despite considering offers for each scenario - as well as why we didn’t opt to keep the podcast going and just talk more about parenting teens and young adults. (The answer to each is some different version of “we didn’t want to” but if you’re curious, there are some specifics in the episode!)

I can’t speak too much for Sarah, but as for myself, I’ve been feeling a shift not only in what kind of topics I want to write and podcast about, but also in the very essence of what I feel I have to offer.

Many times, over the past twenty+ years since I started writing about motherhood, I’ve found myself in the position of being perceived as a parenting expert, a mantle I’ve been more than a little reluctant to wear.

There’s a reason the subtitle of The Last Parenting Book You’ll Ever Read is (emphasis mine) “How We Let Our Kids Go And Embrace What’s Next.” If the subtitle had been more expert-y, e.g. “How To Let Your Kids Go And Embrace What’s Next”, I probably would have choked on it every time I tried to say it out loud (which, over the past couple of months, has been a LOT OF TIMES.)

Listen, I can’t instruct you on how to do this stage of parenthood, or any stage. I’m there in it too, struggling and flailing right along with you. My book is basically a 272-page reminder to myself that I need to keep doing the hard work of grappling with my own regrets, giving myself grace, holding on with a loose grip, and finding new ways to look forward.

And the truth is that I never really wanted to tell anyone how to be a mom, only to share my own long and winding path.

So while it has been an enormous privilege to be invited into so many thousands of homes and cars and earbuds over the past decade, to become a part of our listeners’ family lives and work commutes and conversations with friends, I’m also very ready to not make writing and talking about motherhood the thrust of my professional life anymore, to make my family less front-and-center in my online life as I make myself more front-and-center in my own.

Sarah is in a similar place, and last week, the two of us started a brand-new project: Midlife Lady Leisure Pursuits, a mostly-for-fun podcast talking about completely just-for-fun topics.

To get a sense for just how committed we are to the deep exploration of very specific leisure topics, our first two episodes were about kayaking and candles, and the next, which releases tomorrow, is about chickens. Soon we’ll be tackling avocados and walking, with or without a weighted vest.

You know, all the midlife-lady stuff.

If you’re a listener of The Mom Hour and this sort of take on specific leisure topics intrigues you, I hope you’ll check the new podcast out! But it’s also totally OK if you were only in it for the motherhood content and now want to find new ways to spend your listening time. We all need different things at different times in our lives.

Personally, I’m leaning into the freedom of being able to be a different person from who I was ten years ago. Even, perhaps, from who I was ten minutes ago.

I’m still a mom; I’ll always be a mom. But motherhood is taking a back seat in my writing as I lean into these other parts of me, into beginner energy, into trying new things, into figuring out what makes this version of me tick.

As always, thanks for being along for the ride, friends.

Warmly,

Meagan