Blanket of Peace
Catholic Mom Calm
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 sometimes it is calm. The part I want you to hear is that it is yours to choose. This episode is me asking you to stop settling for awareness of your thinking and actually reach for the peace. I walk...
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How to Reach For Peace Faster
Catholic Mom Calm
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 now. Not "Lord, take this away," but "Lord, what do you want me to know about this?" About this toddler. About my husband. About my body. About this house. I asked Him something this morning and He...
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Planning From Woundedness
Catholic Mom Calm
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 walk around and have peace. That is the part I want for you. A lot of women tell me they are type A planners. There is a healthy version of that. There is also a version that gets built in a childhood...
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Transitioning from Summer to Fall
Catholic Mom Calm
"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 sizes, nothing has gone wrong. You're not in the change yet. You're in the transition, and I want to give you the exact words to say to your own brain while you're standing in the middle of it. Plus a...
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Managing Your Thoughts About School So You Don't Lose Your Mind
Catholic Mom Calm
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 processing problems that haven't happened yet. Whether you've got toddlers, a struggling nine-year-old, or a high schooler who bit off more than she can chew, I want you to notice how you're...
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How I Use AI (And How My Company Does)
Catholic Mom Calm
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 through the noise. Instead of clicking through twenty websites full of pop-ups and people trying to sell me something, I can ask a question and get a clear answer, then ask for the counterarguments too. ...
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'90s Seattle, Grunge, and the New Elle Woods Show
Catholic Mom Calm
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 in the '90s, went to concerts, lived anywhere near the Pacific Northwest, or ever dyed a strip in your hair and thought it was the coolest thing ever (it was not, but it was to me), come sit with me...
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Enjoying Your Daily Life (No Matter What Season You're In)
Catholic Mom Calm
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 episode I'm going to make the case, hard, that you can enjoy your day-to-day life too. I take on the obvious objection head-on ("sure, Sterling, but you're in an easier phase now") and explain why it isn't...
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Why Your Window of Tolerance Shrinks in Summer
Catholic Mom Calm
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 breaks down the two kinds of tolerance: your capacity for one specific stressor (hello, putting sunscreen on unwilling children), and your overall capacity for everything stacked on your...
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Summer Jealousy
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 spins into a storm. In this episode Sterling slows the whole thing down so you can see the difference between prayerfully feeling your feelings and indulging in what a friend called "tornado thinking."...
info_outlineThe Mental Load of a Catholic Mom (And What You Can Let Go Of)
The “mental load” of motherhood has been all over the internet lately — and often the conversation turns into women vs. men.
But before we talk about who should share the load…
We need to ask a harder question:
Should you be carrying all of it in the first place?
In this episode, we take a deeper look at the invisible weight Catholic moms carry — especially the mental load of imaginary futures and unnecessary worries.
We talk about:
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The difference between real problems and imagined ones
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Why sibling bickering does NOT predict their adult relationship
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How future “doom stories” drain your energy
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The schooling anxiety spiral (and how to step out of it)
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The pressure to give your kids the “perfect childhood”
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Why prudence includes choosing what not to think about
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How to bring your mental load to the Lord before bringing it to your husband
Before you make a list of everything you’re thinking about and ask your husband to share it, pause.
Some of the things on that list may not belong there at all.
God does not give grace for imaginary burdens.
He gives grace for what is real — today.
Interior peace grows when we:
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Discern what is actually ours to carry
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Release the rest
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Refuse to live in constant future fear
You don’t have to carry everything. And you were never meant to.
💜 Sterling