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."...
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Our Love/Hate Relationship with Summer
Catholic Mom Calm
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 incredibly common. This episode starts with a 30-second check-in you can do ten times a day, then unpacks why the gap between expectation and reality turns into anger, and what to do about it....
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Vacationing With Kids
Catholic Mom Calm
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 trip, Sterling walks through why little kids won't remember the vacation anyway, what they do remember, and the three honest questions to ask before you go. It's permission to...
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How to Solve Any Problem
Catholic Mom Calm
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 skill, and almost nobody is actually practicing it. This episode walks through several of the things moms wrote in about, completely anonymously, and shows you the one thing that changes how...
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Do You Actually Want Your Life To Get Better?
Catholic Mom Calm
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 for you (it always comes down to a 30-second moment where you just decide) The open loops draining moms, and the Saturday-close-loops, Monday-fresh-start rhythm you can borrow Clean pain vs. dirty...
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