Fresh Take: Jen Hatmaker, AWAKE

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0:31Amy Wilson:Hello, everyone, and welcome to What Fresh Hell? Laughing in the Face of Motherhood. This is Margaret. And this is Amy. Today, we are talking to Jen Hatmaker. She is a bestselling author, award-winning podcaster, speaker, and fierce advocate for women living in freedom and agency. With 14 books, her podcast For the Love, the Jen Hatmaker Book Club, and more, Jen reaches millions with her signature mix of humor, vulnerability, and wisdom. Today, we'll be talking about her latest instant New York Times bestseller, Awake, a coming of middle age story about losing what you thought defined you and discovering who you really are.

1:12Welcome, Jen. Thanks for having me, girls. Glad to see you. So, Jen, Awake opens with one of the most shattering moments imaginable. I'm hoping you'll tell us a little bit about that moment. Yeah. I mean, we just went ahead and went for the jugular right there in sentence number one, the opening scene. And by the way, the whole book, as you know, is written in scenes. It's not written. It's not chapters. It's not like long commentary on the issues. It's just little moments and memories all strung together to build a story that I'm trusting the reader to find. So the first scene was July 11th, 2020.

1:46It's 2.30 a.m. in the morning and I'm in bed. I'm asleep. And I wake up and I'm hearing my husband at the time voice texting his girlfriend in our bed. And it was clear that those words were not meant for me. There's a lot more to that, but that was essentially the dividing line in my story. There was a before July 11th and then there was an after July 11th. And a lot of women have a date. Sometimes it's a marriage date, but it's like, this is the date I got this health diagnosis. Or like, this is the date that's happened in my family or with one of my kids. And it's just like this marker that goes, everything is different from here forward.

2:23Right.

2:23Amy Wilson:The line divides. We're going to start going in a new direction. Exactly. Before and after. Yep. And after that moment, which starts the book, you then go back. And as you say, scenes that are from all different parts of your life that talk about the before. Everything that led up to the before and everything that made you maybe particularly unprepared for what was to happen next. Everything you had learned had not taught you what to do when this happened because this wasn't supposed to happen. That's right. So can we talk a little bit about the different things in your life that led you to this moment?

2:56Yes. We had been married for 26 years. And so we had followed a prescribed template to get a happy life. So I assumed I was going to get one. We had put in the right ingredients and stirred the soup pot and done all the right things. Follow the rules. We followed the rules. I mean, I certainly did. Let me separate us out here. I was following the rules. Fair point. And that was a combination of intersections that I lived in, that I was raised in. I was raised kind of in a traditional conservative religious environment. I grew up Southern Baptist for the initiated and still recovering on that, by the way.

3:35If you know, you know. If you know, you know. My dad was a pastor. No, my dad was not a normal pastor. My dad was very, very rogue. But I grew up, though, with a dad on a church staff. And then I married literally the first youth pastor that walked in front of my faith at college. It was the first one I could get my hands on at 19. 19-year-old bride. He's good enough. He's going to be a minister. And that's my native tongue. I mean, I know that life. I know that world. I know how to succeed. I know what the role of a woman is inside that particular structure. I knew the boundaries, the edges, the ceilings, the walls.

4:10And at the time, didn't feel hedged in by any of that. I thought, I'm going to be great at this. I am going to plug right into this format and be awesome. We're going to build this beautiful life. And frankly, we did. We built a life that for so many of its years was beautiful. And we have five kids. And I thought we were going to be lifers for sure. So several of those systems started fraying at the edge for me before I lost my marriage. And I started to go, hey, maybe this formula isn't as guaranteed as we were told. And furthermore, even if it is, what if I've got some real internal misalignment with a lot going on inside these spaces?

4:54What if I am no longer in alignment here? What if I have all this cognitive dissonance that I'm going to have to sort through? What if I am not comfortable with these gender roles that I once upon a time didn't just sign on for? I was complicit in perpetuating the role. And so that, to your point, there's a lot of things that unraveled. And my marriage was one of them.

5:17Amy Wilson:I was just talking to Amy before we started. I have an aunt who wrote a book in the 1970s. She passed away this week, which is why we were reading her obituary and talking about it. And she wrote a book in the 1970s called Ever Since Adam and Eve. And it was a celebration of like the role of the housewife and how that was disappearing. And she needed a toe tag because whenever she went to parties, nobody cared about what she was doing. She was the last of this dying breed of women. She had five children. 30 years later, she got divorced and she wrote a book called Disregard First Book. Oh, my gosh.

5:48Wait a minute. That is amazing. Amazing. That story deserves to be heard, everybody.

5:54Amy Wilson:I know. It's its own whole thing, but it resonates. I have another cousin who lost her husband at 40 to cancer. And just so many women, I feel like have this idea of like, wait a minute, I did everything by the rules. I leaned into these roles. First of all, the role went away. And second of all, my partner in this role didn't fulfill their obligations, either because they left me or they died. And now here I am broke alone. And I'm not ready for this because I dialed in real hard on what I was told to do. I feel like so many women listening are like, oh, yeah, I have been in that spot. Most, in my opinion.

6:39There's something about our age, too. Almost every one of us is on the precipice of something changing. Something is shifting. Sometimes it's catastrophic, like in my case, the torpedo of a marriage. But also our bodies or whatever's going on, our roles in the family, even if it's our family's intact, our kids are like growing up and launching. That feels different. Our careers. I mean, are any of us doing what we were doing in our 20s or 30s? I'm not. Well, podcast didn't exist. Definitely not. That's right. I mean, what's the internet? Right. And so there's so much shift and transition in the middle of life.

7:19And so frankly, this conversation is important for almost everyone. I've had a lot of people tell me the book's been out for one month today, one month today. And I've had so many people say, you know what, I read this, wasn't sure what my on-ramp was going to be here because I'm like happily married or I've never been divorced. I couldn't relate to that. And they were like, my God, that was one little piece of it. There were a thousand other things in there that I went, oh, yeah, yeah, this is a midlife reckoning in a lot of categories. And I think tons of us are going through that culturally, physically, relationally, professionally.

7:53And to be frank, it's a wonderful reckoning, even though it is highly disruptive. And in some cases, it starts with crisis, as did mine. I mean, I think about who you just mentioned, your family member whose husband died. That's crisis. You don't see that coming. You did not plan for that, probably not at this age. But here you are. Here you are. And we've got to sort through what kind of life do I want to build for the second half? And that's a good question.

8:17Amy Wilson:And I think for young people, it's great to say, you know, raising a daughter, there is no formula through life without pain and metamorphosis. and that I think is something that I think the next generation, it's really worthwhile to say there is no way to check boxes in life and ensure that you will be safe from metamorphosis, pain, and change. Zero. In fact, the opposite is true. You will experience pain, metamorphosis, and change. You just will. You will. That's the price of living a human life. And if you haven't gotten there yet, just live longer. Like, it will come for you. it's coming it will come for you i wanted to ask you jen about one of the particular things about living a life of faith and the way that you lived it church people as you say that there is this cognitive dissonance and i've been watching the show sister wives for like 20 seasons now and these are women who are living in polygamy oh boy this is sometimes a sister wives podcast i see that this is like a sister wives spam podcast good thank you sister wives podcast Okay.

9:26But this cognitive dissonance, I would see it in these women because they would be trying to explain why polygamy was actually great. And the parts where they felt jealous or horrible about themselves were just God testing them. And if they felt like this wasn't working for them, then they just needed to have more faith because it was supposed to do that. I'm like, wow, that is cognitive dissonance. And you talk about cognitive dissonance in your own life as well. So tell us more about that. That is so familiar. this sort of route around something that we are struggling with, something where we are out of integrity, and we do not know how else to explain it because it may require us to challenge a big system we're in or some sort of context we're embedded in.

10:09And let's be fair and honest, those are hard challenges to make. There's going to be loss baked in, and it's probably going to be your sense of belonging in that particular context, whether it's like small micro context, like a marriage and family, or even a broader context to your point, like your faith community or your political affiliation or your neighborhood, whatever it is like that puts you at odds with the culture that's holding those tenants up as good and true and right. And this is how we do it. And this is, we're all in agreement here. This is the way that we go. Stepping outside of that is scary and hard.

10:51And in a lot of cases, punitive. And we know that. We've watched it happen to so many people. We've watched so many people break ranks, right? And then see the mob come for them or their community go, you're no longer a part of us. We disavow you. I've been there. I've had deeply, deeply been there. It's painful. It's disorienting. It's lonely. And so I can understand. I can understand the sister wives who go, you know what? This is just God testing me. That in the moment feels easier than saying, I think this is a rigged system and that there is no possible chance I will ever flourish as a woman inside the structure that I have helped build.

11:33So I'll just say the problem must be me. I get it. Right. And the church does too, to be fair, right? If you wonder, then you're weak. you're doubting Thomas, you need more faith. Sure, of course. Like, there's a lot of incentive from the power structures to keep us in lockstep. If women decided collectively to break from all the systems that were not built for us, that were never built for us, where we are kept down and sidelined and subservient, quiet, complicit, those systems would crumble. And so they're kind of counting on us to stay in line. And so I see that with a lot of clarity at this stage in my life where I go, hey, this was invented.

12:19And a lot of this was invented to protect men in power, period, full stop. You can apply that to a lot of different spaces, but that's kind of where the buck stops ultimately in a lot of those places. And so I'm opted out. I'm like, I'm opting out. I'm not following. These rules do not apply to me. I don't think they're real. I don't think they're true, I certainly don't think they're good. And so this is an exciting time for me at 51 to be just a little bit too on the nose, awake to a lot of those places where I just sort of rocked myself into a slumber in order to protect my belonging and just say, what do I believe?

12:58What do I think is true? What do I want? What's my preference? What is my desire? What do I want out of this next part of my life. And I'll tell you, 10 out of 10 recommend.

13:08Amy Wilson:Yeah. Telling the truth about your life is the first step to having a good life. It's a doozy. I also, by the way, super sympathetic to people who struggle to tell the truth about their lives. So sympathetic. Nobody wants to wake up in the morning and be like, I think my husband might be a jerk. You know, I think my kid with special needs may never leave home. I think that my kid is off the rails. I think that weird smell coming from his room might be something really bad. Like, I think that sometimes when we talk about it, it seems very facile to say, tell the truth and look at your life and you can't fix it unless you look at it.

13:46Amy Wilson:But I mean, there's a million things in my life right now that I don't want to look at. Yeah, yeah. I don't want to look at it. I don't have the energy. Sorry, guys. Let's be frank. It's not glib to say to somebody, tell the truth about your own life, about your own story. it is highly consequential. And so, you know, when people are staring down a road of inevitable disruption, if they do so, hello, that was me. That was absolutely me. I mean, I knew for three years at large, really four, four years at large, three years more concrete and two years in earnest that something was dreadfully wrong with my marriage.

14:28I knew, my body knew, I had every single red flag in the entire world going, waving, waving all the alarm bells. Like, had anybody else, a friend, a beloved, anybody, a straight, I don't care who, told me, here are my observations right now inside my marriage. I'd be like, sis, you are in trouble. Your dude is in trouble. He is off the rails. Your marriage is in jeopardy. But when it is your own And when the answers to those questions could sink the whole life that you have built, you somehow find this capacity to excuse it, to explain it, or in my case also to just ignore it. And I just thought, we are in a hard spot.

15:15We have been in hard spots before. We will somehow come through this. he is going to get his business together. But instead of like facing it and looking at it and naming it and just going straight at it, I just closed my eyes to it and went, maybe this is going to write itself behind my back without my intervention somehow, which is a fantastic approach to life. Sounds amazing. Let's go with very useful tactic. It took me a while to admit it. But I knew, I knew, and I just couldn't face what it might mean. We're talking to Jen Hatmaker. Her new book is called Awake, and we'll be right back. Being a mom means putting other people's feelings and needs above your own pretty much 100 % of the time.

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19:26Amy Wilson:For real, guys, I'm loving Osea's Hyaluronic Body Serum. It's a multi-layer hyaluronic-powered hydration for the entire body. And right now, we have a special discount just for you. Get 10 % off your first order site-wide with code FRESH at OSEAMalibu.com. That's code FRESH at OSEAMalibu.com. Jen, you setting aside your gut, your instinct, all this was part of the assignment. You talk about this, like being a person of faith, the lying heart narrative. Explain that. Like when you did have these ding, ding, dings, you, the right thing to do as a person of faith, as you understood it, was to put those things aside.

20:09And everybody around you would have agreed with that. So it wasn't like, boy, was I a knot. This was exactly, you were living the life you were told to live. A hundred percent true. And a lot of that was, to your point, embedded in my kind of evangelical culture, which I was raised in, where as girls, and not just as girls, really, let me be fair. All of us were told this, but the girls were singled out in a really unique way. But we were told that we were just simply not trustworthy. Like our bodies were not trustworthy. Our instincts, our gut feelings. Certainly what we wanted. Want was like the W word.

20:42Like you don't get to want. That is outside of your capacity. That is selfish. You can't want something. You can only want what God wants. And people will tell us what that is, right? Don't worry. We'll tell you what God wants for you. But you can't be. You are not a reliable narrator in your own story. and furthermore, we were also told directly that our bodies were so suspect. Like, these are just untrustworthy containers leading us astray, especially the girls, into hysteria and into emotionalism. And if our bodies were giving us a message, that should absolutely raise an eyebrow to go, oh, this is probably something really bad.

21:22Now, even if your listeners were not raised kind of in a religious culture that was sort of like that. It doesn't matter. The whiter culture has always had a problem with women too. The mainstream culture is like, I don't know, a woman is president? What if she has her period when we've got to like declare war? We know what the world thinks about women. They've been telling us how to look, what to weigh, how to act, our whole lives since we were little girls. And so I have so much compassion for women who are trying to claw their way out of that garbage paper bag to make a new deal with our bodies.

21:59Well, we're like, guess what? You're not my enemy. You're not the enemy of the world either. You're not all these enemy to all these men and enemy to the... We are good and wise and trustworthy and reliable. Like reversing that internal energy toward my own body and soul is probably going to be the work of the rest of my life. But that's where I'm at right now.

22:23Amy Wilson:making peace finally and expanding on the making peace idea you have kind of moved from different spaces from this southern baptist childhood into different ideas in the middle of life shall we say yeah it feels like culturally right now we're in a moment of teams like are you on this team or that team do you believe this or that and if you believe that you're on the other side of the fence from me because my team believes this and your team believes that and therefore we are now at war. How do you navigate identity in terms of the journey that you've been on? Does it involve saying, I'm no longer on this team, I'm out of that team, now I'm on new team?