Hi, I'm Laura Vanderkamp.

I'm a mother of five, an author, journalist, and speaker.

And I'm Sarah hart Hunger, a mother of three, practicing physician, writer and course creator.

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 episode is airing in late September of twenty twenty five.

We're excited to welcome Jen Hatmaker back to the show.

Jen is the author of a brand new memoir called a Wake, which is about the end of her twenty six year marriage and the aftermath of that.

So Jen was actually on the show back in April of twenty twenty, which I distinctly remember because it was one of those pandemic like early pandemic interviews when I was doing it, because if it aired in April, we were probably recording in either early April or March or so everyone was still sort of figuring out what on earth was going on.

And I remember talking to her then, but.

I was pondering, like, do you have memories of April twenty twenty, Sarah, how was like that you were still holding on too from.

That part of your life.

They weren't positive.

I mean, yeah, like I had a two and a half year old, I had a kindergartener who was like in virtual school, and it was like the failest failed that ever failed, Like it just.

Did not work.

And then the only kid that was sort of learning anything was maybe Namel in virtual second grade.

But it was still like highly depressing, and I had to work, like so I would be on call in person.

But then otherwise I think we were entirely tallehealth, thinking it was going to be like just a few weeks.

So I sitting upstairs like trying to see patients from my office and I hate it.

I still hate telehealth, like I just really, I mean, for a quick follow up, it's great, but for like a new patient evaluation or talking about something serious, it's not ideal.

And then the kids were like loud and it was not a fun time.

Plus Josh and I were like no, everyone was very scared of the virus at that point, and Josh and I were kind of like, well, we're getting it because we're going to work and we have to and like they're not even like enough mass to go around, and who was wild.

At times, and I don't really remember it fondly.

My only happy memory from that period was going on walks where Genevieve would like hug trees.

So I think that's what my I've golden whitewashed it to distilled it to.

That, but she was tree hugging, literal tree hugging.

Yeah, no, I mean there wasn't much else to do.

I guess that was the little adventure for the day, to go out and hug totally.

Yeah, I was thinking about that too.

I mean, Henry was an infant during that time and he basically wouldn't sleep except on somebody, so either me or Michael or one of our babysitters would have to like hold him and trot him around.

And then he at some point decided to stop taking a bottle at all, because why would he.

I was there, I was clearly there.

I wasn't going anywhere, so it's a little hard to convince him that there was another option.

And yeah, I mean, just like everyone wearing masks during sort of crucial times in other children's social emotional development that you can't read social cues that take a long time to sort.

Of deal with the fallout of all that.

I don't know.

Oh, I still think that's why Genevieve's in speech today yasing those key years with her teacher.

I mean, we had to do it at the time, but yeah, I actually can't read blog posts from that time.

Like I if I accidentally like linked to one, I'm like, oh, I closed it.

It's yeah, it's just it's a lot.

Yeah, well Jen was at the time when we talked, she didn't actually have a whole lot of idea what was about to happen.

But as people who read her memoir will find out, in July of twenty twenty one, middle of the night, two thirty am, she wakes up to hear her husband of twenty six years dictating a text to his girlfriend.

If you could imagine, She mentions in the book that it was weird that during the pandemic he was lots of other places which nobody was going anywhere during the pandemic, but suddenly he found places to be a sort of pondering that it would have been very challenging to pull off that during the pandemic.

Going where are you going?

Where are you going?

Doesn't make sense?

But one thing I appreciated her memoir is it's not just like my ex is a terrible person.

I think she delves deep into various problems that she refused to see before then, and so I appreciate when things are not entirely black and white, even in situations where it might.

Appear that they are.

So.

In this interview, we discuss a week and Jim's career evolution from sort of the Christian mommy blogger's sphere to what she's doing now.

So we're excited to have her back.

So Sarah and I are delighted to welcome Jen Hatmaker back to the show, first time since twenty twenty.

So, Jen, thank you so much for joining us.

I'm so happy to be here.

Thank you for having me again again.

Yeah, well, why don't.

You tell our listeners really quickly for those who weren't listening in twenty twenty, a little bit about yourself.

Well, let's see, what's the snapshot of my life.

I live in Austin, Texas.

I've been here for a long time.

I've got five kids.

They're all like young adultish, we're nineteen to twenty seven, and I've been a single parent now for five years.

So that was not anything I ever expected.

But that's where I'm at now.

That's a change since the last time we spoke.

And I'm a writer.

I've written a lot of books.

The first hout whole half of them were absolutely terrible, and I tell people all the time, I'm like, if you read one of my first five books, I will never speak to you again ever.

And so, and I have a podcast it's called for the Love and I love it.

And I just have a great life on my best friend I live on the same street and one over for my best friends in the world.

My whole family lives here, and also my parents and all my siblings and my adult kids minus my marine.

So I'm just in a really happy moment in my life for sure.

Which is wonderful.

Which is an interesting to be talking about this memoir, of course, when you're in this wonderful place, because the memoir Awake is about the end and aftermath of your twenty six year marriage.

I mean, did you ever imagine, like in the mess and Moxie era that this would be a book that would be on the shelf next to all those.

I mean, not in the outer most reaches of my imagination, like it would have been the opposite.

I would have had a fairly like violet reason response to the suggestion that I might one day write a divorce memoir.

I mean, come on, we were married for twenty six years, and we were we had done like a whole we'd done the thing, we'd done the like Christian do the right template thing.

We got married really young in Baptist Bible College, and I was a nineteen year old bride, if you can even imagine something so absurd and insane, and married for twenty six years.

He was a pastor, and we started a church here.

And so no, no, under no circumstances did I ever foresee or even moderately suspect that this was going to be my story.

Yeah, which is I mean, life comes out all of us hard, right, I mean, this is just the truth life happens.

But one thing I really appreciated about this memoir is it wasn't.

Just like this guy is terrible.

It would be very tempting to write a memoir you have a public platform and be like, my ex is a horrible person.

But you talk a lot about the challenges of the fact that you did get married so young.

Yeah, and what happens with that?

I mean, what are the issues inherent?

I mean, you guys were together for twenty six years, but when you get together at age nineteen, I mean, what are the challenges that come with that?

Oh?

My god, I have a nineteen year old right this second.

My youngest kid is nineteen.

If she came home today and said she was engaged, I would run her over with my car.

She is a baby.

She doesn't know anything about anything, and neither did I, but I thought I did not.

Only is there just the obvious immaturity and undeveloped nature of being an actual teenager.

I got married halfway through my sophomore year of college.

So we were just simply half baked.

Like, put two people together in that age range and expect them to understand conflict resolution, to understand attachment styles, to know how to manage their money like just a banana system.

And then there was kind of the bigger story around, which was one of sort of religious dogma, and so there was a real high premium placed on like sexual purity in our subculture, and so the only credible way through that conundrum was to get married, because that's the only place sex belonged back then, as we were told, was inside marriage.

But everything after that was just absolutely like shame based and like fear based.

And I know exactly how that worked.

And so that was a driver into like a covenant that we were simply unprepared to make.

Even if you can even just think of, like who you might have chosen as a life partner when you were eighteen years old, can you even think of that, like you would just grow up and choose differently when you were a full blown adult.

And so I have a lot of compassion actually for both of us, not just me.

I have compassion for him too.

It's taken me a long time to get there.

And that is not an excuse.

I'm not saying, oh, well, now I feel great about all his choices.

That's not what I mean.

But we were both handed a story at a really young age, and we played those roles to the best of our ability.

Yeah, and I'm sorry for what that subculture actually stole from both of us.

Absolutely, We're going to take a quick ad break and then I'll be back with more from Jen Hatmaker.

So I'm talking now with Jen Hatmaker here on Best of Both Worlds.

And when we talked in twenty twenty and April, it was the middle of the pandemic, and all the events that started this book happen shortly after that in the summer I believe of twenty twenty.

But I follow you online and one of the things that's fascinating to me with people who are very online, who have a public presence, public following, and things life happens, things go bad, trying to figure out how you are going to address that that you're used to sharing so much about life, I mean, like stories of your kid peeing in target or something like that, and then all of a sudden, the biggest thing that's on your brain is something that is so hard to write about.

So maybe you could talk us through how that went, like how you were figuring out what to share, like as your life and your family is in crisis, and how you thought that would go, and then how it did wind up going.

That's so fuzzy, like that whole season is just bogged down in this fog of grief in my memory because First of all, the end of my marriage was a shock and a trauma.

It wasn't like we had been having conversations like privately and we had finally just emerged with this decision we had made.

It wasn't like that.

It was like the type of ending where you go to bed with one kind of life and you wake up the next day with a completely different life.

That was how it was.

And so the level of shock and betrayal and grief and suffering that we were experiencing in the family was just unprecedented for us.

And then on top of that, I had to figure out how to manage a pretty public facing career, one for which at least a part of what I have talked about for fifteen or twenty years in front of people, among other things, is marriage and family.

So I mean this is it felt not like just such a catastrophic personal loss, but also like a loss of I wondered if it would be a loss of credibility, whatever sort of confidence I had ever inspired in my community.

I had no idea, to be honest, but at the beginning it was all just so very traumatic.

I just went silent.

I just didn't do anything.

I just went a wall.

I don't have the capacity to just pretend.

I just don't have it.

Like I did not have the ability to come online and just say something about something over here while my life was in tatters.

I don't That's not my way.

So I just said nothing, and of course that did not go unnoticed.

A big portion of my career is locate online, and that's where we gather, and that's where I write, and that's where whatever, and so I eventually just had to put a placeholder out there and just say we're in it, like we're in it, just I don't know what to say about it, but just we're in it.

Like if you can spare a kind thought toward our family, send it.

And that just sort of held the tide at bay for a while until a journalist, I say journalists loosely, but like a person who runs a website dedicated to kind of like Christian Gotchas if you will, found our online filing and we had tried to keep that as private as we could with initials, and it didn't matter.

She found it and wrote a whole thing exposing our divorce.

So we hadn't even told all of our family yet, and it was pretty devastating, So just kind of on the spot.

It was trending, and it was interesting because her particular site was sort of a lightning rod for like Christian fundamentalists, if you will, like the gatekeepers, the type who are looking like preparing to catch anybody in any trap.

And so the response was overwhelmingly to blame me for it?

What did she do?

We knew this was going to happen, We knew this was her problem, she says, what she deserves.

My husband, by the way, omitted from the reckoning, ironically, when all of it was his doing.

And so that was a really chaotic season.

But I will say, as I landed, sorry for such a long answer, what happened in my actual community, the one that I have built, the one that I as in under my wings online was so beautiful.

The response was so stunning.

I mean, I cannot think in fifteen years of leadership anything that has galvanized my community more in terms of love, hair, support, encouragement, women in my community coming out and going I've been right where you're at.

I'm ten miles further down the road than you are.

Keep going, this is what to expect, this is what to do.

It was like so helpful.

My community held up a bunch of lanterns for me and said, keep walking this way.

We promise you're going to get here.

We all got here, you're going to do the same.

It was.

It turned out to be the most beautiful soft landing I could have ever hoped for.

Yeah, which is wonderful.

I mean when you get that sort of support.

And from people in your actual life, like not just online life too, And that was what I found interesting.

I mean, obviously I don't know you personally know your friends and all that, but one of the things I've found with friends who have gotten divorced is very challenging.

It's like, who gets custody of the friends?

Yeah, that's right, right?

If you had a couple of friends and like you're a couple, like, well, am I going to go hang out with Doan and Robert?

Now, just as me to feels weird, how did you navigate that?

Because it sounded like you you managed to keep a lot of them.

I did my own personal friends, the ones that I live with and live by and live for, the ones in my life and my family, and honestly, Awake is essentially a love letter to them, as you saw they loved me back to life.

I I'll never get over it as long as I live.

But to your point, I mean, we've been married for almost three decades.

We had a group like divorce breaks a million hearts.

It is not just the spouse that loses, it's the kids.

My parents lost a son in law, my siblings lost their brother in law.

I lost my in laws.

And then we have this friend group of which we had been in a tight pack for so long, and what is that going to look like?

And there's no one way through this.

In my particular story, I think a lot of my friends loyal to me, in which if they felt like they had to choose, and I'm not sure they would say it in those stark terms, but just based on the nature of the ending, Yeah, it was dark and it was bleak, and I was left here with the kids and with the remains of a life, and it made a bit of a before and then after in our friendship group.

Yeah, oh there, you're really funny about it.

I appreciate that the memoir that you want them with a gathering of like three couple friends and you you had to bring two side dishes because you don't get out of bringing two just because it's nobody sorry for me?

Like there, sorry, are you going to work?

Like that sucks?

But you're gonna bring you two dishes?

Yeah, that's right, Like I geet excited, getting excited?

All right, got it?

Got it?

So I want to talk about me Camp because I absolutely love this idea of me camp.

I mean, particularly for someone who was married young.

So you've been sharing space with your husband and sharing decisions with your husband for since you're nineteen years old.

And then you've got five kids who are if there anything like my five kids, they are always around.

Somebody is always around it.

There's not a moment where there isn't somebody there in the house.

So how did me camp come to be?

And how has this tradition evolved?

Yeah?

I do want your listeners to know this is not just a sad book about divorce.

It's got a lot more in there than just that divorce is not that interesting.

It's wider than that.

It's also about grief and recovery and ultimately flourishing, which is a great story to be able to tell.

And part of that tipping point, part of that turning point was what I ended up calling me camp.

It was sort of an accidental I stumbled into it accidentally.

At first.

It had been almost a year since I'd lost my marriage and I had a kid who had deeply suffered, and I was like, I got to get this kid out of this environment.

We need something wholesome, we need something pure, no screens.

We got to get off TikTok.

We got to get out of this house.

So I signed her up for a month of summer camp in Maine.

This is a state I've never been in in my life.

But because she was still pretty fragile, and so was I.

Both of us had fallen down to the bottom of the ocean physically mentally, we were both pretty fragile, and so all of a sudden, in a blaze of hubris, that I just made up on the spot because I just signed her up maybe with three weeks to go, I said, honey, what if while you are at camp, I'll go to Maine two and I'll just be there so that if you need me at any moment, I'll be less than two hours away.

I can literally get in a car.

And I don't even know what I was saying.

I've never even been to me like I don't even know what I'm talking about, but I just felt like I needed to provide this emotional safety that underne her.

So then all of a sudden, I was like, well, what the hell am I going to do?

What am I going to do for?

Well?

Who?

I've never even been to a movie by myself, And so fast forward and I rented a house in bar Harbor, Main right on the coast.

Beautiful place, beautiful, Oh my god.

And thus began the most wonderful, healing, restorative months of my entire life, solo travel for a month in a beautiful place.

My daughter was fine, she never even needed me, never called, didn't And I was like, look at this moment of independence of joy.

I'm a solo traveler.

I love it.

I'm not self conscious.

I am absolutely like invigorated and so on the spot.

I didn't mean to I wasn't looking to brand it.

I was just I didn't even know what I was doing.

But I was like, God, my daughter's at camp right now, this is my I'm at camp.

I'm like, this is my me camp.

And it genuinely was a turning point in my recovery, and I have since repeated it five times that.

Where did you go this summer?

Yeah?

Where's this summer?

And went to a tiny town on the Oregon coast called Yahats Yahats, Oregon.

It is my fifth meet camp in a row where I mostly travel solo for the month of July and it has been, honestly one of the best things has ever happened to me, and so I love it.

Never going to end it.

As long as I can tear it up, I'm going to keep doing it.

Well, We're going to take one more quick ad break and I'll be back with more from Jen Hatmaker.

Well, I am back talking with Jen Hatmaker about her new memoir a week now.

I have to ask, because you are in a new relationship.

You've posted that on social media, you and your boyfriend or partner or whatever you want to call him, But how is he with the idea of you taking months to go off and.

Do a camp.

Oh, he loves it.

He loves it for me, and since he hit the scene, he comes and visits me for a few days at every meet camp for sure, So he's thrilled about it.

He gets like a he gets a full mini vacation out of my personal meat camp as well.

But no, he cherishes my independence almost as much as I do.

And so we're old.

I'm fifty one, he's forty nine.

We're not grabby and needy and co dependent in a lot of the ways that we were when we were young adults, in a lot of the ways that I was when I built a marriage.

We've already done the part where you build a life.

That's in our rearview mirror right now.

We just get to live one and it is such a delight, and it is such a joy.

I don't need him to make my life right, and he doesn't need me to make his life right.

So each of us is just free to be a good partner without kind of crushing the autonomy of the other one.

We don't live in the same set.

We're long distance.

I live in Texas, he lives in Tennessee.

But it has been a very surprising joy.

I did not go looking for him.

The universe dropped him in my lap, like the old fashioned way where you meet somebody out in the wild.

Because if you remember, in a wake, I do tell the story of my twelve hours on a dating app, and it was dark.

It was not the place to be.

It's not for me.

I just I went twelve hours in delete the app never again.

I'm sorry.

I'd rather just be single the rest of my life.

So yeah, yeah, I felt really lucky that he's in my life, but he did not fix me.

I found him when my heart had already healed, and I got to be a different version of myself in this relationship.

Which is wonderful.

Yeah.

I mean, the title of the memoir is Awake, and I mean it's about this idea of we can sort of sleep walk through a lot of life.

Especially when we make decisions young.

I'm curious if you have advice for someone like, how does one wake up in life without necessarily going through an obvious trauma like this?

Yeah, I don't actually believe that we have to experience trauma to be shaken out of a slumper.

That's how it ends up working for a lot of us, because there's a lot of factors that will rock us to sleep in our own life.

And it is definitely the path of least resistance, but it is possible to choose it.

It is possible to choose going through your life in a posture of being wide awake to your own story.

And for me, I can only do this in hindsight, but there is a real moment that I think each of us have to say what is actually true about our lives, our marriage, our habits, our relationships, our addictions, our dreams.

We can choose to be honest about those or not.

But what happens is, I think for a lot of people, and this is how it was in my life.

And I mentioned this in the book that I wanted the story of my marriage, not my actual marriage, and I was very committed to it.

I was committed to the outcome I wanted.

We weren't experiencing that, and I didn't know how we were going to get there.

But I was so committed to what I wanted out of that that I refused to actually face what was what is true here, what is actually happening right now?

And so I am hopeful for so many people who will choose instead the courage to say kind of face what actually is, what's actually true, even if it's hard, embarrassing, humiliating, inconvenient, disrupt dive, because most things are, even then I am going to face them head on.

I'm going to say, this is what's true, this is what is not what I wish it was.

And then I'm going to reorient my life around that truth.

I wonder sometimes what would have happened if I could have done that, if I would have had the courage to do that, what would it have looked like?

I'll never know, because I lived too long in the story, and somebody made the choice for me, and so then I had to.

Then I was forced to reorient my life or on what was true.

And I will tell you that here, five years later, almost exactly, my true life is so much more full than the one that I had before.

And you could not have told me that five years ago when everything was shredded.

But it is actually more abundant and expansive and just plain happier to live a true story than to force a fake one into existence.

And so I hope people will dig deep and go I'm not going to let somebody else choose this for me.

I'm going to go ahead and face what's actually true about my own life and then adjust my life so that that truth is the one I'm living.

Absolutely absolutely well, and one thing that is true right now.

To end on a sort of later note, you are driving what is it a nineteen seventy six stick shift Bronco.

I mentioned that story that I'd never bought my own car.

I mean I had in so many ways, my adulthood was stunted, and that's somebody's fault, that's mine.

I phoned a bunch of stuff in because I had a partner from such a young age that I didn't have to learn some adult skills.

Buying a car was one of them.

And so yeah, the first car I ever bought, all by myself after my divorce was a nineteen seventy five Bronco.

What I wanted.

But did you know how to drive?

Stick shift?

And I did?

You did?

Okay?

I did.

I was a child of the eighties.

We all had are okay?

All right?

Well I had one horrible experience with it and that was the end of it for me.

You're an automatic girl for life.

I mean I had at a girl for life.

But uh oh, well, I guess that is so Dan.

We always end with the love of the week, which I guess could be your Bronco if you want it could be something else.

I will say.

I'm actually this is just whatever is cool for you.

Right now.

I'm recording this from a random coworking space in Nowheresville.

New Jersey that I rented because my beach house has really terrible Wi Fi.

And I kind of like it, like there's a nice little plant on the desk, Like there's no clutter, like it's my office, except there's no clutter like ten years of home office clutter that I've built up.

So big fan, big fan, how about you.

One thing that I'm loving right now are my indoor plants.

I decided last year to become a plant person on the spot.

And I'm a person who's never ever kept plants alive ever.

So I called my daughter, my twenty five year old, who is a plant savant, and I said, I would like you to help me be a plant person for my birthday.

So she came over and we potted a bunch of plants.

Now, some of them are it's definitely rip, like they didn't all make it.

But my plants give me so much joy and I pay so much attention to them, and I'm constantly like tweaking and pruning and watering and snipping, and every time I look at them, they made me so happy.

So my indoor plants is the end thing.

Kept them alive, kept them alive, all right?

Well, thank you so much for joining us.

Where can people find you?

Well, as you might imagine, there's not that many gin hat Makers, So if you put in gin hat Maker, you will find me.

Jinhatmaker dot Com is my website.

That is the location of everything that I do over there, and then I'm Gina hat Maker on all the socials and my podcast is called for the Love with gin Hatmaker.

Awesome.

All right, well, thank you so much for joining us.

Appreciate you having me.

All right, Well, that was fascinating.

I cannot wait to check out that book.

Okay, So our question comes from a listener.

They have an older kid and they want to know is there a system for who has the car once you have eighteen driver?

How did you figure that out?

Any mistakes to avoid?

Perhaps?

Yeah, this is tough and in our case, so we were trying to get by with Jasper and me sharing a car, and the general idea was that he was driving to school.

So then that kind of left me without a car during the day.

And I don't always go many places during the day, but it was still a little weird to not have the ability to go anywhere.

And I could on Wednesdays and Fridays.

The van was available for part of the day, but normally the van is what our nanny would use to drive around the little kids, and so that was still had Henry at various points during this So I wasn't going to be like, Okay, you guys have to sit at home because I have to take the car somewhere.

Which way I have to arrange it.

Long story short, we wound up getting another vehicle, and I'm not saying that's going to work for everyone.

I understand there are real reasons people either can't or don't want to do that, but I'm also of the opinion that sometimes reducing mental load is worth putting some money into, and you might be able to get a kid a I mean, a safe car, but it definitely does not need to be flashy or expensive or.

Anything like well or new.

Yeah, probably shouldn't be new.

I would put that out there because the odds of them dinging it are probably pretty high, and if that's going to upset you with a new car, perhaps you don't wish to do that.

What we actually wound up doing is that I got my car back because I like my car.

It's old, but I like it.

Jasper got Michael's old car which is a twenty eighteen car, and then Michael got a new car, which he was happy with because he wanted a new car.

So everyone was pleased with how the trade worked out.

But I would say, don't entirely rule that out.

I know a lot of people don't want to or think maybe we won't work.

But you could also, especially if you're going to have a lot of teenagers, you might decide that you're going to need a teen car that gets passed from kid to kid as people graduate.

Yes, I mean, if your plan is to get that kitt car eventually and it would make your life easier to get it for them while they're still in your house, logic would have it that it might just make sense to bite the bullet.

And you're right, it doesn't have to be getting that kit of car.

Could be getting yourself a car so that they can have your nice, safe, seven or eight year old car.

Yeah, And I mean this could be something that you don't want to like, I mean, if you're worried about like spoiling a kid or something, and me, you could definitely have them contribute to it, right, Like, I mean, this could be something that like, Okay, we are going to get the car, and then you are going to be responsible for X of the cost, or we expect you to con tribute x from savings from a summer job toward this.

As part of it.

But especially if your kid has a lot of places to go, like not having to drive them, there.

Is a huge benefit, I know, like not.

Having to drive fifteen minutes to voice lessons and then hang out there for an hour and drive fifteen minutes back.

It was just like, Yeah, it's an hour and a half out of my life that I.

Don't have to deal with because he could drive himself.

That's where I don't know.

I'm I know.

That wasn't the answer that people wanted.

You know, we have an elaborate system where you put in your bid for having the car for the day or whatever.

So maybe they're looking for permission to go ahead looking for for it.

So you just gave it.

We gave it.

Yep, all right, Well this has been best of both worlds.

I was interviewing Jen Hatmaker about her new memoir Awake.

We will 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