I turned 50 on April 9th.
I didn’t escape to a day spa – though I wrote about wanting to do exactly that when my oldest turned 18, so you’d think I would have learned by now. I didn’t have a breakdown in the Walmart parking lot, though I won’t say the thought didn’t cross my mind somewhere between the paper towels and the cereal aisle. I just…turned 50. With a 6-year-old who needed breakfast and a 30-year-old who called to sing to me off-key and everything in between that is my actual, full, beautiful, chaotic life.
Thirty years ago I became a mother and I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. I was young, Catholic, full of fire, and entirely convinced that love alone would carry the whole thing. Nobody told me that thirty years later I still wouldn’t have it completely figured out – I’d just have more data, more gray hair, and a considerably larger collection of hard-won convictions about what actually matters.
Here is what nobody tells you about being a mother at 50: it doesn’t stop. The chaos doesn’t end. It just changes. The requests change, the stakes change, the prayers change. And somehow that surprises you – even when it probably shouldn’t.
“The chaos doesn’t end. It just asks different things of you.”
The Stages of Catholic Motherhood Few Write About
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about tunnels.
Not the light at the end of one – though sure, fine, that too. I mean the middle of the tunnel. The straddling place. One foot still planted in the thick of active mothering – backpacks, permission slips, bedtime prayers with a 9-year-old who has very strong opinions about everything, and a 6-year-old who launched into kindergarten this year like she owned the building, the parking lot, and possibly the surrounding zip code. One foot edging toward something else entirely – a son who turned 18 in November and is learning to fly (figuratively, people), a daughter who is 30 and building her own life, grandbabies beginning to arrive from the children I’ve already released into the wild.
Eleven children. Three of them I will only meet on the other side of this tunnel. The eight here with me range from 30 to 6, and I am, at any given moment, needed in approximately fourteen different ways that have absolutely nothing to do with each other.
I am not in the tunnel anymore. Not the one where you can’t see your hand in front of your face, where you’re nursing a baby while helping with second grade math while trying to remember whether you showered. That tunnel – the flour-on-the-floor, what-day-is-it, God-give-me-grace tunnel we all know and most of us have survived – I know it well. We lived it for a long time in a house on Cornerwood Drive, and then again and again as the family grew. I earned every single gray hair.
But I’m not out either.
I am straddling it. And friends, nobody wrote the book for this season. Nobody is writing about the woman who is packing a kindergarten backpack in the same month she’s welcoming a grandchild. Nobody is talking about what it means to be still deeply, actively needed by small people while simultaneously watching the first wave of children you raised live out – or push back against – everything you tried to pour into them.
That woman is me. And if you are reading this, she might be you too.
“I am straddling the tunnel. And nobody wrote the book for this season.”
What the Field Looked Like in 2013
Back then, I wrote a post about crop rotations.
The premise was simple: ministries have seasons. You can’t plant the same crop in the same soil indefinitely and expect it to keep producing. At some point you rotate out. At some point you let a field lie fallow. And there is nothing to feel guilty about when that season comes – not even if you were the one who planted the field in the first place. You can read the whole thing here.
I wrote that post at 37, neck-deep in parish life at St. William, fresh off a three-year term as chair of the pastoral council – a role I had nearly blacked out when nominated for, then discerned for a full year before accepting. I was facilitating RCIA on Mondays, attending Bible study on Tuesdays, Pastor’s Talks on Thursdays, showing up for everything, and somehow also raising six children with a seventh on the way. My friend and faith formation director Noe Rocha had been telling me for years, gently and consistently, the same thing: Jerusalem first. Service to family first, then community, then the ends of the earth. In that order. Always. If not, your spiritual alignment gets out of whack – and hooweeee, will it ever.
I knew the theology in 2013. What I didn’t know yet was how long the fallow season would actually last, what it would cost, or what it would grow when it finally broke open again.
I found out.
“Ministries have seasons. There is nothing to feel guilty about when it is time to rotate – not even if you were the one who planted the field.”
What Catholic Sistas Actually Was
Catholic Sistas turns 15 this August 18th.
I founded it in August of 2011 – from a kitchen table on Cornerwood Drive, on a budget that had no line item for self-care or outside outlets of any kind. I was an INFJ who desperately needed to get outside her own head without spending money we didn’t have. Volunteering at the parish and writing were the great equalizers – they cost nothing, and in return they gave me something I couldn’t manufacture any other way: a community, a sense of purpose beyond the walls of the house, and a place to put the fire that had been building in me since I started really studying the Faith.
What started as a conversation among faithful women became something I never could have engineered on purpose. A contributor network of more than 50 women. More than 100,000 followers built entirely through organic strategy before anyone was calling it a strategy or selling a course on it. A liturgical planner – DAYBOOK – that women still write to me about. I stood in front of rooms of Catholic women and said things I had only ever typed before. I appeared on Relevant Radio. A platform that became a community that became, in every sense that matters, a family.
And running underneath all of it, always, was the domestic church on Cornerwood Drive (and our other homes) – eight children eventually, three babies we’ll meet in heaven, a husband, a home, a vocation that never once waited politely for me to finish a blog post.
Most of my children grew up with Catholic Sistas humming in the background. Not loudly – it was never the centerpiece of our family identity – but it was there. Mom wrote. Mom edited. Mom was the woman some people at church recognized before she recognized them. They knew Catholic Sistas existed the way they knew the parish existed: part of the furniture of their childhood, neither front and center nor entirely absent. The weight of that is something I am still taking honest inventory of at 50.
“A platform became a community became, in every sense that matters, a family. And running underneath all of it was the domestic church that never once waited politely for me to finish a blog post.”
When the Stages of Motherhood Demand You Choose
In 2022, my husband got sick.
I will leave the details where they belong – close to the heart, offered to God, not for public consumption. What I will say is that it was frightening in the way that only a serious illness can be frightening when it involves someone who is the other half of your whole life. And just like that, every open question about balance, rotation, and prayerful discernment of the next ministry season resolved itself with startling clarity.
You go home. You tend the field that needs you most. You trust that if something was built by God’s hand, it will still be standing when you come back.
If it was meant to be, it would still be there later.
I stepped back from Catholic Sistas formally in 2022 and I have not regretted a single day of it. Not because the platform didn’t matter – it does, it always has – but because my husband needed me present. My younger children needed me present. And I needed to actually practice what I had been writing about for over a decade. Jerusalem first is not a blog post. It is a life decision. Sometimes life just makes the choice unavoidable. I am grateful, in retrospect, that it did.
The fallow season was real. It was long. It was, in ways I am still discovering, exactly what the soil needed.
“You go home. You tend the field that needs you most. If it was meant to be, it would still be there later.”
What the Fallow Season Grew
Here is the thing about fallow fields: they look like nothing from the outside. Dormant. Quiet. Possibly abandoned. But underneath, the soil is doing something essential – restoring, restructuring, building the capacity for whatever the next season demands. The farmer who skips the fallow season because the field looks productive eventually ends up with soil that can’t grow anything at all.
These past few years have been that season for me. And it turns out that four years of going inward – of tending Jerusalem, of praying without an audience, of being present to my family in ways the busier years didn’t always allow – produced things I couldn’t have manufactured on purpose.
Out of that season came Flourish – Catholic business coaching and mentoring for the faithful entrepreneur, creator, and business owner who knows they are called to build something, but wants to do it without losing their peace, their priorities, or their family in the process. Fifteen years of building Catholic Sistas from a kitchen table, distilled into something I can offer to women and men who are right where I was in 2011. If that sounds like you, I’d love for you to take a look.
And out of the fallow season came this – a return to the keyboard, to this community, to the Mom So Hard series and the Justice Cries Out series running alongside it, with more to say than I have had in a good long while. Not because I have it all figured out – Lord, I do not – but because I have now lived long enough and deep enough to have something worth saying that isn’t just theology. It’s testimony.
Later is now. And I am glad to be back.
“The fallow season produced things I couldn’t have manufactured on purpose. Later is now. And I am glad to be back.”
What I Know Now That I Didn’t Know at 37
The chaos doesn’t end. Let me say that again, lovingly, to every woman reading this who is counting down the days until it does: it doesn’t end. It just asks different things of you.
The flour-on-the-floor chaos asked for your body – your sleep, your physical presence, your ability to function on four hours of rest and a cold cup of coffee and a prayer that cost you everything you had left. This chaos – the straddling kind, the 50-year-old-mother kind – asks for your wisdom. Your restraint. Your willingness to let the ones you launched actually fly without grabbing the back of the seat. Your capacity to be fully present to a 6-year-old on a Tuesday morning while carrying on a completely separate interior conversation about a 24-year-old who needs something entirely different from you.
It asks you to hold thirty years of mothering in one hand – the things you got right, the things you would do completely differently, the seasons you poured yourself out in service beyond the home, the seasons you pulled inward, the babies you carried and lost and will only know fully on the other side of this tunnel – and to offer all of it back to God without requiring that He explain the returns to you yet.
It asks you to trust that the field is not finished. That the rotation is not complete. That the chaos you are in right now – different as it is from the chaos that came before it – is still purposeful, still formative, still held.
Standing here at 50, I can see more of the field than I could at 37. And what I see – all of it, every acre, the losses and the launching and the still-small-ones at my knee and the grandbabies coming – is, somehow, good.
He makes all things work together. Even the fallow seasons. Especially those.
“He makes all things work together. Even the fallow seasons. Especially those.”
For Your Reflection
- • What tunnel are you in right now – deep in the thick of it, straddling the middle, or stepping out the other side? What does your chaos look like in this particular season?
- • Where is your Jerusalem right now – and is it getting what it actually needs from you? Not what’s left over, but what it needs.
- • Have you ever stepped back from something you built for God? What did that cost you – and what, if anything, did the fallow season grow?
If this resonated with you, subscribe to Catholic Sistas below so you don’t miss what is coming next in the Mom So Hard series – and in the Justice Cries Out series running alongside it. There is more to say, and I am so glad you are here for it.
And if you are building something from your vocation and need a trusted companion for that journey, come meet Flourish. It is what the fallow season built.
About the Mom So Hard Series
Mom So Hard is a Catholic Sistas series that tells the truth about motherhood – not the sanitized, highlight-reel version, but the real, hard, holy, worth-it version. From the flour-on-the-floor years to the straddling-the-tunnel years to whatever comes next, this series exists because Catholic mothers deserve more than platitudes. They deserve witnesses. Browse the full Mom So Hard series here.
