Speaker 0:00

Welcome to Overcoming Anything, the podcast where we dive deep into stories of resilience, transformation, and growth. I'm your host, Anne Reese, and today we have an incredible guest who has overcome the complexities of motherhood. So joining me today is Jennifer Griffith. She is a former sales leadership rockstar who left the corporate world to pursue her writing and storytelling passions. Where her writings discuss reinvention, resilience, and the courage it takes to rewrite your story. And she has an amazing story of exploring the complexities, contradictions, and the emotional truths of being a mother and being mothered. So welcome to the show.

Speaker 2 0:37

Oh, thank you for having me, Anne. I love what you're doing. I think it's so important.

Speaker 0:41

Thank you. It's a pleasure to have you. So before we dive in, I always love to ask, what's one quote or mantra that keeps you going in tough times?

Speaker 2 0:48

Oh, there's so many. Oh, that's such a great question. I've never been asked. What I'm gonna do is, I'm gonna reference a moment. It was when my father was, passing away almost 10 years ago. And he said to me they tried to knock me down, but I kept getting up. And so when I'm having a tough time, I think to myself, just keep getting up. Just put one foot in front of the other. And when you had sent me your framework questions to consider before we recorded, that was something that. I wanted to express to listeners is the importance of movement, just keeping, getting up and putting one foot in front of the other. And it's something that my mother, would tell me as well that she thought about when she was being raised in the orphanage after her parents died tragically, that she just would sometimes look at her feet and say, I can keep moving, so keep getting up. That's my message.

Speaker 1:36

Wow, that's so inspiring. 'cause sometimes, yeah, when you hit rock bottom in life, you can't really see beyond, your circumstances and you think, oh, how am I gonna get out of this? But if you just take one more step. Exactly,

Speaker 2 1:49

and you

Speaker 1:49

just, you just keep going one more step

Speaker 2 1:52

and you keep the motion going. 'cause I think oftentimes so many of us, we,, we feel stuck in a moment and the importance of walking, or for me, one of the things that saved me personally was running. You know, a walk can become a run. And another thing that saved me was writing. That's my hand moving, that's my mind moving and my hand moving together. So I think movement becomes a really important thing in being resilient and redefining a moment.

Speaker 2:19

Wow. I love that. So tell us about this resilience muscle that you have just built up through your life and the circumstances which led you to running, to your overcoming.

Speaker 2 2:30

Thank you. There's so many things, but I think when,, so my book, both sides of then came out last year and I had left my tech career after two events of loss. And I had suffered second child infertility and I had lost two pregnancies. And when I lost the second one, I thought to myself, I had a 4-year-old at home and I was racing to the city every day to work. And he was with his nanny. And I remember losing that second child pretty late term. And thinking to myself, what am I doing? I have this gorgeous child at home. Why am I racing to do this career where I have proven myself? And yes, I could keep proving myself and climbing the ladder, but. Really in the end, I just wanna enjoy being a mom. And that was a very pivotal moment. And then my father on the heels of that, was passing away and when you know when the end is coming. For him, it changed him in many ways and he was very open and, a non-emotional, a man or father became very emotional and he had always kept my sister's eye out of his, personal world. And at the end he didn't, he was pulling us in and I remember one of the things he said days before he died, I was sitting at his feet and he said, it just went so fast. And I said, what did dad? And he said, life did. And it was, every time I say it, I get full body chills because it was visceral for me. And so here I had lost these two pregnancies and my father is telling me, life goes so fast. And I thought. Wow. This is my moment to say, I've done what I needed to do in my career, and I wanna go write. I wanna go write this story that has lived inside of me for so long. And so I did that. I left my career and thank you for calling me a rock star. I think I was maybe not a rockstar, maybe like a, I don't know, maybe I was playing in dive bars or something like that in terms of what other people have accomplished. But, and I, and I just decided I'm gonna give myself 10 years to see if I can become a published author while being a mom. And I went out with the intention of writing my mother's story and she. Has, I'm getting into your question about resilience. She was an incredibly resilient woman. At the high level, it's a book about my mother's life being raised in an orphanage in Philadelphia after her parents died tragically. And then being forced to relinquish her first born, my brother for adoption in the decades before Roe, when unwed mothers were, shunned from society and told, you cannot be a single mom. Wow. And so I, wow. I went out. With the intention of writing her story and honoring her, because I always, she always said, I wanna write a book, but I knew she couldn't do it for herself. She just couldn't go back to that pain. And so I wrote that story for her, and I realized how incredibly strong she was, because I wrote it in first person, through her various storytelling and the research that I did. And by embodying her existence, I realized, wow, did my mother face incredible pain. And she's still standing. She's still, like I said earlier, putting one foot in front of the other and. Then the book became something bigger because I made this connection of her story and how her childhood influenced the mother that she was to me. And that became the bigger purpose of the book was, how did I, what did I get from her and what didn't I get from her? And how do I reset the mother that I'm going to be to my son? The only way you can do that, the only way you can address what you were, what you inherited from your parents is to face it. And once you name it, then you can claim it. And then when you do that, then this, you're empowered by your story. You are not taken down by the mistakes you made or the breakdowns that you had. You're actually empowered by them. And so that. That writing process is where I think I became aware of not only my mother's resilience, but my own.

Speaker 6:08

Wow. Oh my gosh. That, wow. What an inspiring story. I'm just sitting here taking it all in.

Speaker 2 6:13

Thank you. Thank you.

Speaker 6:14

Wow. I'm not really sure where to go from there.

Speaker 2 6:17

Yeah, I can say for listeners, because I know your purpose, and it's such a good one, is that oftentimes in our society, people are putting up the images of what works.

Speaker 6:27

And

Speaker 2 6:28

that's not very realistic. We have all had pain and I, what I coach people on, or what I love to talk about with people in these intimate settings like you are creating is that oftentimes your pain can be your purpose. I didn't wanna lose those babies. I didn't want my father to pass away, but those heartbreaking moments led me to a more purposeful life because you have to embrace that pain and the bad things that can happen to all of us. Use it as a tool, right? And to use that as your strength. And I think that becomes the process that we all need to tap into more, and that when people are sharing their vulnerabilities and not just the. Instagram filtered images of how they're, how they want their life to look to the world. Right? When we're being vulnerable, that's when we're creating community. And that's exactly what you're trying to do here with your podcast. These conversations that you're having is okay. All, it's all good. You had a good day and you, that's a great picture and wonderful for you. But what about the real stuff? What about. You those moments that define you and your strength. And I'm more interested in that. I'm way more interested. I think we're so obsessed with celebrity, and I'm going on a little tangent here, but I like it. Go

Speaker 7:40

girl.

Speaker 2 7:41

You know, these celebrity, we're so fascinated with these celebrities, but I'm not interested in that celebrity story. I'm interested in the person that I meet at the coffee shop that has this incredible life that not. Everybody is paying attention to. And so I think when we talk about turning points, the turning points are, it's not the view from the top that matters, it's the ascent of our lives and our climb. That's real.

Speaker 8:06

Yes, and I think we have no idea what our neighbors, our friends, and sometimes our even family members are going through because everybody likes to put on this false front that, Hey, my life is perfect. Look at me. I got this car, this house, this vacation, and deep down inside, I feel like we're just all hurting in our own little way. And if we just take the time to listen to other people and to extract the wisdom from others and their experiences and their gifts and their knowledge, we would all be so much better. And so one question I have for you is, having gone through that loss of the two babies and then your father, how has that changed your perspective on life?

Speaker 2 8:51

Oh, tremendously. One, as I said that feeling of watching my father who was larger than life humbled that his life was ending. The seize the moment of that was really incredible. But the thing that it launched me to was this career that I didn't know that I needed. If that makes sense. Yes. I didn't know., One thing about the editorial process for my book that I think is interesting and has led to a bigger movement per se, is. I wrote my mom's story and in first person and I had my voice at the beginning and the end, and one of my first editors said, yeah, it's good, but it's really sad and mean. My mom does have a sad story. It's full of hope, but it's sad. There's, she takes one hit after another before she's even 18 years old, and then she said, it's a good story, but I wanted to know more about you. And I was like, what? I'm not the memoir. I'm not. No way. It was not my intention to write that story. But in doing that, what I realized was that we all have a story to tell. And then when I wrote my story and threaded it with my moms, I became very clear that although our lives looked so incredibly different on the outside they were more similar than you could imagine. And so one of the things I encourage people to do, everybody is to. Be curious about your parents' life. Be curious about the woman your mother was before she became your parent. Because in that exercise of curiosity, that's my framework. You asked me what my framework was and my frame framework is curiosity. In my pursuit of being curious about my, the woman, my mother was, before she became my parent, I ended up putting the pieces together of my own identity in a really different way.

Speaker 10:27

Wow.

Speaker 2 10:27

And I think sometimes the way that our society is structured, our parents are just our parents. They're not people. With stories and hopes and dreams and loves and losses. Right. And because my mother had relinquished a child and then had told me she found him when I was 13 and he was 18, my mother at that moment was forced to become a woman with a story in my eyes. And that doesn't always happen for people.

Speaker 10:50

Yeah.

Speaker 2 10:51

And so what I say is, to, to individuals, when the time is right. Start to interview your parents. Start to capture who the elements of who they were before they took on this tremendous role of raising you. This complex role of motherhood and fatherhood. Who were they before that? Because those moments and those experiences, great. Greatly shaped the way that they parented you for better or worse. Right. Parents are like snowflakes. They're not all the same? And each one is different.

Speaker 11:19

Right.

Speaker 2 11:19

And I think for all of us, that is such. An interesting conversation to have, and one of my favorite conversations is, tell me about your mother.

Speaker 11:27

I do

Speaker 2 11:28

if you want, if you really wanna get to know somebody, ask them that question.

Speaker 11:32

That's a great one.

Speaker 2 11:34

And so for me, that's the framework is this curiosity around that. And I think it's not something that we have been encouraged to do, in our lives as much as I think we should be.

Speaker 11:44

Yeah, that's great advice. I know I bought, those Hallmark books, one for my mom and one for my dad to talk about their life story. I did that probably 10 years ago, and then they put pictures in there and like, how did he propose and what was your partner like before you got married? Yeah. And so I, I love that kind of stuff too,

Speaker 2 12:02

because Oh, good. And did that give you something when you gave, when they, you gave that to them, they gave it to you back? How was that for you?

Speaker 12:08

Oh my gosh, it was amazing. I totally treasure that and I was like, this is something, I give my kids, because we live far away, so my parents don't get to see my kids as often as, what they would like. So I love it. Great insights in there. So what advice do you have for. Let's say women who may not want to follow the same parenting methodology as their mother, and they decide, okay, I respect what my mom did. She did the best that she could with the knowledge that she had, but I want to be a different type of mom. So what suggestions do you have For women?

Speaker 2 12:40

Good therapy? No, I'm just kidding. It's going back to that phrase I used earlier. When you name it, you can claim it, I think sometimes is something as easy. Journaling, obviously, when I talk about movement, journaling and writing about the scenes of your life and what they meant to you. Allows you to put it in a place. And by no means am I saying everyone should write a memoir. I don't suggest it for everybody to, put your business in the street as I call it. But I think reflecting on those key moments in your life are really important because then it's in a place. You can say, I wanna extract that and take it with me and use that and that other stuff that I don't like, or I didn't like and I didn't like how it made me feel. Then you put it in a place. And so one of the things a memoir is that you write your life in scenes. You have to bring people into the scenes of your life. And I encourage people, and I do workshops on that of write the scenes of your life and. Something really magical happens when you do that. You can see what, like I said, you can see what you liked and what you didn't like, and then you get to really focus on the, like I, I want those lessons instilled and then those other things, I'm gonna keep them in their place in the past.

Speaker 13:45

I like that. I like that. So what's one of the top misconceptions about motherhood from your perspective?

Speaker 2 13:52

So many. I get so angry about, and angry is the right word, and a strong one is this idea of we have to be perfect mothers and that we are not making mistakes all the time. And caring, guilt and shame. That is such a, that is such an element of motherhood. It's not the only one, but it is one that gets ignored. You know, the struggle of parenting because when we, when we have our children, we are then forced with this, like looking at our past as well and what we have inherited. And that is an important part of it because we inherit so much more than we realize. And so for me, the fallacy is that it isn't a difficult game, a difficult job. It's one of the hardest jobs and it's one of the hardest jobs. 'cause not only are we dealing with how we're raising our children, we're dealing with how we were raised at the same time. And that's the thing that I think people miss. That is a big moment in a mother's life. Is to face that. Right?

Speaker 14:48

Absolutely.

Speaker 2 14:48

That intersection of past and future and that's what mothers I in interviewing Mothers on my podcast and just talking about my book on the tour. That's a lot of what people wanna talk about. A lot of what people wanna talk about is that intersection and I think the more that we have these conversations and we put it out there, then I think it. The more compassion we will have from others because I don't think they get the compassion that they deserve.

Speaker 15:15

I agree a hundred percent. There's so much pressure on mothers today too, between, like you were talking about when you were in sales, you were fortunate to have a nanny taking care of your child, but you still come home, you're cooking, you're bathing, you're trying to have quality time reading with your child, but then you're exhausted. You have to prepare for the next day. And there's a lot of women in your circumstance that you were in. So how did you get, I don't know if courage is the right word, but the strength to say no more and to walk away from your successful career?

Speaker 2 15:45

Oh, that's such a great question. Maybe that's book two. You bring up a good idea. At that time you remember Cheryl Sandberg's, the Lean In Book?

Speaker 15:52

Yes.

Speaker 2 15:53

That came out right when this was happening to me. I became incredibly upset with that message because I was like, there's actually more power in leaning out, and I did a blog series about that. There's more power in choosing the lane that you wanna have versus being told that you have to do everything For so long, women have been told that they can do everything and I think that's bs. I agree. I think that. That is the biggest fallacy and weight that has been put on mothers for so long at our detriment. And I don't, I think there's a shift going towards that conversation, right, of like, no, we can't do it all and you shouldn't put everything on our shoulders. And so for me it's leaning out and leaning out means you're not participating. It means that you're choosing.

Speaker 16:42

Oh, I love that because I think that's why so many women our age are burnt out. They're having autoimmune problems. They have chronic pain in their body because so many times they were suppressing those emotions that they wanted to release, but they were just too busy and they didn't have time to relax or. To take time for themselves because it was work and children. And then God forbid if their parents were sick, then you might have to throw that in the mix. And then you still wanna have friends in a social life and just running on fumes,

Speaker 2 17:13

And you're making me stressed out even just talking about that. But that's what women deal with every day, right? Yes. And I think there's a really interesting thing, and this could be another topic that you explore with other people, is that, I think that's one of the reasons that menopause is getting more of a. Focus and getting is part of the conversation that we're having, but also great divorce because women are burnt out. They are. Totally just like enough, you know? And as they go through that intersection of midlife with menopause, a lot of marriages are failing because women say, I have nothing more to give. And I think that's sad. I really do think that's sad because at the end of it, when your kids go after college or whatever they choose to do, and you have this marriage that's, let's been going for 20 or 30 years, that shouldn't be when it ends. That's when you should celebrate everything that you did together. And if we keep doing this to women and putting them in these impossible situations, to your point, that lead to autoimmune disease and all these things, and just chronic fatigue and exhaustion. Is that really what we were suppo, is that the end goal, that then they're just done raising kids in their marriage and they just want to be alone? It's kinda sad. So I'm glad that those conversations are on the table because I think that will be a trend into being more selective about how we spend our time in society, not telling us that we have to do everything all the time.

Speaker 18:31

Yes. I agree. What life lessons have you learned through the experience of, writing your book and, leaving corporate America to follow your dreams?

Speaker 2 18:40

Life lessons. I think the biggest one that I tell people is, for so long, writing was what I wanted, but I told myself I couldn't have it, and in the end when I allowed myself to believe that I could do it. That was all the difference in the world. So when I was getting rejections from top New York, agents and, running into the hard world of getting a book published with a publisher, which is, can be a very long process and very daunting, I just woke up every day and I was like, and said to myself, I know I can do this. I don't know how long it's gonna take me. I'm just gonna do my best work and I'm gonna show up for myself every day and I'm gonna show up for this book, and it will work one day.

Speaker 19:19

I love that. That's so inspiring right there, because there's so many women who have a job and they go to their job because they're making good money. They have insurance, but yet that's not their dream. There's something else that they wanna do, whether they wanna be an artist, a writer, or start their own business, and they may not have the ability to walk away from that paycheck. And so what advice would you have for them to maybe. Hang in there a little longer or maybe start their little side hustle or their passion projects on the side if they have time.

Speaker 2 19:51

I love that. And I think that's a really important point to make because I was able to save enough money to give myself a certain amount of time. I said, I will give myself nine years. I, excuse me, 10 years and, end to end, it took eight and here we are in year nine, right? So that's a long time of, but I was able to invest in myself that way. So what I will say to you is this, if you cannot leave that job, you cannot leave that paycheck. Do 15 minutes of inspired work a day. Think about that. At the minimum do, and I learned this from Mel Robbins, do, if you have that dream, identify it, write it down, make it a lifelong goal. And then if you don't have a ton of time, just spend 15 minutes a day every day and then that you'll see that it starts to build a foundation versus it'll become something tangible versus just an idea that you think about every time you go to bed.

Speaker 20:42

I love it. I love it. Just 15 minutes a day,

Speaker 2 20:45

just 15 minutes a day. Even if it's just ideas or journaling. Okay, I wanna open a store. This is what it looks like and this is where it would be. And just that starts building on itself. It's just like running, when I built, started my running career, as a way to become, a friend of a way for my body to become my friend versus my enemy. And. Girl. I couldn't run a block in the beginning, but eventually I was running marathons.

Speaker 21:08

Wow.

Speaker 2 21:09

Break it down into little bits? And that becomes really important. And I think we underestimate, we always look at these people who are there like, oh, look at everything they have.. And we forget that it took 10, 20 years for someone to get there.

Speaker 21:23

Yeah. Combining your advice, 15 minutes, one foot in front of the other,

Speaker 2 21:27

right? There's everything is just little pieces and, just like my son loves to build Lego sets and it's, I think his biggest one was 6,000 pieces. And I looked at him, I'm like, how did you do that? Brick by brick.

Speaker 21:37

Yeah, absolutely. So is there a book that helped you on your journey that inspired you to start writing or maybe to leave corporate America or follow your passion?

Speaker 2 21:47

So many. I think for me it's not a certain book. It's a genre of women, female, southern writers, and I do write about this in my memoir about how important that class was for me in college. Because I was finally reading a woman's voice and. I had been reading men, Hemingway and Conroy and all these people around Melville, and I'm like, okay, this is not me. This is a man's version of the world. And when I got to that female southern writer's class, that was the difference maker because I, it was Maya Angelou, Kate Chopin, and Flannery O'Connor talking about the world in a way that I connected with. And so I would say it was those female writers that made the difference.

Speaker 22:27

Beautiful. Wow. This has been such an inspiring conversation. Thank you for sharing your journey with us.

Speaker 2 22:33

Oh, thank you for having me and letting me share it. I it's such an honor. Thank you.

Speaker 22:37

Oh, it's been a pleasure. So where can people connect with you, follow you, learn more about your classes to reflect back on their life?

Speaker 2 22:44

Yes. So my website is by Jennifer Griffith. Jennifer Griffith. There is another Jennifer Griffith author that we were talking about before we recorded. That's not me. And I have one book. It's both sides of Van and it's available wherever books are sold. And if you're an audiobook person, a lot of people are, I read it so you get to read the author reading her own words, which I think is

Speaker 23:04

I love it. We'll connect that down below in show notes. So any social media channels that you have?

Speaker 2 23:09

Oh yes. Instagram. All by Jennifer Griffith. So you put in by Jennifer Griffith. That's where I promote workshops and book tour events and all those good things.

Speaker 23:18

Excellent. Thank you again. Thank you. If you found this episode helpful, please share it with someone who might be facing a similar challenge and needs to hear this message of hope and inspiration to follow their dreams. I'll see you next time on overcoming anything.