It's Launch Day!
An excerpt from my book, Motherhood and the Good Life, which is available now.
Today is April 8, 2026, and my new book, Motherhood and The Good Life is officially available. I am thrilled to share it with you. Below you’ll find a part of the preface of my book (the entirety of which is available to read, along with the first chapter, here).
When I agreed to write “something on motherhood,” I set out to frame up a project similar to my previous work—Bible studies that neatly follow a predetermined section of Scripture. The problem with that approach is that the Bible doesn’t offer extensive direction specifically to mothers, nor does it outline mothering as a defined institution with a prescribed set of practices. “Maybe,” I thought, “I could write a Bible study on the Trinity and compare it to the role of mothering.” And maybe I could have. But the more I tried to outline that study, the clearer it became that I was forcing the form. Mothering, let alone the Trinity, is too intricate, too personal, too nuanced, too all-encompassing to properly address in a ten-week devotional. Thus, we pivoted to this: a real-life, honest-to-goodness book book.
But a real-life, honest-to-goodness book demands the author’s utmost honesty on the given topic, and that’s a scary thing to offer. What’s more, the experience of motherhood is utterly unique to each of us, and I am, admittedly, a relatively new and unremarkable mother. As I write this, I am mothering three children (ages seven, five, and one). We’ve just found out that we are expecting our fourth baby. At the time of publishing, my children will be nine, six, three, and almost one. I’ve only experienced motherhood from a biological perspective. I’ve never parented a child with a disability. I’ve miscarried once, but I have not struggled with infertility. I do not feel like mothering “comes naturally” to me. I’m a Midwestern, white, married woman doing my best with what I have. Even so, it’s likely that what little I know as I write will have been relearned or forgotten by the time this book is in your hands. It’s likely that I’ll change my mind on much of what I write here and perhaps even apologize to my children for it. Not to mention, my kids are not your kids, I am not you, and my journey into and through motherhood may be entirely different from yours—you may not resonate with a word of what I have to say.
So here we are, with this real-life, honest-to-goodness book book. “But,” you may be asking (as I have), “aren’t there plenty of books on motherhood already?” Probably, and for good reason! The necessity of stories and wisdom from mothers who’ve gone before us cannot be overstated. But it seems to me that many of the mothers writing books on the topic have older children, perhaps even children who’ve already left home.
Hear me when I say that these books are important! Essential! A gift! But there’s a softening that comes with time, a blurring of the jagged edges of what mothering young children actually feels like. In my mothering years, the most comforting voices have been those who are, to use a cliché, in the thick of it—mothers who can yet conjure the smell of the delivery room, whose hands are still sticky from making lunch, whose breasts burn with mastitis, who are desperately hungry for a conversation with a grown-up. I need to hear mothers admit how enormously scary it is, how wild with love they’ve become, how confusing and beautiful it is, how the good parts and the horrible parts of mothering are sometimes exactly the same. I need to hear mothers working it out, wrestling with what the world has told them about motherhood, what they believed, what they’re unlearning, and what they’re becoming.
And that’s what I pray this book is. This is not a parenting book. This is a book about being a disciple of Jesus as a mother. It’s about the glory and the tragedy of walking this road in a culture whose views on us are rapidly changing—and not for the better. Please hear me now when I say that the methodology of your mothering is not the concern of this book. The decisions you make as you walk humbly with God are part of the glorious mystery of God’s love unfolding within and through you and are thus not mine to evaluate. As we walk through the following pages, your flesh may cry out for answers as to why this or that is so hard or concrete explanations for the love surging through your body, spilling out in laughter and sobs. It may anger you that I won’t defend a particular opinion or advocate for the choice you made or did not make.
What I do hope to speak to is the way God handcrafted this position, this agency of his likeness, and the way the entire molecular structure of the universe might change if mothers believed God when he called this role blessed (Proverbs 31:28).
Here’s the thesis of this book: Mothering is godly. Being a mother is an invitation into kingdom realities, kingdom work, and ever-deepening devotion to Christ. This reality is what buoys me on the days when it all feels too much (or not enough). Mothering matters so much because its ultimate end is the expansion of God’s kingdom within us and through us.
Click here to learn more about the book and here to download the first chapter for free.
Yay Katie! So excited for you and just bought two copies of the book for two close friends. Thank you for all the labor and heart that went into writing this. So important!
So happy for you, Katie! And looking forward to reading it.