EP 137: Why Modern Motherhood Leaves Us Empty
Modern motherhood can feel like a loop: endless meals, endless messes, endless decisions… and somehow, you end the day feeling more empty than when you started. If you’ve ever wondered, “Is this all?”
This episode will put language to what you’re carrying, and give you a real path forward.
In today’s podcast, I walk you through three specific reasons modern motherhood leaves moms empty and the solutions that actually work.
You’ll also hear personal stories (including my homeschooling journey and what it taught me about confidence, truth, and courage), plus practical, actionable steps you can take immediately, starting with what you read, what you surround yourself with, and how you begin the journey of self-discovery with your children beside you.
Important invitation: If you’re coming to MDM Celebration in Utah on Saturday, September 26, your ticket now includes something powerful:
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✨ a live sneak peek workshop on January 29
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✨ and a mentored community that carries you all the way to the event
Grab your ticket and join us (and invite your sisters, friends, mom, grandma, nieces—everyone who needs shared language and real tools). Go to themissiondrivenmom.com and click Conference.
And tell me in the comments: Which of the three are you working on first: culture, education, or self-discovery?
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📚 Recommended Reads
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💛 Join us for the Mothers of Creation Conference, Sneak Peek Call, & Mentoring Community
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Transcript (AI Generated)
Introduction: Why Modern Motherhood Feels Heavy
Welcome back to the podcast. I’m Audrey Rindlisbacher, the author of The Mission Driven Life, and the founder of The Mission Driven Mom. I am so excited for you to join me today. We are going to talk about a topic that’s a little bit heavy, one that weighs on our hearts as mothers: why modern motherhood leaves us empty.
And I have some really important things to talk to you about—three specific reasons why modern motherhood leaves us empty. I’ve also got some results of that emptiness and some solutions for you. And we’re going to get into that in just a minute. I want to tell you a couple of personal stories, tell you about some of our students’ experiences, and give you some tasks—some actionable steps you can take—when we’re done here.
Announcement: MDM Celebration, Workshop, and Community
But first, I have to tell you about this opportunity I don’t want you to miss. If you’ve been around for very long, you know that for a few years we did what’s called the MDM Celebration, and it’s been in Utah and it’s been in Texas. We’ve reintroduced it. It’s going to be in Utah again. The venue there is fantastic, and we have quite a large following all along the West Coast, so we’re going to be back in Utah on September 26th—that Saturday.
We started selling tickets, and they’ve been selling well, and I’m super excited to see you there. But we added something additional, and some of you may not know this, so I want to make sure you’re aware of it. We have added a sneak peek workshop and a year-long community. This is a mentored community that’s going to be available from the moment you sign up all the way through the event in September.
This is important because as Mothers of Creation, it’s not just going to happen overnight. We have so much content, and as I was going through it, I thought, wow—what if we could get a head start on this? What if we could start learning it now? What if we could be practicing some of the key concepts all throughout the year, becoming Mothers of Creation? Then when we get to the event, we’ll just hit the ground running and put our plans together.
We’ll have our declaration statement—our creator declaration statement—all tied up by the end of the day, and you’ll be off to the races.
So what we’ve done is this: on January 29th, Lindsay and I are going to give a workshop in our MDM community, and there’s a private, exclusive-access group in the community for those who are coming to the celebration.
All you have to do is get a ticket to the celebration, and this workshop and the mentored community—all throughout the rest of the year leading up to the event—are available to you. Some of the things we’re going to cover in this workshop are the origins of the drama triangle, what drama is and why it matters, how drama shows up in your everyday life, and the types of victims.
This is really unique. I don’t know anyone else who teaches this, aside from a few places where you can get a little bit of information in the TED community, but we’ve put our own spin on it. We’ve also come up with antidotes. We’re going to help you identify the type of victim you show up as, how you show up as that type of victim, the antidote for that, and how to snap out of victimhood.
Then you’re going to be in this mentored community with other attendees. You’ll meet them, collaborate with them, and be mentored. Lindsay is going to mentor that group for the rest of the year and take you through additional content in the community. You do not want to miss it.
I’ll put the description below the podcast, or you can go to themissiondrivenmom.com, click on “Conference,” and sign up so you don’t miss that Thursday night, January 29th workshop. If for some reason you can’t make it live, don’t worry—it’s recorded, so you can hop into the community anytime.
Whenever you sign up for the event, you can watch the recording and join the community. And you are going to want your girlfriends, your sisters, your mother, and your grandmother to participate in this opportunity. It will give you shared language, help you support each other, and help you really infuse your home with a creator mindset.
Student Story: Leanna and the Power of Shared Language
I want to tell you about one of our students, Leanna, and what she shared with us a few years ago. Of course, she had a deep dive in creator orientation, as well as many other awesome principles in the Academy, so she’s coming from that perspective. But we are covering this content at this event.
Here’s what she said. She said it’s given us a common language. She’s talking about the Academy and understanding drama and creator orientation. She said the principle that is the opposite of victim is creator. It blew my mind wide open, and it blew my relationships wide open with my children.
Just the other day, I was having a hard day. I was tired, stressed, under pressure, and I was being impatient with my children—and they could feel it. My oldest came to me and said, “Okay, Mom, I want to create right now. I want to be a creator.”
Why could her son say that? Because she had been teaching them the principles. She had taught her family how to be creators instead of victims.
Her son said, “I want to be kind and find someone to serve. I’m going to give you a big hug.” He came over, gave me a hug, and asked, “Can I make you some breakfast?” I said yes.
What was so powerful about that—this is still Leanna talking—was that it was really sweet, of course, but the power behind it was that I had learned that principle and that language, and I had taught it to my kids. It gave our whole family a common language we could use.
They knew I wasn’t perfect. I could talk to them about my struggles, and then they could come help and serve me when I needed it.
Right away, it melted me. I thought, I’m being a victim right now, and because I’m being a victim, I’m also being a persecutor to everyone around me. Instantly, I thought, okay, how am I going to create? I hugged my son back and said, “I’m going to make breakfast with you.” We turned on music, had a dance party in the kitchen, and it changed the entire day.
That’s the power. Every day I’m trying to apply those principles, and it’s been really life-changing.
Setting the Stage: Why Mothers Feel Empty
Alright, let’s talk for the next few minutes about why modern motherhood is leaving mothers empty. I was reading an article the other day, and I want to read you just the first part because it really sets the stage. This is from the blog of Sarah E. Frazer.
“As we left the kids with my parents and in-laws—we now have to divide them up, since we have five kids—I felt a sense of relief, like a burden was being lifted off my shoulders.
My husband and I were going out of town without the kids. Freedom. We both giggled like newlyweds. As we drove off, we spent our vacation sleeping in each morning, relaxing by the pool, and talking with no interruptions. I didn’t have to cut up food or get five other plates ready before sitting down to my cold meal.
When we wanted to just sit, I could close my eyes and enjoy the quiet without having to keep an eye on a little one for seven days. We enjoyed talking to each other, reading, and eating together in peace.
Only, that’s not my regular life. In fact, my house is pretty loud and crazy in this season right now.”
Motherhood is not for the faint of heart.
Amen.
For you new moms out there, I feel you. The routine of it all is enough to make our hearts restless. Did we really sign up for this day after day? The same seemingly empty tasks feel incomplete, leaving us feeling empty. Endless meals, dirty clothes, and constant decisions can make us feel useless.
All we want is an escape. I’ve felt this. I’ve been guilty of surfing the internet, flipping through social media, and watching pointless videos just to escape the moment. Motherhood can leave me empty. The natural tendency of my heart is to feel empty and immediately want to fill it—frantically.
I look around thinking maybe buying more things, planning more trips, exercising, or having a job will fill the emptiness. But it doesn’t.
That’s exactly what we’re talking about.
And I’m going to give you three reasons why this is happening to modern women. It’s not that women in the past never felt emptiness or struggle, but there are specific things that have been taken from us—ways our culture has shifted—that are making it harder.
Cultural Pressure and the Loss of Validation
The culture is not proud of us. In fact, sometimes it thinks that we are not doing enough. Sometimes even our husbands think that if we don’t go out into the workforce and earn a lot of money, we are not doing our job. We are not doing enough.
Now, not that you can’t be a working mom—it’s just that we feel unappreciated. We feel invalidated. And really, one of the only rewards for us is the love of our own children and the fulfillment we feel from doing that job.
Sometimes we wonder if we’ve even done the right thing. We feel pressured to perform in the marketplace, earn money, or justify our choices because of what the feminist movement did to our culture. So the solution to this first problem is for us to link arms and change the narrative, and that’s what The Mission Driven Mom is doing.
That’s our mission and message—that motherhood matters, and that we can link arms as we build principle-centered homes. We can also lift our culture, make it more principle-centered, and rewrite the story of what femininity is, what motherhood means, and why it matters so much.
And we have a vested interest—maybe more than anybody else—because we know we are building the world our children will live in.
So we can push back. We can reaffirm the incredible courage it takes to be a mother, how vital it is, and what it means to be the best mother you can be. I talked about this last week—what it does for you in so many meaningful ways.
Student Story: Valerie and the “Problem That Has No Name”
One of our students shared this—her name is Valerie Kinkcaid. This is what she said:
“I’m almost done with Level One of the MDM Academy. I’m just finishing up the last little bit of it, and before I started, life was good. I had a good marriage and cute kids, but I wasn’t feeling happy, and I didn’t know why.”
Again—that Betty Friedan “problem that has no name,” right? So what’s the prescription? If that’s the problem, what’s the prescription? We have to get the prescription right, and then we have to follow it if we want the results.
Valerie goes on:
“I had every reason to be happy, but I felt like there was something I needed to change, and I didn’t know what. I didn’t know where to start or what was wrong.”
That’s exactly how women were feeling in the sixties.
But now, going through Level One and learning things like the drama triangle and being in the box—and she lists several of the principles she learned—all of those things we teach in Level One have totally changed how I view myself. It’s changed everything, and it’s been a huge help for me.
So we don’t say in the MDM Academy that you need to go get a job in order to feel fulfilled, in order to be proud of your motherhood, or in order to thrive as a woman and a mother—to be a mission-driven mom, which we’ll talk more about next week and being on that mission-driven journey.
That’s just not what you need to do.
And I know this is a shameless plug for the Academy, but it is—because we know it works. And even if you don’t join the Academy, I hope you’ll learn all about what being a mission-driven mom means. I hope you’ll go to the website, get the free audiobook, and come to our celebration to become a Mother of Creation.
Personal Context: When Education Failed Me
Now, before we talk about the second reason modern motherhood leaves us feeling empty, I want to give you some context about where I was.
As I’ve shared on this podcast and in many other places, when I was a young mother of three small children, I was struggling in every conceivable way. My husband had a pornography addiction. We had one income, and it was sporadic. Both of our parents were divorcing or separated.
There were extended family issues. I was trying to figure out how to be a mom to young children. Our finances were troubling. There were so many things in my life that felt incredibly overwhelming, and I didn’t know how to manage them.
I remember sitting with myself one day, thinking, I just feel awful. I feel unmotivated. I don’t know how to do this right.
I was angry. I was frustrated. I was overwhelmed. And something snapped.
I realized in that moment: wait a minute—I went to fifteen years of formal education, and it did not prepare me for this moment. What in the world were we doing?
Why was I in school all those years if it didn’t teach me how to be a wife, a mother, or a fulfilled individual? If it didn’t show me how to manage extended family relationships, finances, or career? What in the world?
I felt so cheated.
And then one thing led to another, and I started searching for answers.
Discovering Liberal Education
I searched for a year, and then I found liberal education.
This is the story I always tell—my sister-in-law told me about this small college, and I went to their website. It listed all the readings. It said they were reading Plato.
I thought, what in the world? I can’t believe I read Plato.
That sounded so different from anything I had ever tried—and maybe something that might work. I didn’t know what else to try, so I went on that journey.
I learned that liberal education used to be the go-to. It was always done—reading original writings, looking for true principles, focusing on the good, the true, and the beautiful, and virtue as the fundamental end of education.
These educational truths were so rich and fulfilling. I found them as a mother of three, then four, then five, then six, and over time I earned a liberal arts bachelor’s degree and a liberal arts master’s degree. I’m incredibly grateful for that.
But this education has been robbed.
I could give you a whole history of American education and explain how Charles Eliot at Harvard, in 1899, introduced the elective system. Once he did that, all the other Ivy League schools followed suit, and eventually we lost the foundation of liberal arts.
Even in the forties, people noticed it—C.S. Lewis noticed it. Mortimer Adler noticed it. Robert Hutchins noticed it. That’s why they created the Great Books of the Western World.
The point is: you and I were robbed of this education.
Not just formal education. Not just what we would have received in American schools. And I know not as many women went to university, but it didn’t matter, because education at younger ages used to be rich, intentional, and principle-centered.
We were one of the first countries to institutionalize free education for children. But the context, the conversations, the Socratic method—we didn’t get it.
And on top of that, we didn’t get proper training.
The Loss of Preparation and Discernment
There are many reasons for this. If you’ve ever read the book Laddie by Gene Stratton-Porter—who also wrote the Limberlost books—it’s her autobiography.
She describes how, in the mid-1800s, girls in her family couldn’t even be courted by a man—let alone married—until their mother left home for a month and they ran the entire farm themselves. They had to prove they knew what they were doing.
So here you have rich formal education—not about earning money, but becoming your best self—and practical training to succeed as a wife and mother at a much higher level.
We have to try to get that back.
The net result of losing this is that we weren’t raised with the skills to discern truth. And so motherhood feels inevitably overwhelming.
We’re responsible for these little ones, but we don’t know how to recognize truth. We don’t know how to discern in this culture. We don’t know how to level ourselves up or put our families on a foundation of principles.
So of course, the solution is education.
I know that sounds crazy, but it’s true. You can train your mind. You can learn to live according to principles.
Choosing Better Inputs
Someone reached out to me just today and asked, “Where can I learn to live according to principles?”
And I had to be honest—I don’t know where else you can get this.
For twenty years, I’ve been learning, studying, practicing, teaching, and mentoring. Other women have joined me, and together we’ve built something truly special.
But if you’re not ready yet, go grab a classic. Start asking better questions. Have conversations with the authors.
Get my book, The Mission-Driven Life, the free audiobook, and start living those seven laws of life mission. Start reading better things.
Surround yourself with what is true, good, and beautiful—right now, today. You can choose that every minute of your day.
Read good children’s classics. The Narnia series. The Little House series. The Little Britches series. Mine them for truth.
Read Little Women. Pay attention to the mothers.
These are things you can do right now to uplevel your game.
A Shift in Thinking
Carolyn Marriott, one of our students, said this:
“I’ve learned that I just need to think better and differently. Instead of trying to do more, I need to think differently and seek to understand and find truth.”
That’s why it’s so important—if you don’t want modern motherhood to leave you feeling empty—you must change how you think.
There’s a lot of good material out there about affirmations and positive thinking, and we cover that too. But this is deeper than that.
Thinking critically. Analyzing well. Understanding the nature of truth. Knowing how to mine for it.
That’s vital.
Max Lucado’s Story: Discovering God-Given Gifts
Max Lucado shares this story:
“I recently met a 20-year-old who needed to hear this, just discharged from the military. He was pondering his future. He bore a square jaw, a forearm tattoo, and a common question. He didn’t know what to do with the rest of his life.
As we shared a flight, he told me about his uncle, a New England priest. ‘What a great man,’ the ex-soldier sighed. ‘He helps kids and feeds the hungry. I’d love to make a difference like that.’
So I asked him the question of this chapter: What were some occasions when you did something you loved to do and did it well?
He dismissed me at first. ‘Ah, what I love to do is stupid.’
‘Try me,’ I invited.
‘I love to rebuild stuff.’
‘What do you mean?’
He spoke of an old coffee table he found in the garage, seeing its potential. He shaved off the paint, fixed the broken legs, and restored it with great pride. He presented it to his mom.
‘Tell me another time,’ I prompted.
‘This one is really dumb,’ he discounted. ‘But when I worked at a butcher shop, I used to find meat on the bones others threw out. My boss loved me. I could find several pounds of product just by giving the bone a second try.’
As the plane was nosing down, I tested a possibility with him.
‘You love to salvage stuff. You salvage furniture. You salvage meat. God gave you the ability to find treasure in someone else’s trash.’
My idea surprised him.
‘God did that?’
‘Yes. God. Your ability to restore a table is every bit as holy as your uncle’s ability to restore a life.’
You would’ve thought he’d just been handed a newborn baby. As my words sank in, the tough soldier teared up.”
Heed Your Desires, Don’t Suppress Them
And my message to you today on this third point is Max Lucado’s message right here:
“See your desires as gifts to heed rather than longings to suppress, and you’ll feel the same joy.”
I have a quote up on my vision wall that says something like, the dreams you nurture in your heart are the most noble part of you.
So pay attention to what you do well, what you like to do, and why you love to do it.
Student Reflection: Discovering Strengths
Here’s another one of our students:
“I didn’t think I had a lot of gifts, but through MDM Academy, I’ve really discovered my gifts and talents and come to appreciate them on another level. I feel like I use them with more respect and reverence for myself and the gifts I’ve been given.
I discovered myself in a new way and how to focus on my strengths. I now see the power of being focused on the things I’m good at.”
And that’s what you can do.
Start with this book, and then go on a journey of trying things you’ve never tried before. I say this on the podcast often—I give this as a solution often—because I know these are the things that work.
Bringing Your Kids Along the Journey
These are the things that turn you back on. They make you feel alive again. And you can do them right there with your kids.
Years ago, my husband had always wanted to take karate. So you know what he did? He took karate with my two younger kids. They now have all these incredible memories together—doing karate, serving in that space, helping with events, and being a force for good in the community.
They did something they loved, together.
And you can do that too. I promise. You absolutely can.
Final Encouragement and Invitation
So remember—let’s push back on the narrative of who mothers are and what we mean. We’re going to talk about that in more detail next week.
Get the education you deserve by picking up a classic and surrounding yourself with enriching things. And then get to know yourself and develop your talents.
I would love to hear in the comments below which of these three you plan to work on and dive into.
Next week, we’re going to talk more in depth about going beyond being “just a mom” and becoming a mission-driven mom—what that looks like, the six traits of a mission-driven mom, and why they matter so much.
Thank you so much for joining me here today. And again, remember—I want to see you and your friends, your sisters, your mom, your grandma, and your nieces at our January 29th workshop and in that private, exclusive community for celebration attendees.
I will see you there.
