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The Life of And podcast is for high-achieving women and working parents who are ready to stop living a life of “have to” and start designing a life they actually want. It’s a space where we talk honestly about the things we’re often afraid to admit — even to ourselves. The exhaustion. The ambition. The loneliness. The joy. The tension of wanting more without losing yourself in the process.
If you’re in the thick of it — feeling stretched, tired, hopeful, driven — this is your invitation to take a breath, get real, and find your way back to your own Life of And.
[00:00:00] Tiffany Sauder: Life does not exist solely for our comfort and consumption. And when we expect it to, when that’s the unspoken deal, the unspoken agreement that we’ve made with life, the hard things feel like betrayal, like something has gone wrong. But what if maybe the hard things are just part of the texture of life? What if they’re not a detour from your life, but actually the thing that’s forming you into who you’re supposed to become? I’m Tiffany Sauder, entrepreneur, wife, mom to four girls, and a woman figuring it out just like you. Come on, let’s go build your Life Of And. Last Saturday, JR took Quincy, our five-year-old, to a daddy-daughter dance and she was the most excited to be the only sister who had any plans. We curled her hair, picked out the outfit, did all the things. And while they were gone, I was at home with the older three, sitting on the back porch picking out prom hair from my oldest, just dishing on friendships, talking skincare, just in it together, spending just a sweet spring evening on the back patio.
[00:01:04] Tiffany Sauder: At the end of the evening, Quincy comes flying in the house talking a mile a minute, caught somewhere between being completely on cloud nine and being totally exhausted. And before I knew it, the girls decided that they needed Culver’s, they piled into the car and they were headed out just to get ice cream. No mom, no dad, no plan, just sisters. And I remember standing in the driveway watching them pull out and I thought, that’s it. It’s the whole thing. I’m Tiffany Sauder and this is Tiffany Unscripted, a new episode style that I’m trying out where I’m not teaching, I’m not interviewing, I’m just talking. And today I want to talk about what it feels like to be right in the middle of your life because at 45 I’m very much in the middle and yeah, there’s a lot happening. So if you’ve been following along, you know that we’re in the middle of we moved out of our … Sold our house that we’d been in for 10 years about nine months ago.
[00:02:04] Tiffany Sauder: I have been living with my in-laws for the last six months and we’re renovating a home. And so we’re T minus 15 days from moving into this renovated home and I’ve been in full logistics boss mom mode, like boxes, decisions, timelines, who’s doing what. And somewhere literally in the middle of all of this doing, I had this thought come through my head that I just wasn’t expecting and I realized this might be the last time I ever move my things. I’m pretty sure this is our forever house. And when that thought landed on me, I wasn’t sad exactly. It was more like reverence. Something met me in the quiet and said, Tiffany, pay attention.This is a moment. I thought about our first home. I remember just getting married, the excitement of that first grownup purchase, the feeling that your whole life is ahead of you and literally everything is a possibility.
[00:03:06] Tiffany Sauder: And then the next house and the next season we added kids, we got bigger jobs, we just generally had more responsibility in life and every move represented this new beginning of sorts. And now we’re here at the middle where the address might not ever change again. And instead of this feeling like an ending, I too want it to feel like a beginning, like we’re still at the start of something. And I started to think, maybe I finally get to just be fully here. Maybe this is the house where I’m not striving, I’m not wishing, and I can focus on just being, like just being here.
[00:03:50] Tiffany Sauder: As many of you know, our four girls are very spread out. So right now we have a five-year-old and an almost 18-year-old all under the same roof. And I want you to sit with that for a second because I have to sit with this. Almost every day I think about this, literally like what this is going to look like because simultaneously I’m at the beginning and the end of the parenting chapter. And I say end of the parenting chapter. I know it’s not over when she goes to college, but this idea of all of my girls being under one roof, like all of us together, like that’s your primary address, that chapter is beginning to come to the close. So next year we’re going to have a senior in high school and we’re going to have a kindergartner, which is just wild. I think about like back to school shopping, it’s just going to be nuts.
[00:04:36] Tiffany Sauder: And to give you a picture of what that actually looks like on a Wednesday, this is what my schedule looks like. I’m up at 5:30 to make breakfast before early morning swim practice for my oldest. I’m still awake at 10:15 PM at the stove making second dinner for when Ainsley comes home from her late practice and somewhere in the middle of that, I’m doing bedtime prayers and teeth brushing with my five-year-old and running math facts with my 1-year-old. Four kids, four different needs, four different versions of mom, I need you. It’s just on very, very different ends of the clock right now. There are days when this spread makes me feel super stretched and I feel like so many of us I’m trying not to wish this stage away, not to wish this stretch away, not to move through it quickly, not to be annoyed with the early alarm and the breakfast on one end and the late dinner on the other end.
[00:05:33] Tiffany Sauder: I want so desperately to just be in the middle of it.
[00:05:40] Tiffany Sauder: One of my goals for these Tiffany Unscripted episodes is to just share what life is teaching me, maybe not in like a life event framework way, just like in a real life let me export kind of way. So alongside the kids’ wild schedules and the move and like just keeping work going, building Life Of And I’m walking through some really difficult things personally right now. The details right now just like aren’t relevant. Perhaps one day I’ll jump on and share them, but for now it feels most authentic to just share that life has been pretty hard. It’s like been very crunchy. So it’s like walking through mud a bit. And then these seasons I’m just reminding myself that we have choices to make and how it is that we’re going to decide to show up. I was talking to a therapist recently, it’s actually Michelle Gam.
[00:06:33] Tiffany Sauder: She’s been on the show a couple of times and she explained it this way. We all have times in our lives when we meet a face plant moment, like just bam, like not hard days, not stressful seasons. I mean the moment where the ground just literally disappears and it’s like boom, like your face plants down where everything changes in an instant and you have to decide right there who you’re going to be on the other side of this. Because when the face plant happens, you have to actually decide if you’re going to get up because you don’t have to. But here’s what I’m learning in the getting up, that all of us has a face plant moment. Maybe you’ve already had yours in life and you’ve encountered it, maybe yours is coming. Maybe like me, you’re in the middle of it right now and you’ve picked up this episode because something told you you need it to.
[00:07:22] Tiffany Sauder: You don’t get to choose whether it arrives. You only get to choose what you do when it does and I’m saying this to myself all the time right now. I only get to choose what I do when it does arrive. When the ground disappeared for me, the first thing I reached for was people. The relationships of my life have just like helped me stabilize the rocking so, so much. And I think our instinct can be when everything falls apart is to get small and to get quiet and to go inside and almost like try to hide and handle it alone or maybe that’s just my initial reaction. But I know in seasons like this when I was younger, I felt pressure to hold it all together in the middle of it, to like not have to take an extra beat, to not say no to the things that weren’t completely necessary, to like still keep going at the exact same octave at the exact same RPMs that I was doing before it happened, that I felt the desire that I just needed to keep going.
[00:08:26] Tiffany Sauder: But this time I’ve done the opposite. I know like I am the one who needs something right now and I’ve leaned into the people who I know love me to my core and it’s helped. It’s really, really helped. Maybe this seems like super obvious to you listening to this and honestly, as I say it, it sounds really obvious like, “Hey, if you need help, you should reach out. “ It’s like, yeah, it sounds obvious, but to me it’s taken an enormous act of intentional courage to talk about what’s going on even in little ways like right now on this podcast and in big ways to those close to me because it is so scary to say I’m not okay right in the middle of it. It’s easier to talk about it when we know the end of the story like, “Hey, beginning face plant, middle, here’s what I felt and here’s what I did and here’s how it ends.” I don’t know the ending yet, but I’m just on here saying, “Hey, I’m not rolling at 100% right now.
[00:09:29] Tiffany Sauder: I need some support that isn’t normal for me and I need people to hear me and see me and love me. “ I’m sensitive to sharing this because I don’t want you to feel like this is like some weird cry for you to start like the Tiffany Sauder Support Club.
[00:09:46] Tiffany Sauder: That’s not your job. I’m not asking you to come on and like rescue me. I’m sharing this because I want to remind you that there are people in your life that want to love you, that want to show up for you, that want to walk through the hard with you. And if you’re traveling it alone, maybe it’s because you’ve chosen to travel it alone and it’s not actually because you need to. If you feel that way, I want you to stop this episode right now and I want you to reach out to your mom or your best friend and just text this. I need you right now. Can we talk?
[00:10:25] Tiffany Sauder: I want to take a quick moment to thank my partners at Share Your Genius. For the past four years, they have been an incredible part of my journey behind the microphone. Share Your Genius is a content and podcast production agency that helps leaders and brands bring their message to life. So whether you’re trying to find your voice, develop a content strategy, or get your leader behind a microphone, they’re going to help you make it simple, strategic, and impactful. The other thing I’m learning is a deeper understanding of faith. My worldview is as a Christian and my faith has been extremely stabilizing in the season of face plant, the season of uncertainty, this season of just feeling disoriented about some things. And very practically for me right now, faith looks like this, staying present, staying present and searching for what is absolutely real because when you’re in face plant seasons, your stressed out mind can think and imagine and dream up all kinds of wild and unwieldy things.
[00:11:26] Tiffany Sauder: And so I’m practicing stillness and I’m practicing staying present.
[00:11:31] Tiffany Sauder: I keep telling myself, I do not want to use the past as a weapon and I’m not jumping into a future I don’t understand yet. I don’t want to use the past as a weapon and I’m not jumping into a future that I don’t understand yet. I’m just being here just now, just still. Just what is actually true in this moment. Because here’s what I know, or maybe I should say, here’s what I’m learning. Life does not exist solely for our comfort and consumption. I’m going to say that again because it sucks, honestly, that it’s not true, but life does not exist solely for our comfort and consumption. And when we expect it to, when that’s the unspoken deal, the unspoken agreement that we’ve made with life, the hard things feel like betrayal, like something has gone wrong, like this wasn’t supposed to happen to me.
[00:12:30] Tiffany Sauder: But what if maybe the hard things are just part of the texture of life? What if they’re not a detour from your life, but actually the thing that’s forming you into who you’re supposed to become? I still have agency in this face plant. You still have agency in your face plant. That’s the thing I keep coming back to. I get to decide how wide a swath this takes through my life, through my attitude, through my self-worth. Nobody else gets to decide that I do.
[00:13:03] Tiffany Sauder: Okay, this next part of this episode is going to sound like a left turn. And when I was writing out some notes for this, I was like, “Why is this the thing that is coming to mind? This is so incredibly random.” But as I thought about it more, I actually think it fits and you can decide at the end of this if you think that’s true or not because it is definitely random, but I think it’s maybe the perfect closure to this episode of what it’s like to just be in the middle. So here we are. Okay. In the middle of all that’s going on, I bought a new bra. I told you it’s random. I bought a new bra. Okay, so stay with me. So I think this is actually maybe my new number one wardrobe pack that I’m convinced most women are totally sleeping on.
[00:13:55] Tiffany Sauder: Buy a new bra. Go literally ask yourself, go look in your closet, drawer, whatever. Which is my newest bra and how many years has it been since you bought it? Because I bet it’s greater than one year ago. What the world? Not a cute one necessarily. Please don’t. The cute ones don’t work. A good one with real elastic and support ladies, because here’s what happens. Everything goes where it’s supposed to when you wear a bra that actually fits you and has good elastic. Your clothes fit better, your waist looks smaller and that tight hug of new elastic like chef’s kiss. But here’s why I’m really telling you this. Okay. Is it really about the bra? Maybe it’s about the bra and maybe it’s not. In the middle of a face plant moment, in the middle of boxes and prom hair and forever house and all the big significant things that are happening, I’m still showing up for myself practically, physically, and in the smallest, most unglamorous ways possible.
[00:14:51] Tiffany Sauder: And that’s what I want for you to do too because I think when life gets enormous, we do one of two things. We either completely abandon ourselves, no sleep, no movement, survival mode, like no oxygen, or we think that showing up for ourselves has to match the size of what we’re going through. It has to be big and dramatic, like a retreat or a revelation or a complete reinvention. It doesn’t. Sometimes it’s a bra. A bra. I’m still a customer of my own life even in this season, maybe especially in this season and so are you. So your win this week. Pick one small physical way to show up for yourself, make the appointment you’ve been putting off, take the walk, or Holy Smokes just buy the bra. Not because everything is fine, but because you still matter even when it isn’t and maybe we matter most when it’s not.
[00:15:48] Tiffany Sauder: So here’s where I keep landing. I am so squarely in the middle of my life, not the beginning where everything is possible and not the end where everything is reflection. The middle where the daddy-daughter dance and the prom hair happened in the exact same weekend and it makes me cry. I don’t know why because I think it’s tender. I know this is the only time we’ll be here where your five-year-old is still spinning in her dance dress and your almost 18-year-old is picking out what she’s going to wear when she walks into her future. When you stand in the driveway and you watch them all just be together and you feel proud and heartbroken and grateful all at the exact same time where you’re moving into your forever home and carrying hard things and buying new bras and choosing every single day to stay present for all of it.
[00:16:45] Tiffany Sauder: I used to think that maybe the goal was to get through the hard parts just to arrive somewhere easier. I used to picture there would be this grassy meadow someday where everything was just great, but I don’t really believe that anymore. Not that life can’t be great, but I don’t think that’s the goal. I don’t think the goal is to hold your breath in the seasons that are hard only to breathe in the seasons that are abundant. I think the goal is to stay awake inside your actual life by the beautiful parts and the brutal parts and the ordinary Tuesday parts where all of it is working at the exact same time, not using the past as a weapon and not jumping into the future that you don’t understand yet to just be here, to just be this, to just be now.
[00:17:43] Tiffany Sauder: So if you’re in a face plant moment right now, I just want you to know you’re not alone in the way that I’m not alone, lean into the people who love you to the core and I encourage you to stay present in the hard to search for what is real and maybe just buy a new bra. I’m Tiffany Sauder, crying on Tiffany Unscripted. If this episode found you in the right moment, I would just love if you would share it with someone who needs it. And if you want to go deeper into any of this work, designing a life that actually holds all of what matters to you, the good and the hard, come find us at Life Of And, the links here in show notes. Until then, I’ll see you next time.