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Growing Slow with Jennifer Dukes Lee

• Amy J Brown, Jennifer Dukes Lee, author • Season 3 • Episode 136

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Amy welcomes writer Jennifer Dukes Lee as she reflects on a picture from 20 years ago when she and her husband made the bold decision to leave their successful careers behind and embark on a journey of farming. Amidst the doubts from others, Jennifer’s journey of slow growth vs. hurried comparison taught her how to relinquish control. They discuss the cultural pressure of progress, achieving results, and the profound lessons learned, including the realization that the best things in life take time. Join us for a fun conversation about how slow growth can give you life! 

Ep.136; July 11, 2023

Key Moments:
[2:45] Life isn't linear. It’s circular.
[9:43] Practical ways to grow slow
[18:50] Spending time with children creates unexpected memories
[20:42] Seasons teach us about growth and life
[25:08] Finding beauty and growth in difficult times
[30:34] New guided journal with writing prompts

Resources:
Growing Slow
Stuff I'd Only Tell God: A Guided Journal of Courageous Honesty, Obsessive Truth-Telling, and Beautifully Ruthless Self-Discovery
Jennifer’s Website 

If you enjoyed the show:

Hi, this is Amy Brown, and I am so excited for our guest today. Today, I'm talking to Jennifer Dukes Lee. Jennifer is a best-selling author, thinker, and question-asker from Iowa. Her friends say they are scared to sit alone in a room with her because they end up telling her things they never intended to say. She is both proud of this fact and also a little annoyed at how nosy she can be. She put a bunch of her favorite questions into a journal called Stuff I'd Only Tell God. It's like your own little confession booth. She is also the author of Growing Slow and It’s All Under Control. You can learn about Jennifer Dukes Lee at www.jenniferdukeslee.com. So let's welcome Jennifer to the show. Jennifer, I am so excited that you're here and that we get a chance to talk. For those that don't know you, could you give a little intro to our listeners, let them know who you are and what you do?

Jennifer Dukes Lee: Absolutely. I'm from Iowa. We are a fifth-generation farm up in the far northwest corner. There are significantly more pigs than people where I live. It is a rural part of the country. We've been growing crops and pigs and humans. I have also been planting seeds that are like words. That's what I do day in and day out. I am an author, and Scott plants seeds in the ground, and I plant seeds in hearts. It's a great place to live and do work.

Amy: I grew up on a grain farm and a dairy farm, but our neighbors were pig farmers in Indiana. I appreciate the words that you plant. One of the reasons that we are having authors on this season is there are so many books that have impacted us that aren't necessarily books written for special needs moms. In your book, Growing Slow. Actually, I just got my journal. How old is Growing Slow? When did it come out? 

Jennifer; It came out in May of 2021. 

Amy: I went away for a retreat in May of 2020. Went up to Mackinac Island because I'm from Michigan, and I just found that journal, and I'd written in all caps. I want a growing slow life. I had written that in all caps after I'd read your book. 

Jennifer: Oh, that means so much. Wow, that's like fuel for an author's soul to hear things like that. Thank you for sharing that.

Amy: Your book really impacted me because, honestly, I thought I can grow slow. That's an option? Our listeners are special needs moms; we're full-time caregivers. We have all these things on our plate. You get the treatment potentials from your doctor, and you want to go do them all and figure it out right now. This idea of growing slowly in our culture, but especially in the lives of special needs moms, especially; it's not even an option I don't think that we think about because it seems that there's always some next emergency. I think our brains kind of put us in that. It may not be an emergency, but our brains are looking like that. Where's the next danger? When's the next emergency going to come? I loved your book because of the continual caregivers. I don't think I thought that was an option.  I know that you speak in the book a little bit how you started this growing slowly. I think you had a health crisis. Am I right? How did you start growing slow?

Jennifer: Yes, that's right. It was just so many things compounded one on another. To your point where everything feels like an emergency, I treated my whole life like an emergency. I think that culturally, we look at our families, our kids, our careers, or whatever it is, our bodies and think that we're on some linear path toward progress. When in fact, life is much more circular and doesn't always feel like forward progress. Progress that has been made sometimes isn't made evident until you're far far far down the road. I have been a woman who's always been in a hurry. I've wanted to progress quickly for myself, for my family, for my faith. I mean, you name it. I'll join a health fitness class, right, and I want results like by the next day. I'll start eating differently and get discouraged if, after a week I don't see results. I started an Instagram page. You name it. I want something to grow, and I want it to grow quickly. That's been my default ever since I was a kid. I'm an Enneagram three, high achieving. I think I've got to be the most responsible person in the room, and I annoy even myself with all of those things, in my 20s, that actually worked out pretty well. When I hit my 40s and tried to run myself as I did in my 20s, I ended up in a doctor's office. All the Western medicine doctors said, "We just really don't know what to tell you. All the tests show that there's really actually nothing wrong." I went to a functional med doctor. I said, "You've got to help me." He said, essentially, "I had a hurried heart" I was waking up in fight or flight mode. I was in fight mode all the time. Every chemical in my body was shooting off on high levels, and there were never really moments of slowing down or rest. As I said, it served me well in my younger years, or so it seemed, but there were costs. We can get to that in a moment. When I got older, it really affected my gut issues, the way that I thought about myself, the way I thought about my work, and the way I thought about my progress. I went home that day from the doctor's office, and I Googled "hurried heart" and hurry sickness and all these things that he spoke over me, and I'm like, Oh, my gosh, I have all of the symptoms. I started to look back on my life, Amy, and I thought, my goodness, there were costs even in my 20s. One of the biggest things that paid the price was my relationships because you cannot hurry and connect at the same time. I can't hurry my kids out the door and connect with them at the same time. I can't hurry my intimate moments with God and connect with him at the same time, crossing things off the list. I realized I don't want to live like that anymore. I could have much more easily written a book called growing fast, and I could have filled like arenas. Come to my class, and I will tell you how to grow your business in 30 days. Come to my class, and you can lose 10 pounds by this weekend. The fact of the matter is the best things in life take the longest to grow.

Amy: It's so true. It's kind of funny that we think we can. You're a farm wife. I grew up on a farm. You can't make a plant grow by yelling at it or pushing on it. It's funny to think we think we can make things grow by going faster. It's this false sense that we have control, maybe?

Jennifer: You got it right—my lessons on growing slow. I was actually learning when we moved here 20 years ago. There's this picture of Scott and I with our little girls at the time, and I look at that picture. I remember how, at that moment, (it was a photographer from the Des Moines Register that came and took our picture because I worked at the Des Moines Register at the time), and they had come out and done a story on moving back to the farm. One of our political reporters has left everything behind and has gone off to the farm. When we did that, people said, "You guys are crazy. Scott, you have a law degree. What are you going to do with that up on the farm? Jennifer, you're throwing your career away. What are you going to do?" At that point, books didn't enter my mind. There wasn't anything that I knew of called blogging. There wasn't social media. I stood there in the field with Scott and our kids, and this former colleague of mine had come to take our picture and get the story. I looked at him, and I thought, oh, my gosh, what if they're right? What if we are throwing it all the way? It took me a lot of years later to ask another question. That question is, what if they're wrong? Because they weren't living this rat race life and paying the price. I was, and so only I could make that choice. Now I look back on that picture, and I think that was day one of growing slow. Even this lesson of slow growth has taken a long time to take root in me. I've learned so much by looking out at the fields because we cannot control growth. We can plant seeds, but you can't water 700 acres. We have to rely on God to bring sun, to bring rain and for the good work of the seed to do what it does. The very last thing to grow on a corn plant is the corn. You can't rush these intermediate stages. And the same is true of us.

Amy: It's funny that I have this oxymoron of I want to grow slow, but I want it to happen fast. I want the results of it. I love that you say that it takes time, and I'm sure you had, and still do have many times where you're like, okay, you get right back into that. Then you have to start over again. To the person that starting out, I would think about some of our listeners who have a million things going on, but what would you say? Where do you start with growing slow?

Jennifer: That is such a good question. I'm going to give you some practical little things that people can do starting today. But I also think it's important to speak to the philosophy and the mindset and to do what you did long ago in a journal and make a commitment toward I want to live a growing slow life. Think about what that looks like in the context of your own life and how you can make that kind of a commitment. It happens, coming to terms and peace with the progress that you're making now, and letting go of the notion that you're falling behind, that you should be further along by now, which are very, very common mantras that we speak over ourselves. Oh, I'm falling behind, I should be further along. That has us living in a hurried mindset. I think you do have to sort of embrace the whole concept of slow growth because it's pushing against a culture that says something entirely different. There are things that you can do every day that help you grow slow,, but that actually don't hurt your productivity. I was afraid of growing slow, because I thought, well, I won't be as effective as I've been all these other years. I've been able to do a lot of things at once. I've been able to multitask. But when I set aside those growing fast ways and started to take some simple steps every day, it changed. Here's one, and that is to actually sit down and taste the food that I have made for myself. I know that sounds so simple, anymore, but in the past, I would eat at my desk, get it in as quickly as possible and get back to work. When the kids were little, grab bites here and there, and eat standing up. 

Amy: Eat the crusts of the grilled cheese that you cut off. 

Jennifer: Yes. I'm not taking care of my body, and I'm also not enjoying the gift of food. I don't want to idealize, for instance, breakfast or lunchtime or supper, but we've always made it a priority in our family to sit down at meals together and carve out time to taste the food and appreciate the flavors. That could be a frozen pizza or Kraft macaroni and cheese and hot dogs. I don't care what it is. God decided that he wanted to fuel our bodies, not by sending us to a gas station so that we would pump ourselves with fuel. Instead, he said I'm going to give you all of these flavors and textures to enjoy and savor, whatever that happens to be. When you do that, you can feel your blood pressure dropping. You are approaching even food and meal time with a sense of gratitude. I get it. I know how crazy it can be at mealtime when you've got a child with applesauce on their little melamine plates or whatever those things are just winging it across the table. I think trying to create that sort of daily practice is super helpful. Another one is to resist the urge to check your phone at stoplights, and I think a lot of us have done that, just real quick. It's a red light. Let me just check real quick or in a Target checkout line. 
The reason is if there's something that's of urgency on your phone, you automatically have a hurried heart, but you can't really deal with it when you're at the stoplight. You just end up having this growing fast, frantic approach of some emergency that's happening, and you're not really able to fix it at that moment. I mean, those are just two things. We could make a whole Podcast episode on little things you can do. I'd be curious to hear what some of yours are. You mentioned you had some.

Amy: I think a good point you make is once you turn on, there's an alert on my phone, or there's something coming up that I need to deal with, all the growing slow just goes out the window because your brain is triggered. One of the things that I do is a mental download of everything I'm worried about because the worries just swirl about. It could be anything from I have to change doctors or get this medicine for my kid to what is my neck gonna look like in 20 years. They are lame things or really big things and all the things. When are we going to go on vacation? It's so ridiculous all the things that can keep buzzing, so I will write everything down. Then I will take about five minutes to breathe deeply, and then I'll go okay. Honestly, Amy, here are the two things you really need to attend to today. I think it's putting those little practices in place and paying attention to how different you feel when you put them in place. That starts the snowball going, I think, a little bit. They're not long practices. You don't have to lay about. For people that are busy, I think I don't want to lay around, and I want to be busy. The difference you feel when you are sitting down to eat a meal and being grateful, and you're enjoying the people around your table. You do notice the landscape when you're driving instead of texting, which nobody should text and drive, those little tiny steps. I also want to go back to something you said, as we always think we should be farther than we are. I would say to the special needs moms out there that feel that way about their child. I know what it feels like to say this child has the same diagnosis as my child, my child's back here, and be able just to allow yourself to say this is where we are is a really big gift to our hearts and our souls and our kids. I don't think we would say to our kids, "Why aren't you as far along as this child," but in our hearts, I know we hold that. I know even if you don't have a special needs kid, you may hold that feeling about your children. I guess that's my encouragement, too is just this is where we are today. I think Emily Freeman calls it small-moment living. What are the small things we can do to take a breath? One of the things I've said before on the podcast. When things were really intense several years ago in our family, I would look back. I'd think everything's just so intense. In my journal, I'd written little notes of things of beauty and things I did with the other kids. I took this kid for ice cream, because sometimes, as a special needs parent, you're always worried about other siblings. There was life happening in the midst of a very big season. I took the time to write them down and notice. It was just a quick jot. It wasn't like a big flowery paragraph. It was really very small. I think that's another thing. It's just little small things that help you kind of take a deep breath. 

Jennifer: Yeah, those little things, the things that seem like, does this even matter? Those end up becoming the mattering things; they really do, no matter if you have a child with special needs or not. I look back on my life with our girls, and it's all those little things added up together that made a life. Having eye contact with your kid, and being responsive to a child's fears. Yes, maybe extending the tuck in just a bit longer to hear what's on their heart, doing ridiculous Tik Tok dances with my older children, singing around the piano on a random Tuesday night, engaging in conversation about the things that matter most to them, going to the movies that matter most to them, shooting hoops if that's what it takes, whatever the thing is that helps you to slow down and appreciate how your child was made and what their interests are. All those things added together are the mattering things, and I see it with so much clarity now that I'm an empty nester. The kids, they've flown the nest, and one's a freshman, and one's a junior in college, and you can see it. It's the things they talk about now. "Hey Mom, remember that one time?" Even all the ridiculous things like the applesauce-throwing business become the part of the story that makes us a family. It all matters.

Amy: I have six, so my oldest three are 30, 28, and 23, and they all say, "Mom, remember this was really fun," and obviously, it's a little thing, but I don't have a memory of it. They have a big memory of it. Once again, back to the special needs moms, I know that a lot of us have to spend a lot of time with our kids with medical and emotional issues. Those little things we do with our kids, they remember. That's an encouragement. I also want to come back to the book because we talked about this earlier. We talked about living in the seasons. Recently, you and I were at a retreat together. You were the speaker, and you talked about seasonal living or the lessons you've learned by paying attention to the seasons. At that retreat, you shared a lot about each season. You had us stand up. You asked, "Are you in spring? Stand up," and you prayed over the people that were in spring. When you got to winter, I just stood up. Muscle memory stood me right up without me even thinking about, well, wait a minute, am I really in winter? What season am I in? Is my brain conditioned to think I'm in winter? I wrote about that a little bit, and I had some people reach out to me and say, "How do we see spring? How do we look past the never-ending winter? First of all, I'd like you to talk a little bit about the lessons you've learned. I think we give winter a bad rap. We're like nothing happens in winter. It's desolate. Everything's terrible in winter. I think we need to change our perspective on winter. I would love to hear the lessons you've learned about winter.

Jennifer: Yes. For a little context, for those of you listening, the book Growing Slow is separated out into four seasons because seasons teach us a lot about our growth. In the same way that seasons are how a field works. There are times when we're planting things in our life just like a field, and that happens in the springtimes of her life. That doesn't mean that spring is only when you're 16. 
You can have a spring moment when you're 80. Then there are moments when we're in summer, and we look around, and we see things growing in our lives. We celebrate that. There are autumn moments of harvest when we've completed something or we feel like we're about ready to enter a new season. We get to hold that fully ripened thing in our hand and say oh my goodness, but that can also bring a bit of sorrow because the thing is over. Ask me how I know as an empty nest mom, right? Then comes winter. When I wrote the Growing Slow book, I only wrote a couple of chapters on winter because I thought people don't want to hear about winter. That's not fun. That's a depressing way to end this book. Of course, when I sent it to the publisher and my literary agent, they both sent back the book writing in the margins, basically more winter, please. We need more winter chapters; you've got more to say here. I ended up writing more about winter in those chapters. In fact, it was probably the most formative writing experience for me personally. I began to realize that as a person who goes more toward growing fast in my past, I've wanted to be constantly in spring, summer, autumn, spring, summer, and autumn in a constant cycle. On a farm, there are four seasons for a reason. That fourth season, winter, is actually one-quarter of the growing season. It turns out that there are all kinds of things happening in winter. There are little animals with tiny little heartbeats in their chests moving around underground. The frost cycle causes pests and diseases to die off. There's all kinds of incredible scientific things that are happening underground. Not to mention the fact that around here, we call snow poor man's fertilizer because as it falls, it takes nitrogen and plants it into the soil, there are all these beautiful things happening in winter on a farm, and the same is true of us. We can end up dreading these winter seasons, thinking there's nothing growing here. This is depressing. It's cold, it's dark, and I can't grow anything in a place called winter. The truth of the matter is, I believe, in my life and in many people I've talked to, it's in the winter seasons where God grows us most. It's in the winter seasons that we grow in steadfastness and faithfulness and patience and trusting God, and that equips you for spring and summer, and fall in ways that you cannot learn in those seasons. It makes you the kind of person who can really grow good things in the field of your heart in spring, summer, and autumn. That's an important season. Sometimes it looks like a season of obscurity. Winter can look like that. Sometimes winter can look like a season of great trial. Sometimes a winter season can look like grieving the loss of something, a dream, or a person. It can look like a great disappointment. It can also be a time, just like the way that Christmas falls in the middle of winter, it can be a time where you pause to take moments of celebration, and account for all of the good blessings in your life and make time and space to celebrate those good things. Like in Narnia, it says, oh, it's always winter, but never Christmas. No, in our winters, it's not always winter, first of all. Secondly, in the midst of our winters, we really can have a sort of Christmas spirit in a way in parts of the season.


Amy: We wouldn't grow without that season. It's funny that we think, oh, this is just a trial. I think sometimes we can be in a hard moment, as special needs moms; there's some kind of emergency always around the corner. But I've been at a hospital and still seen beauty. I've been by a bedside of a child and been very worried, but also seen a lot of beauty. I think the perception of winter is trials equals winter. I don't think that's really what winter is. It's encouraging to know that that's where a lot of the deep work is done. For moms of kids who are constantly waiting for the next hospital visit, the next doctor visit, the next psychiatrist visit, we're given an opportunity to grow in those moments. I don't mean that in a trite way. Look at the bright side of everything. No. I think God really does grow us in those moments. I think it's about looking for signs of hope and looking for the shoots of spring, even in a winter landscape. I really reflected after that retreat with you. Why did I just stand up? I don't really think I'm in winter, but I just did it. As I've been thinking about that a little bit, just because the situation is hard does not mean that it's a winter season. Because we can be in a hard situation in any season. I think it also goes back to gratitude. If we're only looking at the half empty or the next emergency, we miss the beauty of the moment. I write about this a lot because I have to learn it is that being present to the moment and that small moment mindfulness of here is where I see the shoots of spring or the full-blown daffodils or whatever, in this hard situation. To repeat what I said, winter has gotten this bad rap. It's not just a hard situation. It's a growing, rich season that we can get rest in actually and sink into a little bit. I appreciate you sharing that because I think we don't think of it that way.

Jennifer: Yeah, when I look back on my life, the season where God has grown me most has been in winter, there's no doubt about it. Also, just like Hal Borland says, "No winter lasts forever, no spring skips its turn. Spring outside has finally come." We've had so much snow this year. It's been unbelievable. You know that eventually, there's going to be a robin bopping around your yard. You know that that snow is going to melt. You know that the sun is going to shine again. It's just the way it works. The same is true of us as people. I think that you're really on to something about that. I think we idolize or idealize spring, summer and harvest. We see those as being the seasons that have real value, partly because of a culture idealizing progress, and what growth looks like and all of those things. There are metrics, and there's a way to tell if you're really growing. That's pretty easy to figure out what that looks like in spring, summer, and autumn. What does growth look like in winter? I think growth in winter is more of a below-ground growth, whereas it can be invisible, but that is the growth that makes the growth in other seasons. It really makes things bloom in ways that they couldn't otherwise.

Amy: The idea of snow, I live in Michigan, so we get a lot of snow too that covers the ground. I like to think of winter as an extra covering by God as things are growing in us. That's why I loved your books. 
There's all these seasons, and it's such an encouraging book in growing slow. One of my favorite quotes, actually, on my dry-erase board in my office, is: "Slow down and let the living hope of a living God engulf you." I love that quote. I love the word engulf because it's a big word. It's not ripple over you a little bit. It's encircling you.

Jennifer: Yeah, that's a great, great picture. 

Amy: I really love that quote. I want to talk about your next book because one of the things that I think helps us see the shoots of spring in the summer stuff is paying attention and taking notice of things. Your new book is Stuff I'd Only Tell God: A Guided Journal of Courageous Honesty, Obsessive Truth-Telling, and Beautifully Ruthless Self-discovery. Now, my question is, do you remember your subtitle? because I can never remember ours. I always have to write it down.

Jennifer: I would literally be sitting here right now reading it while we're talking. I would have to always. Interestingly, I wrote that subtitle on a Wednesday night while Scott and I were watching something on Netflix. I don't even remember what it was. He asked, "What are you doing on your phone?" I'm in my notes, and the subtitle is coming to me. It was so much fun. I remember how it came about. I remember why I say these things. But can I recite it back to you? No

Amy: I want to tell you. First, I'm a writer, so I'm a journaler. I opened up the book, and my first thought was, this is gonna be a lot of I'm really upset with God. It is so delightful. I opened it up. I don't mean this in a negative way. It's all over the place. It's got all kinds of things in it. 

Jennifer: It is all over the place. You never know what's gonna happen when you turn the page.

Amy: I read through some of the prompts. Some of them are: back in your childhood and nostalgia. What's the soundtrack of your life? Here's the feeling I had when I skimmed through it, because I haven't started it yet. I took a deep breath and went, oh, here I am. This is me. I think, as a mom and as a special needs mom, I think our listeners are going to love this book because we're so identified with our special needs kids and our roles. Here I am, the silly things about me. The serious things about me. How did this book come about? You've never written a book like this, right? How did this come into being? I'd love to know.

Jennifer: Yeah, it's so different because every other book I've written is like the book that you wrote. It's a book with chapters and lots of words and kind of a clear path toward an ending where this is what I hope the reader experiences by the end of the book. This one is something entirely different. This book is literally about you or whoever is listening. I say that there are some books that you lose yourself. 
There's some books that you find yourself, and this is the find yourself kind. I am a very back-off person here. You hardly see me except at the beginning. This becomes the story that you tell about yourself. It came about because I love asking questions. Some people will say I'm really nosy. I don't mean to be nosy or annoying. I'm really just genuinely interested in what's going on in people's lives. I love having people over for dinner and just digging in. I would love to be a podcaster and ask questions. I mean, it's already in you. You're a question asker too. I was a news reporter for a lot of years, and I asked really good questions. I was good at that. I got great stories as a result. But one thing I didn't do very well is explore myself with that level of intentionality. When I began to do that, and when I began to interrogate the Bible, like I interrogated police chiefs and mayors, I learned a lot about God. Literally, question-asking and waiting for answers changed my life. That's how I arrived at a saving faith because I interrogated the Bible immensely and deeply, and so that's been such a part of my journey. I've also been a journaler for a long time. A lot of times in my journaling I thought, I don't know what to say, and I'm a writer. I still sometimes don't know what to say. I thought, what would it be like to pick 100 or 1000 of my favorite questions, both deep and weird, and put them all together? It's kind of a journey from womb to tomb because it starts with the people who have influenced you since you were a baby. You go through your past, then you go through your present, and then you go through your future. At the end, I'm like, hey, what's your tombstone look like? If you get cremated, where do you want your ashes to be? What do you think heaven is going to be like? What do you think will be on the 24-hour buffet there? Weird questions like, who do you want to talk to there? What do you think your house will look like? Who will be surprised to see you in heaven? Who do you hope that you don't have to live by in heaven? It's really like honest questions that make you think. I also think, just to have fun. I even have like a section in there about what we just got done talking about. I have a whole section called the seasons of my life. In it, you describe what season you're in right now. there's no judgment. Nobody's saying you shouldn't be in the winter season. The question, after you pick your season, is, here's what I want to say to God about the season I'm in right now. It's permission just to be where you are. There's no pressure. There's no judgment. If you took my question: these are things that confuse me about God. There's no Bible verse afterward to say, oh, but don't you know that God is in control? Let me now share these five verses with you. Most people know that, but they need a space to be real with God. They need a space to be silly, and they need a space to be; this is how God made me, and I am so weird and wonderful, and quirky and silly. That's all really wonderful and delightful. All of those things together came into Stuff I'd Only Tell God. I call it your own little confession booth because it's a mind dump of everything that I could think of to put into the journal.


Amy: It looks so fun. As I said, I'm a journaler, but a lot of my journaling is trying to figure out life, and it's kind of more serious, but this is going to be really fun to do. Once again, as I said, there you are, here I am, this is me here, and I get to put the things that are weird, or things about my childhood or whatever. It's really delightful. I want to encourage you, and I know you have words for this. What if a person goes, oh, I hate journaling, and I'm just not a journaler? What do you say? Because I think this is the book for them.

Jennifer: Yeah, I think a lot of times, the reason people don't journal is because they don't really don't know where to start. A blank page can be really intimidating. This is a guided journal, so it takes them on a journey. There's nobody saying now you have to do this page. You can skip around, choose your adventure, and do whatever. Maybe you just need a day of lighthearted questions asking yourself, would I really survive a zombie apocalypse? Let me think about that. I mean, that's a question in there. Then maybe that's what you need to get warmed up. But the thing is, even the deep parts are really important. Journaling has been a practice, and I'm not a therapist. I know from talking to therapists that this is a practice that is encouraged to help you declutter your mind, to help you put some of your worries down on paper, kind of like the way you do your brain dump. It helps you unravel some things and let it be and let it go a little bit. It's in a place that helps you do that. It really is a healing practice. I think for me, it helps me when I've answered the questions to understand why I am the way I am. It's helped me to treat myself more empathetically. Not only the me of today but the me who I was right 20 or 30 years ago. All of those things added together make journaling worth it, even for non-journalers authors. Finally, I think one reason that people don't do it is because they're afraid they'll suddenly die and people will find it. So, hide it well, or burn it when you're done or something. 

Amy: I have a friend who has letters from her husband. She says If I die, here's where they are. They're from when they were dating. I don't want my kids to read them. Here's where they are. If she dies, it's my mission to get rid of them.

Jennifer: Thank you. Because when I decluttered my office, Scott's like, throw those away. I say I couldn't bear to. But what if the kids come across those? Now I have a plan. He told me to throw them away. I am going to tell two of my best friends what to do with them. 

Amy: This is what you need to do. The minute you hear about me, you need to go right to my closet. I'm so excited about this book. One of the things as a special needs mom is that I have a little bit of a practice that I write. This is what I want to remember. I write that every morning about the day before. It may be something as simple as the sun out or the moon, but sometimes it's memories. 
I want to go back and see it's not always winter. Here's where God was faithful. Here's where I laughed out loud at things. Here's where life was wonderful, and life was happening. I think this is going to be such a great tool for special needs moms. I know you're busy, but this is so doable. My question do you think you would survive a zombie apocalypse?

Jennifer: I will. I would. The reason is that my husband has assured me that we would make it. We used to watch Walking Dead, which I do not necessarily recommend, and we had to stop walking watching it. It was invading my thoughts. I would literally drive around thinking, now, what if it happened? It was getting in my head. It was violent anyway. I think I could. It's because we have a farm. Scott's resourceful. We might have waves of zombies come by from the big city of Sioux Falls. For the most part, I think we could have our own little compound, and then we would have our moms here, and some friends from church, and we'd make it we do. We'd do all right. 

Amy: I think I would. First of all, I’m a farm girl, but also my husband calls me the Oregon Trail wife. I would have made it to Oregon, and he would not have. It’s a fun question. Our family was laughing about this question the other day. Which one of our kids would most likely be a cult leader? Everybody weighed in, and we know who it is. It would be the most charismatic.

Jennifer: I love this question. If I do a second version. I might have to add that question. That’s brilliant.

Amy: Thank you for being here today. I’m excited for our listeners who don’t know you to get to know you through your new book and your book Growing Slow. I think it’s going to be a great resource for them.