This is a Personal Touch, a chance to check in with ordinary people making an extraordinary difference in the world. I’m Rebecca Cressman. And today our guest is Saren Eyre Loosli. She is the mom behind The Power of Moms which is a growing online community of mothers. And the underline of The Power of Moms’ title on the site says Saren, “Growing ourselves, building each other, and shaping the future.” You’re the mom of five children. When did you get the idea and the time to say, “You know what? I’m not just going to build my children. I want to help other moms build their kids, too, and themselves.”
A: Well, my background is really in training and development. I have a master’s in education and I worked with educators all over the country and did lots of different training. Then I started having my kids and realized that, first of all, I didn’t want to be doing that full time anymore and I wanted to be with my kids. But then I thought, “You know, there’s not a lot of training out there for moms.” Here I am, struggling with these little kids of my own, thinking, ‘I can turn to my mom. I can turn to my aunt. I can turn to my grandma. And there are lots of great books and there are lots of informal groups of moms that’ll get together and chat at the park or whatever.’ But there just wasn’t a lot of resources that I could find that offered me the chance to talk about motherhood as a serious pursuit. Not to just talk about potty training and not to just talk about recipes, but to talk about motherhood and how it was changing me as a person and how I could become the mother that I truly wanted to be.
Q: Well that makes perfect sense, really! If you had your master’s in education and you were working and looking at training and development that you would look also at the role of a mother, and realize it is so complex and it does require so many different skills. Yet people have said before, “You don’t even have to have a license or a permit to become a mom.” The education and the information we need isn’t just transplanted in our brains when the first child is born.
A: Yes. They hand you the baby. They kind of give you some tips on breastfeeding and they send you home. And it’s hard. Everyone will tell you motherhood is just… everyone speaks about the respect they have for motherhood, “What a hard job it is; what an important job it is.” So when it came right down to it, there just weren’t a lot of resources that I could find to help me become a truly wonderful mother. So I found wonderful books and of course my mom has written beautiful books and that was extremely helpful. But even given all the resources and help that I had, I still felt that I needed more support, and that I wanted to learn from other mothers that were actually in the trenches that were dealing with the same kinds of things that I was dealing with and had things to say—things that they had learned the hard way. I wanted to learn from them. So I actually was able to meet another wonderful woman that felt very much the same way as I felt, April Perry, and the two of us really worked together. Put our heads together, and put together a lot of writing that we had done on motherhood and invited a lot of our other friends to enjoy writing about motherhood and started putting together this little website, The Power of Moms. It really grew from there. We have really attracted a lot of wonderful mom writers, a lot of mom bloggers that wanted to have an opportunity to share their writing with a larger circle. It’s just a lot of people contributing their writing and ideas: short pieces, long pieces, essays, quick little moments that they wanted to share. Then we developed a bunch of programs that would support that writing and that would offer opportunities to take things a little step further.
Q: Well, and so the people can read those essays. They can read those experiences that people have shared. But they can also find the hands-on advice that you said, “It’s not just about potty training,” but boy that can be one of the most difficult six months to a year experience for a new mom to realize, “Okay, this is really tough.” So you’ve got the hands-on advice as well.
A: So we do offer a lot of hands-on advice, but the thing that we think separates The Power of Moms from—and there’s so many really good mom websites out there that offer a lot of advice about shopping or about potty training or about discipline. I mean, there are a lot of resources out there. But what kind of differentiates The Power of Moms and what April and I felt we really needed to offer moms, and to offer ourselves, was the opportunity to really help the mom develop herself as a person while being the best mom she could be. And so The Power of Moms is a place for moms to contribute their writing, to learn from each other, and to participate in different kinds of fun programs where they can get together with other moms using the materials that we supply and really talk about different topics of motherhood on a little bit deeper level, a little bit more meaningful level. To get away from the basic logistics of motherhood and get into some of the deeper things like: who am I becoming and how can I be more patient? What are the things that are hard for me? What are the pursuits that I miss? I miss everybody. How could I do that more often? Those kinds of things that a lot of moms are losing themselves as they become a mom. And I don’t think that’s really what is meant to be as a mom. We’re not supposed to lose ourselves. We’re supposed to become our own very best self through the hardship and the wonderful things of motherhood. And that’s what The Power of Moms is about.
Q: And you mentioned it and you have three different sections: a section for you, a section for your family, and a section beyond. And you say, “Inside every mom is a living, breathing person who needs to be nurtured and developed.” And then you also go back to the point so that she can be the kind of mom she’s meant to be. Do you think when you go to a classroom, you go back to education usually when you’re going to present a lesson or curriculum and you have an objective in mind. Do you think that very often we really haven’t sat down to say, “What kind of mom do I really want to be?” And define it enough so we can work towards those goals? Do you think we just put a ‘fantasy mom’ up there rather than really saying, “What kind of mom do I want to be?” And then analyzing yourself honestly and trying to get there?
A: I love that you asked that. We don’t take the opportunity to do that very often. More often just trying to make ends meet and get through the day and keep our patience and get through the laundry. I mean, there are just all those things that are thrown at us all the time as moms. We’re just trying to keep running, to keep standing upright. And sometimes we really do need to take a step back like you’re saying and say, “Well wait, what do I really want to be? What do I want my kids to remember about me? What are some things that I want to be developing in myself that I could probably do along with my kids?” We go hiking all the time as a family because I love the outdoors and I love to share that with my kids. I love to read with my kids and that develops—I have a huge interest in literature. I can share that with my kids. And we’re trying to help moms see how they can bring together their personal needs and their personal interests and the things that they’ve always dreamed of doing as a mom and as a person. They can do those things and be much better moms than if they just try to set that all to the side and just focus purely on the semantics and the basics of being a mom.
Q: As this online community has grown, Saren, word has spread and then you have other mothers that say, “I always wanted to be a writer;” or “I was a writer and then I stopped writing at 25 because I didn’t have time anymore.” So is it through the word spreading that other moms who have these abilities and that also have the experience of motherhood, those two factors combined are bringing them to The Power of Moms so that they can share themselves and their ideas with others?
A: Exactly. You’ve got it exactly right. It has been wonderful to see moms that have come out of the woodwork and said, “Oh, you know, I have this blog and I wish I could share with more people,” and they will send stuff our way. Or there are people that used to do writing or loved doing it when they were back in college, and here they’re having a chance to organize their thoughts and to really think, “What do I think?” And putting it down on paper and sharing it with other moms. It’s something you could do with 15 minutes a day. You can find a little minute and write down your thoughts and share them with others. It’s been powerful to see how many moms have come to our website, both to read—some people just come to read and that’s wonderful—and others come to share what they know and others come for our programs. We have a goal setting program. We have a wonderful organizing program. We have a program where we give materials to moms so they can get together and have like a book group, but they’re just reading articles rather than a whole book; articles about motherhood. They come together every month and discuss the article that they all read together that month. That’s called Learning Circles and I just love that.
Q: I was wondering about that and it seems to me it would be a little bit easier to spend time reading a five-page article than maybe a 150-page to 250-page book, even if that’s what you love. But it makes it that much more accessible.
A: It makes it very accessible. Every mom could find 15 minutes to half an hour to read the articles that we provide for in this little Learning Circles program and then they just get together. It’s a fun girls’ night out. You trade off whose house you go to. You sit in a circle. You talk about the topics that really matter. You talk about what things do I wish I could find more time for? You share ideas about how you could do more of the things that you’d like to do. You talk about one of the topics in our Learning Circles program which is: Am I destined to live in a pigsty? That’s the topic all moms wonder sometimes and they all share their ideas. How do we get a handle on the clutter in our lives? How do we organize our cleaning schedules? People have great ideas. The Learning Circles give them a chance to share it. There’s another Learning Circle topic called “Mommy is a Person” where you get together and talk about, “Hey, we’re people as well as moms.” How do we take care of our personhood and the things that we love and our own little personal passions? The things that we wish we had more time for? Can we actually find time for those things in our life? Maybe we can in small little bites. So there are all these different topics that we’ve put together that really resonate with the mothers that we’ve worked with. And they have this wonderful do-it-yourself course in motherhood called Learning Circles where they just get together every month and we provide them with all the discussion questions, all of the instructions, and all the articles that they need to really feel like they’re progressing as moms and as people at the same time.
Q: I have to think that as a woman ten years ago, did you imagine that you would be at the center of something called The Power of Moms? I mean, is this something that kind of grew with you organically as you started to grow your family? Or is this something, being the daughter of Linda Eyre who devoted so much of her life to helping other parents develop those skills, is this something that was kind of an embryo in you before you ever started your family, or is this something new?
A: I think we were—my whole family—we were raised to be people that would be involved in the world and involved in trying to make things better. Whatever we saw needed fixing, we were raised to try to fix it. And so certainly, I think I have to give my parents huge credit for the fact that I would be thinking this way and that I would come to this. And I so appreciate the parenting that they taught me through their own example. The reaching out that they taught me through their own example. So certainly I see that. But honestly, I thought I was going into training and development and I was going to be changing education systems in our country. It was going to be this wonderful thing that would certainly be giving and helping. Sure I would have kids and that would be great, too. But once I got into actually being a mom, I realized, “You know what? I think I need to put my training and my education stuff towards this, towards motherhood because what could be more important.” So that’s how I came towards it. And certainly it’s different than I anticipated. I thought I’d be working with all the schools at this point in my life as I had started off doing. But this is so much more fulfilling because this has to do with what matters most to me personally and what matters most to other women out there. So I just love that my past has brought me to this.
Q: What a beautiful story! And, Saren Eyre Loosli, thank you so much for joining us today and taking time in a life as you mentioned, with five children; that is busy already and your arms are full. Yet you’re taking time as an individual to develop yourself and continue to develop your individual talents. And to bless the lives of so many other women who find The Power of Moms online or maybe in their Learning Circles. Thank you so much for joining us, Saren.
A: Well, it’s a pleasure to be here. I just have found that you take one little chip at a time; you do what you can to make a difference. It’s wonderful for you as well as for those that you’re reaching out to.
Q: Saren Eyre Loosli. I’m Rebecca Cressman; we want to thank you for joining us for this week’s edition of a Personal Touch. Be sure to check your email next week to find out who else is making a difference in our world with a Personal Touch.
End of interview.
