Welcome to the Shameless Mom Academy. I'm your host, Sarah Dean, and I'm here to give you and

other passionate, dedicated moms the tools you need to bridge the gap between motherhood

and living the life of your dreams. I'm also here to help you be a little more shameless every day,

because if you aren't building a life, you're extraordinarily

proud of. What kind of legacy are you building? So let's dive in. Michelle Duncan Wilson is the

founder of soulwork for moms, an online resource for mothers who are struggling. Michelle knows

that mothering is all things, joyous, painful, amazing, terrifying, and the list goes

on and on. One thing's for sure, though, it's seldom what you thought it would be. Soulwork for

moms shares the stories of motherhood and provides resources to help you grow. Michelle is the mother

of three children, ages 17, 8, and 3, and she lives with her husband and her children in

Cincinnati, Ohio. I am so grateful to Michelle for coming on today. We had such a fantastic time

talking about her life experience and just the amazing wisdom she has built and captured

over her years in parenting. Becoming a mom at 17 is kind of a life-changing thing.

And so she's going to talk about what that was like when she was 17 and what that's like now

that she has a daughter who is 17. So Michelle is going to talk about life as a teen mom.

She's going to talk about how she crammed 40 years of life experience into her first

25 years of life, including having a child, getting married, getting divorced, buying a house,

all these big, huge life experiences that she just did right out of the gates. So she's going to

talk about all that. She's going to talk about what she wants her 17-year-old daughter to know about being a 17-year-old mom. She's going to talk about how mothering has been

different, but not easier with her younger children that she had later in life. She's going to talk

about why we are not meant to mold our children, but to accept them in any shape they are.

She's going to talk about why mothering pain is not for nothing,

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