Hi, I'm Megan and I'm Sarah. We're two moms with eight kids between us and we're the hosts of the mom hour.

On this show, we're joined by a team of unique mom voices from across the country and in different stages of motherhood to bring you tips, ideas and encouragement and to help you feel a little less alone.

We all know that motherhood is a lot easier when real moms share honest truths and remind each other that it's all going to be okay.

We're not experts, we're parents who've been there.

We're not perfect, we're real. Welcome to the mom hour.

Hi there. Welcome to the mom hour. I am Megan Francis here with Sarah powers. Hey, Sarah. I'm Megan. How are you?

Oh, I'm ready to dive into this episode big time. We are coming into your ears on a Sunday to talk about romanticizing hard stuff, romanticizing life, romanticizing monotony. However, you want to put it.

Um, this is kind of funny. This is going to be one of those like showing my age moments, but a few months ago, our friend Amy Clark of mom advice and she has a great book related podcast.

She and her, I believe it was her email newsletter. She was talking about seeing like the younger generation. I think she was really talking about like Jens ears romanticizing.

Um, living really simply and frugally and like romanticizing beans. And I thought, oh, that's, you know, what I would have called putting a positive spin on things, but what I didn't realize at the time is that this whole idea of romanticizing is a trend.

Basically, that probably started on TikTok and finally made its way over to where TikTok goes to die Instagram, which is where I am.

45 year old lady Instagram. Sure. Yes, exactly. Or not to die, but to become irrelevant, you know, or to become kind of mainstream. So that's when I, that's what I realized. Oh, this is a thing people are talking about.

So I have a comment in a question. One, I think I was even less familiar with this trend.

But vaguely so when you brought it up and I did a quick Google and I found a May 2022 New York Times article that traced it really back to the pandemic, which makes a ton of sense because early pandemic times required such a reframe and while we're going to get into how it's not healthy to reframe true trauma and things like that.

We're going to get into that. But for a lot of us in those early quarantine days, I think there was this pull to like, okay, this is, this is my life. Now what are the little silver linings or what, how can we romanticize this new reality?

This moment in time. Yeah. That was interesting. We can link to that New York Times piece because I was like, what is this trend? But the other thing, this is like an actual question for you.

Megan, as you understand it, those romanticizing the hard stuff or romanticizing regular everyday life, does it mean that we embrace it with a sort of a positive mindset or does it mean that we actually take steps to add a bit of

sparkle and romance like the New York Times article mentioned one tick-tocker who was ironing eucalyptus leaves to hang in her shower as a way to like, I think of that as like what are small ways to

beautify or specify your everyday existence. Is that how you understand it or is it simply like, no, we're just reframing the fact that we're broken eating beans as like, this is a, this is the time of our lives.

And is it a mindset or are we actually adding sparkle?

I think it depends on the content creator because I think that there are people who are basically just like, this is what we're so, okay, let's just say the recession that never really happened or is still happening.

I have no one seems to know. Let's just take that as an example. If people are eating a lot of beans because they're inexpensive.

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