Reimagining Community - Lizz Enns Petters & Esther Joy Goetz

In this third-to-last episode of Deconstructing Mamas, we talk about one of the biggest questions we’ve been asked over the past four years:

What does community look like now, after everything we’ve lost?

For so many of us, the communities we left behind were built around sameness — shared beliefs, shared behaviors, shared expectations. Belonging depended on staying inside the lines, and when we stepped outside them, everything changed.

In this honest conversation, we explore:

• what we were actually grieving when those communities fell apart
• how the loss showed up in our bodies, rhythms, and spiritual lives
• the tension of wanting connection again but fearing hurt or misunderstanding
• what we truly need from community now (and what we’re no longer willing to sacrifice)
• the surprising, tender ways new community has begun to grow

We talk about Esther’s spiritual direction cohort, our online book club, and the friends who love us with no agenda. And we talk about Lizz’s experience finding unexpected connection with the moms at her small-town school — community without pressure, performance, or shrinking.

If you’re in the in-between — grieving what was and unsure what comes next — this episode is for you.

There is a way forward.
It may be smaller, softer, slower…but it will be truer.

And you’ll know it by how deeply you can breathe there.