Now available in print, Kindle, and on Audible! Check it out on Amazon here.

What women are saying:

“Raw vulnerability and profound truth. I wish I had read this book years ago.” ~ Danielle Wheeler (founder of Velvet Ashes)

“Wise encouragement. A fresh and honest voice.” ~ Michèle Phoenix (Christianity Today book award winner, TCK expert, and author of Pieces of Purple and Of Stillness and Storm)

“Thoughtful and courageous.” ~ Rachel Pieh Jones (author of Stronger than Death and Pillars)

“A readable and beautiful theological treatise on womanhood.” ~ Marilyn Gardner (author of Between Worlds and Worlds Apart)

“Left me feeling hope-filled and encouraged as I juggle all of my own hats.” ~ Lauren Wells (founder of TCK Training and author of The Grief Tower and What Made That Feel So Hard?)

I’m so excited about this book. For the last few years, I’ve been dreaming of publishing an updated version of my original Hats: Reflections on Life as a Wife, Homeschool Teacher, Missionary, and More, and it’s finally happening!

There’s tons of new material in this book. It’s nearly twice as long as Hats, but I also took out about half the original material, as it was reprinted in Serving Well. I reorganized the sections and fully edited each chapter, so this is very much a brand-new book.

Matthew Stock designed this beautiful cover, coordinating it to Jonathan’s Digging in the Dirt while also reflecting the original Hats cover that Jonathan created for me.

So that you can get a better idea for what this book is all about, I’m going to share the back cover material for The Hats We Wear, along with the new preface and the original preface from 2018. Enjoy!

Back Cover

Little girls don’t know they’re going to grow up to be women who wear so many hats. Daughter, sister, friend. Professional, mother, wife. Our hats can weigh us down, and our vocations can exhaust us. The roles we inhabit stretch us in so many directions that we sometimes fear we will break.

Sometimes we even forget who we are.

In The Hats We Wear, Elizabeth Trotter takes us back to the beginning, to the foundation of our faith and who we are as children of God and daughters of the King. She explores our intense emotional worlds and the work of embodied living, then leans into the three specific hats of marriage, motherhood, and homeschooling.

Join Elizabeth on this journey of reflection. Walk with her as she seeks God amidst the hats of female life. Sit with her in the mundane and the sacred. Wrestle with the practical and philosophical implications of living life as a woman of faith.

As you read, you’ll meet someone who frequently does things the hard way first, flailing around worrying and wasting time on unnecessary details. But in seeking the Lord and listening to the wise people in her life, she eventually finds a path forward. 

She invites you to do the same.

Preface to The Hats We Wear (2025)

In the spring of 2018, my husband Jonathan decided to surprise me with a sweet Mother’s Day gift: a book of my writings about womanhood. He gathered articles I’d written on theology, marriage, motherhood, and homeschooling and published the collection on Amazon. He called it Hats: Reflections on Life as a Wife, Mother, Homeschool Teacher, Missionary, and More. I loved the cover he designed and was grateful to have a lot of my writing in one place.

The next year, however, Jonathan and I published Serving Well: Help for the Wannabe, Newbie, or Weary Cross-cultural Christian Worker, and much of the material in Hats was republished there. Over the years, I kept writing, and eventually I realized I wanted to update Hats, adding some newer content and removing duplicate material, much of which related more to my life as a missionary in Southeast Asia than to the broader conversation of Christian womanhood.

So for this version of the book, I removed a dozen chapters and added over twenty-five more, keeping only sixteen from the original twenty-nine. I wanted to distinguish this book from Serving Well, which focuses on ministry life, though I did keep a few chapters which are too foundational to my life and faith to remove. I’ve thoroughly edited and rewritten each chapter, so this is basically a new book.

The first three sections are hats that all women wear, regardless of whether they are married or have children: the practical theologian, emotional human, and embodied woman hats. Then in the second section I dig into the more specific hats of wife, mom, and homeschool teacher. I hope that the words contained in these pages will resonate with your lived experience and that we will forge a bond across space and time.

In preparing this book for publication, I was struck by how similar my struggles have been throughout my life. How wise my past self seemed, fresh from the fires of learning a lesson I find myself re-learning in the present. We are forgetful creatures, and so the Lord must teach us again and again. Is it any wonder He tells us so often to remember?

And so I offer these stories to you, trusting that they will speak to your heart and mind through the goodness of the God who calls us to Himself. May we seek Him first, above all others.

Preface to Hats (2018)

No matter your background or experiences, being a woman is hard. That’s partly because being a human is hard. It’s also due to the many roles we women tend to carry in life. Daughter, sister, friend. Professional, mother, wife. Marriage and motherhood are indeed holy vocations, and they require much of a woman. Whether we work outside the home or from within it, our vocations sometimes stretch us so much that we fear we will break.

The truth is, there’s not a lot of preparation for marriage or motherhood. Certainly, we can read books. We can read books on how to have a great sex life or how to build a godly marriage or how to live out biblical submission, but when it really comes down to it, we marry a human person, not a book, and our husbands also marry a human person—us. A lot of marriage is simply trying new ways of doing things and seeing if they work (including, at times, seeking professional or pastoral help).

It’s the same with motherhood. We can read books on natural childbirth, healthy homemade baby food, and the most godly parenting—or the most logical. But nothing can really prepare us for meeting our child, some mysterious arrangement of our own DNA, or someone else’s. No one can prepare us for their likes or their dislikes, their strengths or their weaknesses. We have to discover these things for ourselves, over time.

What follows in this book is precisely that: the things I’ve discovered over time. There are articles and essays on marriage, motherhood, homeschooling, and the Christian life. In case you don’t know me, here’s a bit of background: As of this writing I’ve been married for nearly eighteen years, having gotten married at the age of eighteen. I’ve been a ministry wife almost that entire time and have been living overseas as a missionary wife for the past six years. I’ve been a mom for fourteen years and have been homeschooling for nine. This book is my lived experience wearing all those hats.

Find The Hats We Wear on Amazon in ebook, paperback, and audio book versions.