Pearl - April 11, 2025


She Had Kids at 40… Now She’s Exhausted and Full of Regret 😓


Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

180.39787

Word count

1,732

Sentence count

128

Harmful content

Misogyny

12

sentences flagged

Hate speech

11

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In 2019, only 51% of 30-year-olds in the United States had been married compared to in 1962, when 90% of women were married at least once. Women who waited until an older age to have kids are sharing their stories.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 modern women will wake up between the ages of 33 to 37, rush to have a kid, 1.00
00:00:04.820 find a husband, or both. I can't talk enough about the modern women life cycle we have 1.00
00:00:10.880 established here on Pearl Daily, and I think it's fairly accurate. I've sent it to other
00:00:15.720 creators that I know, and they've verified its validity. Now, I can't recap the whole thing here,
00:00:22.480 but go back to my previous episodes of Pearl Daily to hear the whole thing. Today, we're
00:00:27.380 going to be talking about points four and five of the modern woman life cycle, with four
00:00:32.560 being that modern women will wake up between the ages of 33 to 37, rush to have a kid, find 0.87
00:00:38.260 a husband, or both. And number five being modern women will hit their late 30s and early 40s 0.98
00:00:44.340 and try to get pregnant either by a loser or by IVF. Modern women will rush to have kids, 1.00
00:00:51.740 and some of them will get what they want. They'll find a man who is irresponsible enough to have
00:00:56.640 a kid by or become a single mother and get inseminated by IVF to be a single mother by
00:01:03.880 choice. But when this happens, they end up being older mothers. Now, many of these women find more 0.79
00:01:10.580 fulfillment in parenting than they ever would have found in their careers or schools. That's when
00:01:16.800 regret starts creeping in. There is a growing group of women that admit they wish they had kids 1.00
00:01:22.620 sooner. They admit that raising a child when they're older has a whole nother set of problems
00:01:28.060 that they did not anticipate. That's what we're going to talk about today. Modern women wishing 1.00
00:01:35.360 they had kids sooner. So, okay, here's an article from BuzzFeed. I don't regret having my son,
00:01:45.160 but I regret what I've given to him by having him later in life. Women who waited until an older 1.00
00:01:53.660 age to have kids are sharing their stories. Nowadays, there are multitude of reasons why
00:01:59.060 women are choosing to get married or have children at an older age. In 2019, only 51% of 30-year-olds in
00:02:06.720 the United States had been married compared to in 1962 when 90% of 30-year-olds had been married at least
00:02:13.580 once. In a previous post, dozens of people from the BuzzFeed community shared their reasoning.
00:02:22.080 Next, I want to dive deeper into the kids part. So, I asked people who did wait to become parents
00:02:28.860 at a later age if they're happy with their decision or if there was anything they wished
00:02:33.140 they did differently had their circumstances been different. Before sharing their stories,
00:02:37.980 it's worth reiterating that there's no right or wrong timeline to choose to have kids or not have kids
00:02:42.840 because everyone is so different because it is important to openly talk about this topic because
00:02:48.040 it's nuanced and full of varying and valid perspectives. You can find several of these
00:02:54.220 perspectives below. So, one woman says,
00:02:59.360 my husband and I have been married for almost 10 years with little birth control beside the pull-out
00:03:04.980 method. It's a great method. Okay. I was fine with waiting to have kids first when I was 30 and he
00:03:12.900 was 35. We started wanting to have kids since we'd already traveled quite a bit and bought a home.
00:03:17.500 After two years of infertility and one miscarriage, we went through IVF and I had my first daughter at
00:03:22.220 32 and second daughter at 34. I love them both to pieces. He comes from a large family with lots of
00:03:29.140 siblings. We are both from a culture that values large families. I would have loved to have more
00:03:34.080 kids but I'm just too tired. Having a kid in your 20s versus your 30s isn't the same. You have so much
00:03:39.580 less energy or at least that's the case for me. We're done having kids. He had a vasectomy which was his
00:03:45.120 wish and I'm kind of sad that I'm never going to go through pregnancy labor and have another addition
00:03:49.420 to the family. We do have one leftover embryo that I keep in the back of my mind just in case.
00:03:55.240 Translation. I'm going to find someone else to make me kid number two. Watch out husband. Okay.
00:04:03.320 No regrets here at least not for any of the common reasons mentioned. My regret is that my children's
00:04:08.220 grandparents are older too and that my children will lose them at a younger age than I lost mine.
00:04:13.640 The life, the care, and the wisdom grandparents share is invaluable. Number three. I waited until I
00:04:19.680 found the right partner. We met at 35 and married at 37 and instantly began trying to expand our
00:04:26.520 families. We've gone through multiple miscarriages, failed IVF cycles, and a failed donor egg cycle.
00:04:33.500 I wish I would have been more educated about my body and known how hard it is for a woman of advanced 1.00
00:04:38.360 maternal age to try to conceive. Not one OBGYN spoke to me about freezing my eggs. Not one OBGYN ever spoke
00:04:46.580 to me about my eggs and how age affects them. While I was aware that egg quality declines as you age,
00:04:52.180 I was not prepared for the reality that I've now gone through. I never thought to ask questions
00:04:58.080 when I was younger while actively avoiding getting pregnant. It makes me sad that I was never taught
00:05:03.740 about my own body. Okay. She was 37. Damn. Okay. I had my first child one year ago and I'm very happy.
00:05:14.040 I have no problems getting pregnant after 20 years of birth control. It was an easy pregnancy.
00:05:18.860 I have a loving husband who splits care, child care responsibilities, two sets of retired
00:05:24.320 grandparents who live close by and allow my husband and I to have a weekly date night.
00:05:28.320 We can afford a nanny, which makes life so much easier. I'm so glad I waited. So she was anonymous 1.00
00:05:34.020 and she's 40. So yeah, you know, again, this is all a roll of the dice, right? The same way when men
00:05:39.800 get married, it's a roll of the dice. Fertility, it's a roll of the dice. Like 10% of us have,
00:05:45.740 I think it's called endometriosis, cooked, done, nice, guinata. Really, it's not the worst idea to
00:05:55.700 be tested for that at a young age. You know what I mean? Just to make sure. I didn't end up getting
00:06:01.640 married until 34. Then I got right to work having kids ASAP. I had three kids when I was 36, 38 and
00:06:07.640 40. Respectively, if I had to do it over again, I would definitely have kids at a younger age. I am
00:06:12.280 now 54 and do not nearly have the same energy I would have if I were younger. I'm also scared of
00:06:17.080 having a major health problem before I can get my kids out of the house and through college. Also in
00:06:21.700 terms of helping for college, I'll only have a few years left to work before I retire, all while having
00:06:26.480 to help my kids through college. So it's not the best timing. I think ahead to grandchildren as well.
00:06:31.980 Will I have the energy and health to be a good grandma? Will I be able to help my kids out if
00:06:37.260 they need? A lot of unknowns. Kelly, 43. Number six, Doug MPA on the website says, Pearl Reed, women want 1.00
00:06:46.240 the wedding and not the marriage. Modern women want the pregnancy and the birth, but they don't want to 1.00
00:06:51.260 be married. It's sad. I don't even really think they want the kid. Like, I don't think they really
00:06:57.280 want the kid. They just want, um, they, what they want is the pregnancy, you know, the clout of being 0.94
00:07:08.420 a mom. That's really important, but being a mom, I don't think they really like that much. Okay.
00:07:15.080 That's not their favorite thing. Okay. Um, I loved having the freedom without kids. When I was in my
00:07:21.960 twenties and thirties, I could focus on myself now that I'm older. I have the money, the patience and
00:07:26.760 the time to give my kids a better version of me more than 20 years ago. No regrets. Next. I waited
00:07:34.480 until my career and finances were stable, which took me until the age of 34. Unfortunately, I started
00:07:40.080 developing an eating disorder in my early thirties, which may have significantly inhibited my ability
00:07:47.060 to conceive. My spouse and I are actively trying to get pregnant, but I'm terrified that we completely
00:07:52.040 missed our window. Yeah, you did cooked, cooked. I mean, that's cooked. I mean, I keep saying this on
00:07:59.560 the show because we keep, I mean, we're cooked. Like I do think like, I don't think the world's going to
00:08:06.040 and I think like society will be fine relatively for my whole lifetime. But in terms of like the
00:08:11.520 nuclear family, one mom, one dad and kids cooked, I mean, that's cooked. C O O K cook, E D cooked, 1.00
00:08:20.900 cooked, done, nice, nice ski. No, do you know, it's funny. I was having a conversation with someone
00:08:27.820 and they, they were calling me, he was calling me black pilled. Right. And this, and I'm like,
00:08:34.500 and this is a guy that was divorced, right? So he's once divorced, he has a second wife
00:08:39.020 and I'm talking to him and he's like, how can you have this outlook? Do you not think that like you
00:08:44.980 and your boyfriend could have it? Cause that's what everyone wants to bring up. They're like,
00:08:48.160 you don't think you guys could have a good relationship. Like you think marriage is dead.
00:08:52.040 And I'm like, you're divorced. Like, how are you? I haven't even given it a go yet,
00:08:58.480 but I'm like, you can't predict the future. Do you know what I mean? Like,
00:09:03.000 I'm like, I'm sure. I'm sure you thought you were going to be married forever. I'm sure I thought
00:09:11.440 that I was going to be with a previous boyfriend forever. Right. We all think things, right. But
00:09:17.800 you can't, you know, there's people that think they're going to be at their job forever. They
00:09:21.620 get fired. You can't really control the universe and you certainly can't control another person. So
00:09:26.140 you cannot control if he is going to leave you or she is right. So cooked Pearl Ramsey cooked. You're 0.68
00:09:34.580 right. That's true.