Pearl - October 10, 2026


“She Wanted a Baby at 30… Then REGRETTED Motherhood” @JustPearlyThings

“Man Explains Why EVERY Relationship Is Transactional” @JustPearlyThings “Family Courts Are Making MONEY by Keeping Fathers Trapped in the System” @JustPearlyThings

Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

190.08

Word count

524

Sentence count

22

Harmful content

Misogyny

3

sentences flagged

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

5

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.360 I got pregnant at 33 by someone I wasn't in a serious relationship with, and it became clear pretty quickly that we weren't going to raise this baby together as a couple.
00:00:10.100 The ironic thing is that I was incredibly happy during my pregnancy.
00:00:13.980 After years of feeling like everyone else was getting something I desperately wanted, finally it was happening to me.
00:00:20.180 Yeah, again, she thought it was just going to be like Instagram and, you know, a baby barfing and stuff wasn't...
00:00:25.680 Then I had...
00:00:26.220 Alright, let me keep going.
00:00:27.420 Alright, let's...
00:00:28.100 my daughter and two weeks later i had a stroke from a postpartum complication i ended up in the
00:00:33.860 hospital while my elderly mother and my friends stepped in to care for my newborn when i came
00:00:39.460 home i think i was just grateful to be alive that i didn't even have the capacity to process
00:00:44.660 everything else a few months later the reality of motherhood started settling in i remember putting
00:00:50.740 my daughter to sleep at night and feeling this enormous sense of relief i finally made it the
00:00:55.940 day was over she has always been a good sleeper so nighttime became the one part of the day that
00:01:01.700 belonged to me and then one night i had this realization that i still remember it doesn't
00:01:07.860 matter that i made it to bedtime because tomorrow i'm going to wake up and have to do the entire
00:01:12.660 thing again and the day after that and the day after that it felt like groundhog day i've also
00:01:19.620 never been the mom who couldn't wait to take her baby somewhere taking my daughter somewhere felt
00:01:24.340 like a massive undertaking packing every women just can't stay home getting her ready getting
00:01:30.100 myself ready worrying about naps and food and diapers and tantrums and if you know a humble 1.00
00:01:36.180 idiot will learn an arrogant idiot will never learn we went somewhere and she started crying 1.00
00:01:41.860 or melting down my instinct was always let's just go home home felt predictable motherhood never had 1.00
00:01:48.820 and it never will. She's almost three now, and that feeling hasn't disappeared. There's this
00:01:55.060 idea that as children get older, things just get easier. In my experience, that isn't true.
00:02:00.900 New worries replace the old ones. When my daughter was around two and a half, concerns came up about
00:02:06.720 a speech delay. Suddenly, I was hearing words and possibilities I had never imagined being part of
00:02:12.440 our story, including autism. And that brought another wave of grief and regret. I realized how
00:02:19.520 many assumptions I had unknowingly made about the child I would have. Before you become a parent,
00:02:25.000 you picture a baby. You don't necessarily picture a value. Yeah. So this is kind of going back to
00:02:30.340 what I'm saying. I don't, I actually don't think the birth rate going down is the worst thing in
00:02:34.120 the world. I know I used to say that it was, um, I don't think it is because so many women are just 1.00
00:02:39.080 going to be terrible parents it's like until we get men the kids they're just going to raise terrible kids 1.00