There’s a clock a lot of women carry that nobody else can hear.
It’s the timeline in the back of your mind telling you when you thought you’d be married, when you thought you’d become a mother, and how much time you think you have left to build the life you always imagined.
In this episode of herspective, Jillian and Drey have an honest conversation about the biological and societal clocks women live with and what happens when life doesn’t follow the timeline you planned.
Jillian opens up about approaching 36, being single, wanting children, and doing the mental math that so many women quietly do: If I meet someone now, when would we get engaged? When would we get married? When could we actually have a baby? She also shares how the desire for motherhood affected her decision to stay in a relationship and ultimately her decision to leave it.
Drey brings another perspective to the conversation. After divorce and starting over, she understands what it means to wonder whether the life you pictured is still possible. And even now, in a loving relationship and planning a future with someone, there are still no guarantees when it comes to motherhood.
Together, they talk about the experiences we don’t make enough space for: single women who desperately want families, women experiencing infertility and pregnancy loss, women who don’t want children at all, and the pressure placed on all of them to meet a particular definition of womanhood by a particular age.
They also confront one of the hardest parts of surrender: admitting that the thing you want most might not happen.
Sometimes “you still have time” isn’t comforting. Sometimes “it’ll happen when it’s meant to happen” doesn’t make the grief disappear. Sometimes you need someone to acknowledge that the uncertainty hurts.
From grieving the future you thought you’d have to learning how to trust God with the one you can’t yet see, this episode is about making peace with the clock nobody else can hear and refusing to let it rush you into a life that isn’t right for you.