Thirty-Eight, Thirty-Seven, and Four
On conviction, stewardship, and seeing the future differently.
Last week I turned thirty-eight, beginning the slow transition from early adulthood toward middle age.
On that same day, my daughter had spent exactly as much time in the world as she had spent growing inside me: thirty-seven weeks. My newborn little nephew, also on that same day, was four weeks into his own journey outside the womb.
Birthdays have a way of making us think about time, but motherhood has changed what I measure. I find myself thinking less about the years behind me and more about the decades ahead—and about what I can do with them for the betterment of women and children, especially the children whose futures are no longer anonymous to me.
For years, I’ve written about protecting women and children. I’ve argued that girls deserve fair athletic competition, that women deserve sex-based spaces, that parents deserve honesty from schools, and that children deserve the chance to grow up before making irreversible medical decisions. Those convictions long predate my daughter’s birth.
Motherhood didn't change what I believed, but it did change who I picture every time I write. When I think about girls' sports, I don't picture an anonymous athlete anymore. I picture Maggie. When I think about elementary school policies, I imagine the classrooms she or my nephew may one day walk into. When I think about children's healthcare, I think about the trust parents place in doctors to help their children flourish rather than follow cultural trends.
And when I think about the future, I see it a little differently now. The questions I've spent years writing about still concern every child, but they also have familiar faces. I see my daughter. I see my nephew. The future has become more personal to me and that has quietly changed the way I read politics.
Recently, I read the results of a nationwide survey conducted on behalf of Women's Liberation Front (WOLF) on some of the country’s most contentious cultural issues. At first glance, the questions seemed familiar: women’s sports, parental rights, youth gender medicine, school policies, prison housing, pornography, artificial intelligence…the same debates that have dominated headlines for years.
But this time, I noticed something different. These weren’t really separate debates at all; they were different ways of asking the same question.
What responsibilities do adults owe the next generation?
Should schools withhold information from parents? Should children be encouraged to adopt new names, pronouns, or identities before they are old enough to understand the consequences? Should girls continue to have athletic competitions reserved for themselves? Should life-altering medical interventions wait until adulthood? Should technology companies be allowed to generate fake nude images of real people—including children—without consent? Should children have unrestricted access to online pornography?
We often treat these as isolated political controversies, but I no longer think they are. They’re all about whether adults are willing to create boundaries that protect children—even when doing so is unpopular, inconvenient, or politically unfashionable.
That may be why one finding in particular struck me.
Despite the polarized tone of our politics, the survey revealed something surprisingly consistent. Large majorities favored defining women according to biological sex, prioritizing women’s rights when they conflict with gender identity policies, preserving girls’ sports, delaying medical interventions for minors until adulthood, requiring honesty with parents, and protecting children from online exploitation through measures like age verification and restrictions on AI-generated explicit imagery.
People will debate the details of those policies, but what interested me was the common thread running beneath them. The respondents weren’t simply expressing opinions about transgender issues, education, or technology. They were expressing expectations about adulthood: that adults should protect children before affirming every impulse, that parents should be trusted rather than bypassed, that women and girls deserve recognition as a distinct class worthy of legal protection, that technological progress should not come at the expense of human dignity.
Whether one agrees with every conclusion or not, the pattern is difficult to miss. It’s less a collection of policy preferences than a philosophy of stewardship.
That word has come to mean more to me since becoming a mother. Stewardship is what you practice when someone else’s future depends on your judgment. Every parent understands this instinctively.
It is waking up in the middle of the night because a tiny person cannot care for herself. It is making decisions she can’t yet make. It is accepting that love sometimes requires saying “not yet,” “not this,” or “this boundary exists because I am responsible for you.”
Politics, at its best, asks us to exercise that same kind of stewardship on a larger scale. Not because government is a parent, but because every generation inherits the consequences of the generation before it. For mothers, grandmothers, aunts, teachers, and everyone helping to raise the next generation, I think this polling offers a few encouraging reminders.
First, many concerns that can feel isolating in public discourse are, in fact, widely shared. If you’ve ever hesitated to speak because you assumed you were alone, the data suggests otherwise.
Second, lead with children rather than ideology. People may disagree about partisan labels, but many share an instinct that children deserve protection, honesty, and time to mature. Beginning there often opens conversations that slogans can’t.
Third, don’t keep these conversations confined to your own home. Share the polling with friends. Bring it to your community groups. Ask your legislators how they think about balancing the rights of adults with the responsibilities owed to children. Public opinion matters most when it becomes public participation.
Finally, remember that culture is built long before it is codified in law. It is shaped in conversations between neighbors, among parents at school events, in churches and civic clubs, around dinner tables, and anywhere women gather to talk about the world their children are inheriting.
Last week I celebrated another birthday. Maggie won’t remember her thirty-seventh week and my nephew won’t remember his first four weeks…but I will.
Because somewhere between thirty-seven weeks of pregnancy and thirty-seven weeks of motherhood, I realized that motherhood hadn’t given me new convictions, it had simply given those convictions names and faces. They were always about children, but now, when I advocate, I picture two in particular.
The world I leave behind is not an abstract idea. It is the world waiting for a little girl who has been here for just thirty-seven weeks and for a little boy who has been here for four.
That's what thirty-eight means to me—not simply another birthday, but another year of trying to leave behind a world worthy of the children who will inherit it.