Meghan Trainor’s Surrogacy Decision (and Why People Have Opinions)

If you’re new here, welcome to Girlhood — the group chat we should have had all along, where we talk openly about our bodies and the messy, funny, complicated parts of being a woman. This week: birthdays in your 30s, postpartum periods, Meghan Trainor’s surrogacy decision, and a book that’s stirring up some complicated conversations. Let’s get into it!

Hi friend,

There’s a very specific kind of disappointment that can sneak into birthdays in your 30s. Not because anything goes wrong, exactly, but because the day rarely lives up to the cinematic version in your head. You’ve accumulated a whole life by now — kids, losses, career pivots, years of inside jokes in the group chat — and somehow you expect one dinner reservation and a slice of cake to capture all of it.

For the last few years, my birthday has landed in the middle of something: infertility, then pregnant and terrified after a loss (counting weeks instead of candles), then newly postpartum, which is less “birthday glow” and more “have I brushed my teeth today?” Every celebration felt slightly hijacked by whatever chapter I was white-knuckling through, like the day couldn’t just be a day.

This year was different. For the first time in a long time, I wasn’t pursuing anything. No monitoring appointments, no two-week waits, no bracing for news. Just a regular Friday that happened to be mine.

My husband gave me the most beautiful earrings (the kind that make you feel more pulled together than you actually are), and two of my closest friends took me out for drinks… where we laughed about nothing and everything. My kids presented homemade cards and a dessert that was 90% sprinkles and 10% structure, which felt deeply on brand for our household.

Nothing was extravagant, and for once, I didn’t want it to be.

After years of wanting something so badly it tinted every single day, ordinary felt luxurious: healthy kids singing off-key, a stiff drink, jewelry I’ll wear on our next night out.

37 wasn’t flashy or transformative; it was steady — and after everything, steady feels like winning.

🔍 Ask Clara: Why do birthdays feel different in your 30s?

🩸 When Your Postpartum Period Has a Personality

After two pregnancies and three babies, I thought I knew my body pretty well. We've been through infertility, loss, two vaginal births, and a C-section — I felt like we had a rhythm. And then my period came back postpartum and introduced itself like someone I’d met once in college and barely recognized now.

Not necessarily more painful. Just… different. Heavier. More dramatic. The kind of cycle that makes you check the calendar twice and wonder if your uterus has been quietly rebranding. I remember thinking, is this just what happens now? Because no one really mentions this part. You get the discharge instructions, the mesh underwear, the six-week clearance. You do not get a heads up that months later your period might return with a slightly louder personality.

There are reasons for it. After pregnancy, your uterus has stretched and shifted and done the absolute most. When your cycle returns, prostaglandins — the compounds that trigger uterine contractions — can fluctuate, and the uterine lining can be thicker at first, which can mean a heavier period. Breastfeeding adds a whole other layer, and when hormones finally recalibrate, things can feel unpredictable before they feel steady.

For a lot of women, the first three to six cycles are the messiest... heavier, irregular, just off. I wrote a full breakdown of what’s happening physiologically, what actually helps, and when it’s worth checking in about conditions like endometriosis or adenomyosis (which pregnancy can temporarily mask), here.

Just because your body did something extraordinary doesn’t mean it snaps back into familiarity overnight. It’s allowed to need real support afterward.

🔍 Ask Clara: Can you get pregnant while breastfeeding?

👩🏼‍🍼 Meghan Trainor’s Surrogacy Decision (and Why People Have Opinions)

When Meghan Trainor shared that she used a surrogate for her third baby after two C-sections and complicated pregnancies, my first reaction wasn’t shock. It was recognition.

Not because I have strong opinions about how celebrities grow their families, but because I understand the calculus that starts happening after your body has been through it — surgery, risk conversations, recovery that’s longer and heavier than the announcement. After you’ve already done the brave thing twice, after infertility and operating rooms and signing forms you barely remember reading, gratitude and fear can start living in the same body.

She said her doctors advised her against carrying again. She talked about safety, about wanting to be present for the kids she already has. It felt measured and practical. Almost immediately, though, the online commentary filled in the rest: privilege, outsourcing, what “real” motherhood requires.

It’s interesting how quickly women’s reproductive decisions become public debate, especially when they step even slightly outside the expected script. We celebrate endurance (fertility treatments, high-risk pregnancies, repeat surgeries), and then get uneasy when someone chooses not to endure one more round.

Surrogacy is layered: money, access, ethics, none of it simple. But so is pregnancy. Repeat C-sections carry increased risks, maternal health in this country is complicated at best, and choosing not to do it again isn’t a scandal; it’s a decision.

Eventually, the question shifts from proving you can to deciding you don’t have to.

🔍 Ask Clara: What puts someone at higher risk for preterm birth?

📖 Half His Age and the Relationships We’re Still Untangling

I finished Half His Age in two nights — the kind where you look up, it’s past midnight, and you’re already tired for tomorrow. If you read I’m Glad My Mom Died and immediately decided Jeannette McCurdy could write anything and you’d follow... same.

I loved it. Then I read the reviews and had that familiar reaction when something hits a little too close to home and the internet starts picking it apart.

The premise is uncomfortable by design: a high school teacher, a student, an affair. People are calling it gratuitous, irresponsible, unnecessary. And I understand the instinct to recoil. We want stories like this to tell us exactly how to feel.

But that’s not what she’s doing.

McCurdy has spoken openly about being in a relationship with an older man when she was 18, someone with power over her, someone who should have known better. Half His Age is her processing that experience through fiction, which is what writers do with the things that are too sharp to hold any other way. The discomfort isn’t incidental; it’s the whole point.

What she captures — the way a young woman can mistake control for love, intensity for intimacy, attention from the wrong person for proof of her own worth — isn’t gross. It’s familiar. It happens constantly, quietly, to girls who grow up to be women still untangling it decades later. (I don’t know many of us who don’t have some version of that story.)

Brilliant coming-of-age stories are rarely comfortable. The ones that stay with you usually aren’t. And maybe the urge to look away says more about us than it does about the book.

xo,
Kristyn

🔍 Ask Clara: How often should I be getting tested for STIs?