1KHO 627: Children Are a Reward Not a Regret| Abbie Halberstadt, You Bet Your Stretch Marks

The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast

Ginny Yurich

Parenting, Kids & Family

4.9 • 1.8K Ratings

🗓️ 21 November 2025

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In her second visit to The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast, bestselling author and mama of ten Abbie Halberstadt (M Is for Mama, Hard Is Not the Same Thing as Bad, You Bet Your Stretch Marks) sits down with Ginny to lovingly but firmly push back against a culture that treats children as an interruption instead of a reward. Abbie shares what it was like to have 10 children in 14 years—including two sets of twins—while watching a world where nearly half of young adults now say they’re unlikely to ever have kids. Together, Ginny and Abbie explore why our obsession with control, comfort, and “having it all” is leaving so many women anxious, lonely, and afraid of the very thing that would grow them: motherhood. They talk candidly about stretch marks on bodies and souls, the lie that we must “wait five years” for a reward Scripture calls good, and how God often meets us with daily bread right after we step out in faith. This conversation is packed with stories that will stay with you: banjos and baptisms, European travel with ten kids, postpartum rage turned into a “gentleness challenge,” and miracle-level provision that arrives just in time. If you’re a tired mom, a young woman wondering about children, or a parent raising daughters in an seemingly child-averse age, this episode will help you see your body, your story, and your kids as eternal investments, not liabilities. Learn more from Abbie and her full trilogy here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Why are businesses like HelloVet choosing Apple products and services?
0:05.0	So we started the business two years ago.
0:07.0	We had a few people who were used to PCs and this was their first foray into Macs.
0:12.0	But it's been super smooth getting everyone onto those devices and everyone seems really, really happy.
0:18.0	Find out how Mac can help you run and grow your business at apple.com forward slash hello vet. Welcome to 1,000 Hours Outside podcast. My name is Ginny Erich. I'm the founder of 1000 Hours Outside and so honored. Abby Halberstet is back. Welcome, Abby. Thanks for having me, Jenny. I'm so glad to be here. You have written a trilogy,
0:38.0	which is so exciting. When I think about trilogies, I think about like the Lord of the Rings.
0:45.3	Is that a trilogy? Yeah, I think it is. I feel like it is. I mean, people throw the Hobbit in there,
0:50.7	right? But yeah. Anyway, I just think that trilogies are remarkable. And so you've
0:54.9	written a trilogy. And to round it out, the final book is you bet your stretch marks, finding beauty
1:00.6	and worth in the ways motherhood marks are bodies and souls. Did you ever imagine that you would
1:04.9	write a trilogy? No, not at all. In fact, as a young mom of a whole lot of kids, because I had five by age 29, five, six
1:16.0	and under.
1:16.9	And then I was actually talking to my husband the other day.
1:18.6	And I was like, what was our like largest number of children under a certain amount of years?
1:24.2	You know?
1:24.8	Like, and I realized with our second kind of half of our kids, we had at one
1:30.0	point seven kids eight and under with two sets of twins in there. Now, that had never occurred
1:35.6	to me before because you just kind of live your life. You don't go around thinking like,
1:38.5	how many kids under this age do I have? But that was kind of an aha moment of like, yeah,
1:43.9	I was, I was pretty busy. I still am,
1:46.1	but was really, really busy with lots of small children. And I had three older kids in
1:51.4	addition to those seven, eight and under. And no, no, I wanted to write since I was six,
	...

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