Welcome to the Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace and success.

I'm Ashley Miltight.

This time, you start your adult life believing that having a career is wrong and then everything changes. The first week of my

divorce, I had $40 in the bank and I cried when I set up my own utilities in my own house because

I had never imagined that I could do that. I mean, it was the funniest little things to realize

that I was a grown-up.

Coming up, leaving one life behind and starting a career in your mid-30s.

A couple of years ago, I heard from a listener in Salt Lake City, Utah, called Brooke Lark.

Her email was memorable for a bunch of reasons, but mainly because of the colorful way she wrote.

At one point, she said, when you're raised believing the only thing you're meant to do is have babies,

that education is selfish and career is even more selfish, waking up outside of religion and realizing you've got to swim upstream with a boatload of kids in tow is beyond terrifying.

Recently, I asked her to expand on that.

I was raised in a very conservative religion and left and right, hook, line, and sinker believed that the only thing that I should be doing with myself is being a stay-at-home mom,

birthing as many children as God would allow. And I dove into that really, really readily. I was 19 and married.

And I remember at my 10-year reunion being really proud that I had had four children,

which was the most that anyone had had.

And so, you know, I was like on just this dogma treadmill to winning heaven.

Brooke was raised Mormon.

And unlike Pat Jones in the last show, who's also Mormon,

Brooke had a strict religious upbringing.

She says she knows Mormon women who have always worked,

but that never felt like an option for her.

...