August 30, 2026 — Episode #137

Content note: this episode includes discussion of a past abortion decision within a marriage.

T.C. Talley’s mother once told him plainly: the day you join a gang is the day you leave my house. It worked, and it’s part of what shaped the man who now spends his life mentoring fathers.

T.C. Talley returns for a second week with Jerry and Becky, picking up his story from the streets of Chicago to his current work as a fatherhood mentor at Birth Choice. T.C. describes his mother’s fierce boundaries that kept him out of the gangs surrounding his family, his move to California as a teenager, and getting married for the wrong reasons in his early twenties. He opens up candidly about a painful chapter of that marriage: a decision to end a pregnancy that he opposed but felt powerless to stop, and how that experience now shapes his empathy for the fathers he counsels. T.C. walks through the actual structure of his mentoring program: a ten-week curriculum built around honesty, earning trust, and a documentary screening families watch together. Jerry and Becky close with an offer for single dads to request a free study Bible and a teaser about T.C.’s mother and wife’s stories still to come.

Topics discussed:

• Growing up in Chicago and avoiding gang life because of his mother’s strict boundaries
• Moving to California as a teenager and finishing high school while working
• Getting married for the wrong reasons and the strain that followed
• A painful decision within that marriage to end a pregnancy
• How that experience shapes his work mentoring fathers today
• The structure of his ten-week fatherhood mentoring program at Birth Choice
• Why building trust and honesty comes before anything else in mentoring
• Preview of upcoming stories about his mother and his wife

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