Kids! Your sister has one. That woman on the subway with the very big stroller blocking your way out of the train has one. So does that dude at the coffeeshop who looks like he’d definitely nurse that child strapped to his front if only given the chance. Everyone has a kid! Everyone, except you. And that’s okay. At least, according to famous women who never had kids, it’s okay, and hey, if you can’t feel validated about your life choices by examining the lives of celebrities, then what are you even doing on the internet? Exactly.
Maybe other people’s children make you feel funny-bad, not funny-awesome. Maybe you tolerate your niece because she looks a little bit like you and she has nice hair and you like the fact that she makes your sister less of a lunatic. Maybe you look at other people’s children as tiny nuisances dressed in little shoes and shorter-alls, grabbing subway poles with their sticky fingers and leaving everything they touch smelling faintly of applesauce and spoiled milk. Maybe when your parents look at you meaningfully across the table at Thanksgiving and ask you when you’re going to give them a goddamn grandkid so they can manage their empty-nest syndrome effectively, you smile serenely and say, “I’m never having children. Sorry.”
Are you crying “It me!” in solidarity? Are you worried about what society will think of you if your womb lies empty and you just, you know, live your life as a person without thinking about bringing and supporting another life in this world? You’re in decent company.
Oprah Winfrey
Oprah Winfrey has a very successful career, a pleasant arrangement with Stedman and the best celebrity Instagram to date. She also never had kids because they would fuck with her career, which is the best reason not to have children, ever. She told The Hollywood Reporter in 2013 “If I had kids, my kids would hate me…They would have ended up on the equivalent of the Oprah show talking about me; because something [in my life] would have had to suffer and it would’ve probably been them.”
Sarah Silverman
Sarah Silverman understands the importance of having children when –and if — she’s good and goddamn ready. “I want to have kids when there’s nothing else I want more, and I can make them my world,” she told the Daily Beast in 2013. Seems right to me.
Margaret Cho
“My fear of having children is that, frankly, I just don’t want to love anyone that much,” Cho said in Salon in 2013. “I don’t know if I could stand that kind of commitment, or, if I am really honest, I don’t think I could handle being that vulnerable to someone else.” Seems like a fancier way of admitting that sometimes, we just need to take care of ourselves only, and have that be enough.
Kim Cattrall
““I enjoy kids but not for long periods. I think they’re adorable and funny and sweet, and then I have a headache,” Cattrall said in 2008. Of course kids give Samantha a headache. They are, in fact, the physical embodiment of a headache. All checks out.
Helen Mirren
She has no children because she doesn’t need kids to feel fulfilled. She told British Vogue, “It was not my destiny, I kept thinking it would be, waiting for it to happen, but it never did, and I didn’t care what people thought … It was only boring old men [who would ask me]. And whenever they went, ‘What? No children? Well, you’d better get on with it, old girl,’ I’d say ‘No! F*** off!’”
Jennifer Westfeldt
In 2012, Westfeldt told the New York Times Magazine, “I’ve thought about this a lot lately. I never thought I’d be this age and not have kids. But my life has also gone in a million ways I never anticipated … I kept feeling like I’d wake up with absolute clarity, and I haven’t. And we have a pretty great life together. The chance that we’ll regret it doesn’t seem like a compelling enough reason to do it. I may wake up tomorrow with that lightning bolt, and I’ll have to scramble to make it happen.”
Stevie Nicks
“It’s like, Do you want to be an artist and a writer, or a wife and a lover? With kids, your focus changes. I don’t want to go to PTA meetings.” Same, Stevie. Same.
Marisa Tomei
In a statement that aligns very closely with my worldview, Marisa Tomei told Manhattan Magazine in 2009, “I’m not that big a fan of marriage as an institution, and I don’t know why women need to have children to be seen as complete human beings.”
Gloria Steinem
Your mother’s favorite feminist doesn’t have kids. “I’m completely happy not having children. I mean, everybody does not have to live in the same way. And as somebody said, ‘Everybody with a womb doesn’t have to have a child any more than everybody with vocal cords has to be an opera singer,” she said in 2011.
Jennifer Aniston
Stop asking Jennifer Aniston if she’s going to have children! Stop it. Just stop. “I just find it to be energy that is unnecessary and not really fair for those who may or may not [have children],” she added. “Who knows what the reason is, why people aren’t having kids. There’s a lot of reasons that could be, and maybe it’s something that no one wants to discuss,” she told People in 2014. “It’s everyone’s personal prerogative, that’s all.”
Cameron Diaz
Please tattoo Cameron Diaz’s entire answer on my fucking forehead and call it a day. “I like protecting people, but I was never drawn to being a mother. I have it much easier than any of them,” she said in an interview with Esquire in 2014. “That’s just what it is. Doesn’t mean life isn’t sometimes hard. I’m just what I am. I work on what I am. Right now, I think, things are good for me. I’ve done a lot. And I don’t care anymore.”
Original by Megan Reynolds @mega_hurt
