She may seem like an odd choice for the lead role in the film What to Expect When You're Expecting, given that golden girl Cameron Diaz, at 39 years old, is unmarried and childless.
"I'm sure a lot of people would expect that I would have had a child by my age," says Diaz in the forthcoming issue of Redbook. "But it's not what I've wanted out of my life thus far. We still live in a largely chauvinistic world. There's a box people put themselves in, and when you [live] outside of it, that makes them uncomfortable — they have to look at themselves and question their own choices."
Even though the leading lady expected to be hitched with a couple of kids by age 21, life clearly had other plans for her. And Cameron isn't sitting around lamenting the fact that motherhood so far hasn't been part of her equation.
"My career was starting to take off and there were still so many things I wanted to do… So that dream [of motherhood] for me was shattered early on. After that I never put another time line on anything in my life."
Diaz is part of a growing breed of successful women who imagine that marriage and children will just happen one day. Then they wake up at 45 and realize, as this blogger so aptly put it, that "fertility is a window that closes." Ultimately not making a decision about having kids becomes the decision.
Still, there's a pointed difference between not choosing motherhood and motherhood not choosing you.
And although I may look at that photo of Diaz and the female cast in skimpy tennis whites and expensive tans, and pine a little for the days when I had the time and disposable income to look that good, the bigger, decidedly less bitchy part of me feels sorry for women whose chance at motherhood passed them by.
According to the New York Times, just 18 percent of women between the ages of 40 and 44 are childless. It's like being outside of an exclusive club, and finding you can't get in. So I imagine.
My tribulations as a mom thus far have been greater than I could have anticipated, but then again so has the love. That's something no mother second-guesses or regrets, ever.
Do you feel sorry for women like Diaz who've bypassed motherhood, whether intentionally or unintentionally?
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