Tracee Ellis Ross recently opened up about going through perimenopause at 50 years old, dropping some incredibly insightful truths about motherhood as well as being single and child-free.
Speaking on the We Can Do Hard Things With Glennon Doyle podcast, the actor challenged the societal assumption that having children is an innately central part of being a woman.
“Is it my fertility that is leaving me? Is it my womanhood? Or is it really neither?” she said. “I have to fight to hold my truth, because I have been programmed so successfully by the water we all swim in, by the water we all are served. And I feel fertile with creativity, full of power, more and more a woman than I’ve ever been. And yet that power that I was told I must use was not used.”
She continued, “My ability to have a child is leaving me, but I don’t agree that that’s what fertile means, I don’t agree that that’s what woman means.”
Having not had children before going through perimenopause, Ellis Ross, who is the daughter of legendary singer Diana Ross, describes looking at being childless (or child-free) “with curiosity instead of heartbreak.”
“The heartbreak does come up, and I get to hold that gently and lovingly and then remind myself, ‘I woke up every morning of my life and I’ve tried to do my best, so I must be where I’m supposed to be,’” she said.
She also put into words how her body has been feeling as she goes through the process of perimenopause, discussing both the hilarious and heartbreaking moments in her account. “I can feel my body’s ability to make a child draining out of me,” she said. “Sometimes I find it hilarious, as if there is a fire sale going on in my uterus, and someone’s in there screaming, ‘All things must go.’”
“As my body becomes a foreign place to me that doesn’t really feel safe or like home…I don’t know how to manage or control or fight the external binary narrative of the patriarchy that has hunted me and haunted me most of my adult life,” she continued.
As Tracee Ellis Ross navigates this new stage in her life, she mentioned redefining and “curating” her chosen family: “I don’t think I realized the gift of that until I’ve started to get older.” She also spoke about her experiences of being single—particularly the fact that she’s been “sold” the idea that she needs to be “chosen” by a romantic partner.
“We go back to this model that you’re sold, that not only are we sold it, but we are fed it and we have to drink it and it’s everywhere,” she said. “And if you’re not careful, you actually think it’s true. And it’s the only bit of news for you, which is that my job as a woman is to learn to be choosable.”
She added, “But really it’s more about how I might be seen, so that I might be chosen so that my life could mean something as a chosen woman who then gets to have a child and then be a mother and do that for a child.”
