has called herself a ‘childless cat lady’ while explaining why motherhood isn’t for her – and she makes a very interesting point.
The Twilight star, 39, has previously opened up about not wanting children, as she wrote in her 2016 memoir Scrappy Little Me: ‘I will always feel children aren’t for me.’
When asked about that statement in a recent interview, Anna gave a surprising answer – putting her decision not to be a mother down to this one saying men seem to love, which highlights parenthood inequalities still present in 2024.
‘I was thinking recently about a phrase I’ve heard men say about their desire to have children in the future, and it occurred to me: I don’t think I’ve ever heard a woman say that,’ she began, chatting to .
‘And the thing they’ll say is, “Yeah, maybe one day – a couple of kids running around.”
‘I don’t think I’ve ever heard a woman say that!,’ she continued.
‘Because it paints a certain visual, yes? That you come home at the end of your workday, and you put down your proverbial briefcase, and you’re making yourself a cocktail, and a woman in a Laura Ashley dress is out in the yard, and there’s a couple of kids – in white! – running around. Um, “Where are you in that, sir?”
‘I don’t know, there’s something about that phrase that really starts to rub me the wrong way. It’s like when I hear husbands say they want to ‘help out’ with the kids.
‘And it’s two working parents! And I always want to kind of say something, and then I’m just like, “Well, I’m the childless cat lady. I’m not gonna say s**t.”’
It’s long been reported that women spend a disproportionate amount of time on household and child duties compared to men.
The Office for National Statistics found that in March 2022, employed women living with dependent children spent more time on unpaid childcare (an average of 84 minutes per day) and household work (an average of 169 minutes per day) than employed men living with dependent children (55 and 106 minutes per day, respectively).
While the Pitch Perfect star seems put off from the idea of children now, it’s not always been the case as she revealed last year that she and a serious former partner – who she did not name – and he was pretty much her husband, before it ended in disaster.
She detailed how devastated she was to learn he had fallen for another woman despite him living with Anna and the two starting their family planning journey.
‘I was with someone — this was somebody I lived with, for all intents and purposes my husband,’ Anna explained on the Armchair Expert podcast.
She continued to Dax Shepard and Monica Padman: ‘We had embryos together, this was my person. And then about six years in, about somewhere around there, I remember telling my brother, when things had first kind of gone down, “I’m living with a stranger. Like, I don’t know what’s happening”.’
An embryo is a fertilised egg made during the IVF process, where an egg is taken from the woman’s ovaries and fertilised with sperm in a lab. The fertilised egg, or an embryo, is then returned to the woman’s womb to grow and develop.
Recalling how her partner revealed his feelings for another woman, she added: ‘The worst possible thing was, I was like, “please don’t say this girl’s name”.’
Anna feared the relationship would end because, in her mind, that meant she was ‘impossible’ and that she was ‘lucky that he’s even tolerating my bulls**t’.
‘There was an inherent thing of me being so rejectable that this person who loved me very deeply for six years, it suddenly occurred to him, how awful I was or something. The shame, that lingers much longer,’ she said.
