Gwyneth Paltrow: “When Apple was born I was almost dying”

A long scar marks the belly of Gwyneth Paltrow. It has been there since the birth of Apple, the first daughter, now 17, that the Oscar-winning actress of Shakespeare in love she had with ex-husband Chris Martin. Paltrow herself revealed it, not posting a photo on Instagram, but “the old way”, speaking in an interview about a topic that deserved more than a post on social media.

“When Apple was born it was scary, I was almost dying”, he confessed in an episode of the Spotify podcast Armchair Expert. “Both pregnancies ended in a caesarean, but the first was an emergency. It all happened in a hurry, I felt terrible, I really risked my life “, said the 49-year-old actress, now the protagonist of the new docuseries on Netflix Sex, Love and Goop. But if the joy of holding a child in your arms makes you forget the physical pains, your body always reminds you of them, especially if the experience is “traumatic”, like the one told by Paltrow: “After the birth I was there that I observed myself, I noticed the changes but above all I looked at that scar, neither beautiful nor ugly, but there, new: before it was not there and now it was part of me, and it would be forever ».

The transformations of the body, the new forms, the new signs are but one of the many changes that a woman who becomes a mother has to deal with, especially in the first months after childbirth. Yet, today they are the most difficult to manage, says the New York actress, launching a not too veiled j’accuse to social communication, which – he argues – conditions too much the way women look at each other: “I thank Heaven that when my children were born there were still no social networks”, she said in the same interview, “Today it seems that all , two weeks after giving birth, they must have sculpted abs and you must be wrong if you don’t. But what is wrong is this way of looking at things: dico very good to those who manage to show the “turtle” so early, but it is right to remember that it is an exception, not normality ».

«We are continually bombarded with ideal images that tell us how we should be, providing us with unrealistic models. Instead, there is no “how we should”, there is how we are and everything is fine: whether you have a baby or don’t have one, whether you are breastfeeding or not breastfeeding, whether you come back thin after childbirth or not, whether you go back to work or not ” , Paltrow cautions. “We women need to support each other, not judge each other. Any subject we talk about ».