Tracee Ellis Ross – daughter of legendary singer Diana Ross – has opened up about going through perimenopause at 50 years old, dropping some incredible, insightful truths about motherhood, as well as being single and child-free.
Speaking on the We Can Do Hard Things with Glennon Doyle podcast, she 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.
Hynes White has strongly denied the allegations.
“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, Tracee 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.’”
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She also put into words how her body has been feeling as she goes through the process of perimenopause, and honestly, there are both 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.”
As Tracee navigates this new stage in her life, she mentions redefining and “curating” her chosen family: “I don't think I realised the gift of that until I've started to get older”.
Long live our feminist queen.
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. 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 said.
There's a certain erasure of who we are as people, she suggests, if we're looking to other people to choose us. Being chosen seems to have “nothing to do with who I am, what makes my heart sing, floats my boat, makes me feel safe, makes me feel comfortable, makes me feel good, makes me feel powerful, makes me feel smart. Any of those things.
"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.”
Down with the patriarchy, we stand with Tracee and her fight against it.
