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August 27, 2021 7:21 p.m.
Parenting is tough and Reese Witherspoon knows full well how difficult the first few months of having a newborn can be.
The ‘Big Little Lies’ actress stopped by Dax Shepard’s ‘Armchair Expert’ podcast spinoff ‘We Are Supported By’ where she spoke with Kristen Bell and Monica Padman about parenting.
“I didn’t have a lot of support with my first baby and learned very early, like it wouldn’t work out,” Witherspoon said.
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She is mum to Ava, 21, and Deacon, 17, with ex Ryan Phillippe and Tennessee, 8, with husband Jim Toth. She was 23 when Ava was born in 1999.
Witherspoon continued, “I tried to build muscle for five months with Ava, but I was sleepless and delirious.”
While Witherspoon said she ‘couldn’t have worked’ when Ava was born, she was ‘lucky to have some money saved up and I didn’t have to work but that’s all just not a one-person job”.
Adding: “I would even say that it is not a work of two.”
The three ladies also touched on the topic of ‘women staying in their lane’, bringing up the 2015 Weather magazine article that entrepreneurs called Witherspoon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Blake Lively and Jessica Alba “domestic divas.”
“I had created a clothing company. Gwyneth was really making Goop grow. Blake Lively had a business, Jessica Alba had a business and they made a caricature of all of us,” she said. “We were in ballgowns and they were sticking our heads together, and Jessica was holding an iron and I was holding a vacuum cleaner. It was all so offensive that I burst into tears.
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The ‘Legally Blonde’ actress said the magazine has since apologized, but it shows a cultural problem that needs to be ‘corrected’.
“I’m not even talking about 10 years ago. I’m talking about 2015 when we decided, OK, we’re going to be enterprising, take a swing, invest our own money, our own time, our own reputation and try to do something that George Clooney did, Robert De Niro did – and get ridiculed for it. That message to little girls is, “If you’ve been successful in one area, you can’t be successful in another,” she said.
Witherspoon has just sold his production company Hello Sunshine for nearly $1 billion.
“I found my purpose,” she said as she told stories about women, by women.
“I didn’t know what my purpose was – and your purpose changes too. You get older and your goal keeps changing. You have to keep iterating. We must continue to progress. You have to look at new media and say to yourself, ‘Wait, is there a place for me to be in a leadership role here?’ Because I’ve been doing this for 30 years. I actually know a lot of things and I really want to be of service to the next generation of women, to my own generation of women who have not been well served by our company.