Tracee Ellis Ross is redefining the formula of what a woman should have accomplished by the time they reach a certain age.
In a recent podcast interview of Glennon Doyle’s “We Can Do Hard Things,” the offspring of Diana Ross and Robert Ellis Silberstein opened up about accepting her journey as a single 50-year-old woman who is childless and experiencing perimenopause.
“I’ve been single for a very long time,” Ross said at the beginning of her interview, “I have had many wonderful ins and outs of things, but no one stuck to the pain.”
The thought of a woman possibly going through life without a male counterpart could be seen as ludicrous to some. However, Ross has been determined not to let this restrict her but allow her to gain love through other ways.
This includes her relationships with family, friends, and their children.
“I get to curate my family, my chosen family around me,” she said. “And I don’t think I realized the gift of that until I’ve started to get older.”
Still, Ross has to catch herself from falling into the mindset of being a “burden” on her friends since she’s single and childless — a mindset she realized stemmed from an implemented belief that in order for a woman to be complete, she has to reproduce.
“We go back to this mold that you’re sold,” said Ross. “If you’re not careful, you actually believe it’s true, and it’s the only bit of news for you.”
“…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,” she said.
Though a woman’s purpose on Earth is more than her reproductive system, Ross opened up about stepping back and looking at her life as she enters a new journey of perimenopause.
“I have, for my entire life, been tethered to a very routine cycle. And I’m very connected to my body. So I would know when I’m ovulating.”
Ross continued, “And I turn 50, and here I am in this open space now, sort of allowing the bubbling up of whatever might be here.”
During the podcast, Ross read an excerpt from her journal where she found herself questioning everything going on within her body due to it being beyond her control.
“I can feel my body’s ability to make a child draining out of me. 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.’ ”
She continued to read, “Is it my fertility that is leaving me? Is it my womanhood? Or is it neither? But I have to fight and 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.”
