Patricia Clarkson is perfectly content to be childfree.
“I’m a 63-year-old single, straight, Southern woman who never married and never had children,” the “Easy A” actor said during an appearance on Bruce Bozzi’s “Table for Two” podcast last week.
“Come to our house one night and see just how unhappy Chelsea [Handler] and I are,” she added of the comedian, who is also happily childfree.
“You made a choice you didn’t want kids,” Bozzi interjected.
“I made a big choice,” Clarkson said, adding that she “knew it when I was young.”
“And I’ve had beautiful men in my life. And I’ve thought about it with this one artist I dated when I was 38 ― I had a window … to have a child,” she said. “But at the end of the day, I loved working. And I grew up with great parents who sacrificed everything for me. And you have to really be committed to having children. You have to be a great parent, and I was afraid I couldn’t be.”
One of Clarkson’s biggest hesitations was that she “didn’t want to fail at being a parent.”
“I’m fine failing as an actor,” she said.
Her family is also supportive of her choice, Clarkson continued.
“Let me tell you who’s the coolest about it ― is my mother! My mother and my father. My mother said, ‘Patti, I just don’t want you to wake up at 50 and be unhappy.’ I woke up at 50 in stilettos and a thong,” Clarkson said as she and Bozzi laughed. “I’ve had a great, sexy-ass life.”
“I love being an aunt, I love being a sister, I love being a daughter, I love being a great best friend. I’m a very good friend, I think,” she said. “It’s not what I wanted to define me, because I didn’t want to fail.”
Clarkson is one of a handful of Hollywood celebrities who have spoken out about their choice not to have children, including Handler, Oprah Winfrey and Seth Rogen.
Rogen made headlines earlier this year when he said that not having kids “has helped me succeed.”
“There’s a whole huge thing I’m not doing, which is raising children,” he said on “The Diary of a CEO” podcast back in March. “A lot of people have kids before they even think about it, from what I’ve seen, honestly.”
“You just are told: ‘You go through life, you get married, you have kids’ ― that’s what happens,” he said. “And me and my wife, neither of us were like that. Honestly, the older we get, the more happy and reaffirmed we are with our choice to not have kids.”