Because, well, sometimes you don’t know, do you?
Angelina Jolie, actress, humanitarian and super-mum of six, has admitted that she didn’t always know she wanted to have children and couldn’t see herself as a mother when she was younger.
‘It's strange, I never wanted to have a baby,’ she told Cambodian news station CTV. ‘I never wanted to be pregnant. I never babysat. I never thought of myself as a mother.’
Angelina’s honesty actually highlights something that women can be afraid to say out loud – sometimes you just don’t know if and when you want to have a baby.
While some women know from a young age that they want to be mothers, others have other plans, careers, or just haven’t made up their minds yet - and it’s good to point out that that’s really ok.
There’s no one-size-fits-all way to plan a family, or not, and Angelina’s story and family structure attests to that.
It was, she says, her first trip to Cambodia in 2000, to shoot Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, that changed her mind and made her realise that motherhood could be for her after all.
'I realised there was so much about history that I had not been taught in school, and so much about life that I needed to understand, and I was very humbled by it,’ she said.
Angelina began working in the country with the United Nations a few months later, then, after meeting with school children, her mind was made up. ‘It was suddenly very clear to me that my son was in the country, somewhere,’ she says.
She adopted her eldest son, Maddox, in 2002, before meeting her future husband, Brad Pitt, in 2005 and going on to have five more children together, so it turns out motherhood was definitely for Angelina after all. But interesting to think how your mind can change - either way - isn’t it?
We've also charted 11 brutally honest celebrity quotes on Motherhood and pregnancy if you need some reassurance that Motherhood isn't all plain sailing...