I Call BS: Kate Winslet & her “Powerful Woman Club”

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Did you read this article? [The article is actually several years old; the Skeptical OB posted about it just a few days ago, and it got me fired up to write this… my apologies for being years late to this party. I wasn't a mom when it first happened! But I'm still pissed and need to say this!]

Go read it, I'll wait.

tl;dr: Kate Winslet claimed that her first daughter, Mia, was ‘born naturally and without complications' in 2000. It wasn't until her 2nd child *was* born naturally, just a couple of months ago, that she admitted that she'd been lying for the previous few years, and that Mia was actually born by emergency caesarean section.

Oh, Kate, where to start. (Can I call you Kate? I'm gonna, proper British manners be damned)

I know! How about with this gem of a quote:

‘There's this thing amongst women that if you can handle childbirth you can handle anything. I had never handled childbirth and I felt like in some way I couldn't enter the “powerful women's club”.

So here's thing, Kate.
If people like you (by “like you” I mean people in the spotlight, on magazine covers, on my television and movie screens) would STOP PERPETRATING THIS CRAP, it would eventually go away.
My Max (you're losing out not knowing him, BTW… he's awesome, in spite of my apparent inability to join your “powerful women's club”) was born by c-section. Because if he hadn't been, he and I both would have died.

Died.

Not beautiful died like you do in your movies (have you ever died in a movie? I feel like you died in Eternal Sunshine, but it might be mis-remembering on my part) but real died. Like, my family living without me for the rest of forever.

Still with me?

So here's how it goes: Max is born by c-section. I was in the hospital, on painkillers, blah blah blah.

Now that I've been a mom for almost 5 years?

The getting him out of my body was just about the EASIEST part of this journey.

The day-to-day parenting is the hard part. It doesn't matter how you get to that point. Vaginal, c-section, foster adoption, snowflake adoption, alien abduction. What matters is what you do with that child once you're blessed with one.

A “powerful women's club”? It's either utter bullshit or its membership numbers every woman on this planet. We are ALL powerful, and more so when we band together and hold each other up, instead of telling stupid lies because we feel like “less” of a woman because of a medical complication. Or a choice we made. Or whatever.

Mothers are mothers, Kate. We all have different roads to get there. And we're all amazing.