In Defense of Gwyneth Paltrow. Sort of.

There’s no denying that Gwyneth Paltrow lives a charmed life. The Academy Award winning actress -- who was once engaged to Brad Pitt – makes millions as a movie star, raises two children and still finds time to dispense high-end beauty, fashion and cooking advice to the rest of the world in her blog Goop.

She was also named People Magazine’s Most Beautiful Woman of the Year in 2013.   

Yet for all her successes, GP – as she likes to sign her name on Goop – remains inherently unlikeable. Maybe it’s the string of celebrity boyfriends we’ve watched her enjoy. Maybe it’s because she grew up with a silver spoon in her mouth. (Her father was the late director Bruce Paltrow; her mother is actress Blythe Danner). Or maybe it’s because she actually went through with naming one of her children Apple. (Although one of my kids shares a name with the offspring of Snooki, so who am I to judge?)

Mostly though, I’m pretty sure that we don’t like Gwyneth because every time the 41 year-old actress opens her mouth to speak, she somehow manages to imply that she is better and more important than everybody else on the planet. Case in point: her recent announcement that she and husband Chris Martin have decided to “consciously uncouple.”  

And then there’s the now infamous interview with E!, where she sort of implies that mothers with “regular” jobs face fewer challenges than she does in her work as a famous movie star.      

“I think it’s different when you have an office job, because it’s routine and, you know, you can do all the stuff in the morning and then you come home in the evening,” she is quoted as saying. “When you’re shooting a movie, they’re like ‘We need you to go to Wisconsin for two weeks,’ and then you work 14 hour days and that part of it is very difficult. I think to have a regular job and be a mom is not as, of course there are challenges, but it’s not like being on set.”  

Now, I’m not about to argue that Gwyneth’s life is harder than that of a mother who works a full-time job and cares for her family too. This is a woman who has money and resources and nannies and personal chefs and shoppers and a wardrobe that most of us can only dream about. She clearly has no concept of the challenges inherent in the everyday life of an average working (or stay-at-home) mom.

She could have – and should have – chosen her words more carefully.

Still, I have been shocked and disappointed to watch as the Internet – and particularly the writers and bloggers who are mothers – have spewed nothing but mockery and vitriol toward a woman who is trying to express (albeit in her own completely inarticulate way) the challenges she faces as a mom.

I understand the need to put Gwyneth in her place, I really do. I don’t care for her as an actress, and I doubt we would be friends if we ever met in real life. But in the end, this whole anti-Gwyneth tirade that everyone seems to be on is little more than another rehashed version of the mommy wars. Don’t we all keep proclaiming (over and over and over again) that we’re putting those behind us? That we’re going to stop arguing and whining and judging and comparing ourselves to one another? That it’s not a competition about who has a harder life, and that all moms deserve support and empathy -- no matter what their circumstances look like?

Do we mean it? Because if so, we should really start acting like it.

We can keep taking Gwyneth’s comment personally, or we can look at her statement for what it really is: a woman saying that merging motherhood with some sort of professional identity is HARD. Because it is hard – no matter what your circumstances in life – and we’re all searching for the magic formula that will somehow make it easier. Even with all the advantages Gwyneth has, she’s still looking at other moms and thinking “Man, my life might be better if I had THAT.”

As mothers, we all view the world through the prism of our own perspective and experience. It’s why we follow different paths and have different priorities and can never fully appreciate where another mother is coming from. Gwyneth may not understand our lives well enough to have made the comment she did, but do we understand her life well enough to pass judgment as freely as we have been doing?

How about this? We ALL have the right to talk about the individual challenges we face, and to say – out loud – that this motherhood thing is damn hard. Because, you know what? No matter who you are or how much money you have or what choices you make – even if you’re Gwyneth Paltrow – it is.