Nicki Minaj: ‘I Was Put Here to be a Mother’
Photo by Nicki Minaj/Facebook
“I’m at the level in my career and in my life now where I can do whatever the hell I want to,” Nicki Minaj brags in the new issue of Complex magazine. And what the rap superstar says she wants to do is this: have a baby. “If I’m done with my fifth album and I don’t have a child by then, no matter how much money I have, I would be disappointed, as a woman,” explains the 31-year-old, “because I feel like I was put here to be a mother.”
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The former American Idol judge actually has lots of company in Hollywood on her mommy train. Actress Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting just gushed in June that she and new husband Ryan Sweeting “both want to be parents so bad.” “The Big Bang Theory” star, 28, explains she was “born to be a wife, born to be a mom.”
Ditto expecting “Nashville” lead Hayden Panettiere, 24. “I’ve lived a very big life, and I don’t feel my age, and I feel like I was born to be a mother,” she told Glamour last May. “Sometimes people speak about [having kids] like, ‘Your life ends — you’re never going to be able to do anything again!’ And I’m like, ‘What are you talking about?’ Motherhood is the most beautiful, exciting thing.”
Tyra Banks, 40, even went as far as to have said, in 2012, that having children is “something I have to do. I won’t be happy if I’m not a mother.”
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What is with all the baby fever? “Motherhood is biologically wired into women,” therapist Dr. Paul Hokemeyer tells Yahoo Parenting. “It’s part of their genetic makeup. The intensity of this calling varies among women but it’s present in all women nonetheless.”
The stardom of ladies like Minaj may actually make the yearning stronger, he adds. “For successful women like her, this calling becomes intense when they realize the external success they’ve accomplished doesn’t make them feel whole. They look around them and see lots of pretty sparkly things, but don’t feel the warmth and depth of a mother-child relationship.”
Yet the fact is, nearly one in five American women ends her childbearing years without having borne a child, compared with one in 10 in the 1970s. Add to that the Washington Post’s reporting on the rise of longterm contraception (which reveals that the number of women using an intrauterine device has increased by 161 percent since 2005) and it’s not hard to make the case that the real trend is putting motherhood on hold.
But Minaj may have the answer for that, too. “Every woman is multifaceted,” she notes in the Complex interview. “Every woman has a switch, whether she’s going to be maternal, whether she’s going to be a man-eater, whether she has to kick ass, whether she has to be one of the boys, whether she has to show the guys that she’s just as smart or smarter, she’s just as talented or creative. Women suppress a lot of their sides.”
