Celebrities might make co-parenting look easy but Gwyneth Paltrow will tell you it’s not always as it seems. The actor shares two children with her ex, Chris Martin and she is opening up about the ups and downs of raising children.
In a new interview with Drew Barrymore, the star revealed that after her twelve years of marriage to the Coldplay singer, it was difficult staying tight-knit as a family. However, she’s trying her best to do right by Moses, 14, and Apple, 16.
Gwyneth Paltrow described co-parenting as ending a marriage but keeping the family.
“It’s like you’re ending a marriage but you’re still in a family. That’s how it will be forever,” Paltrow told Barrymore. “Some days it’s not as good as it looks. We also have good days and bad days, but I think it’s driving towards the same purpose of unity and love and what’s best for [our kids].”
“We have this idea that just because we break up we can’t love the things about the person anymore that we loved and that’s not true,” she explained.
For the Goop-founder, it’s “interesting” that the entire process has revealed that “my divorce and my relationship with Chris now is better than our marriage was, so I think that it can be done.”
She said that she felt “really lucky” that she had a doctor who gave her and Martin “a rubric for how to” co-parent successfully, namely, “You have to have radical accountability” and “know that every relationship is 50/50.”
“No matter what you think, how you think you were wronged or how bad you perceive the other person’s actions, or whatever the case may be,” she emphasized. “If you are brave enough to take responsibility for your half and really look at your own garbage and your own trauma and how it’s presenting in the world and in your relationship, then there really is somewhere to go and something to learn and something to heal.”
“You are also holding the other person in this sphere of humanity,” Paltrow continued. “We are all part good and part bad. It’s not binary, we are all gray-area. We all are trying our best. I really wanted my kids to not be traumatized, if it were possible. Chris and I committed to putting them first and that’s harder than it looks because some days you really don’t want to be with the person that you are getting divorced from. But if you’re committed to having family dinner, then you do it.”
“And you take a deep breath and you look the person in the eye and you remember your pact and you smile and you hug and recommit to this new relationship that you are trying to foster,” Paltrow described.
The Emma actor has been talking a lot about her relationship with Martin lately. Last month, she penned an essay for British Vogue in which she described the moment she knew the relationship was over and also the infamous backlash to the couple’s decision to call the divorce a “conscious uncoupling.”
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“We did not want to fail,” Paltrow wrote. “We didn’t want to let anyone down. We desperately didn’t want to hurt our children. We didn’t want to lose our family. The questions, both philosophical and tactical, seemed unfathomable: Who sleeps where, how does bath time work, what do we say to the kids?”
“I bent myself into every imaginable shape to avoid answering them,” she recalled. “But one day, despite all our efforts, I found that I was not at a fork in the road. I was well down a path. Almost without realizing it, we had diverged. We’d never find ourselves together in that way again.”
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Paltrow has been married to Brad Falchuk since 2018. The couple often travels with Martin, Apple, and Moses for family vacations.
“I know my ex-husband was meant to be the father of my children,” Paltrow wrote, “and I know my current husband is meant to be the person I grow very old with.”
Seems like Paltrow’s thoughts about co-parenting are pretty levelheaded. We’re so glad she’s sharing her journey and being so open and honest about the difficulties parents encounter even when they’re trying their best.
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