Angelina Jolie has become the proud and loving mother of six children. Since her first child, motherhood has been good to Jolie in a lot of ways. It’s even improved the way the actor saw herself.
Angelina Jolie didn’t think she’d ever be stable enough to be a mother
Taking care of her children has always been the top priority for the megastar. But back in her earlier days, being a mom wasn’t something Jolie thought she’d be capable of doing. It took a lot of growth and self-reflection to start Jolie off on the path to motherhood.
“I went through a lot of my youth really thinking I was never going to be stable enough or calm enough and be able to give enough of myself as a parent,” Jolie once said in an interview with Marie Claire. “I always loved children, but I didn’t know if I’d ever be ready enough to be a good mom. And I took it very seriously.”
When Jolie did decide to become a mother, she had initially only focused on adoption. That was only until she met Brad Pitt.
“What surprised me is I never planned on having children biologically. I was dead set on just always adopting. That felt right to me and the children would be at home…I had no maternal desire to have children,” she said. “But that changes when you meet somebody you love.”
Angelina Jolie first became happy with the way she looked after becoming a mother
Jolie has always been lauded for her looks. In 2004, Esquire had even named Jolie the Sexiest Woman Alive. But the Oscar-winner asserted that she only truly became proud of her own looks after she became a mother.
“I first became happy with the way I look when I became a mother. There’s this idea that beauty is when someone does your hair and puts a lot of make-up on you and sticks your face on the cover of a magazine. Is that beauty?…Something else comes out of you when you become a parent and, as you get older, you start to see more character in your face,” she said in a 2009 interview with YOU (via HuffPost).
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For Jolie, motherhood has offered her a calmness she hadn’t felt before. And this has only enhanced the way Jolie feels about her appearance.
“Now, when I look at myself, I just see somebody at peace, and I see a mom, and I see my own relatives in my face – and that’s a kind of beauty that exists for everybody and doesn’t disappear,” she said.
Angelina Jolie didn’t think she was traditionally beautiful
Although confident in her looks, Jolie didn’t believe that her features aligned with conventional beauty standards. She credited her unique features to her late mother and her own mixed heritage.
“I always felt not traditionally beautiful. I have big features … as I get older I look like my mom. And I love my mom. You start to kinda put your lineage in line of the different things you are. I see the Native American in me, I can see the German from my father’s (Jon Voight) side and you come to love the combination,” she once told CBS 60 Minutes (via Perth Now).
But at the time, all that mattered was how her ex-husband Pitt saw her.
“As long as Brad thinks I’m beautiful … I wake up and I want to be a smarter person. But I feel like that’s certainly what I’m encouraging my girls to do,” she said.
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