OK, I usually am not bothered by these things, but this article (Parade, 10/30/08) really rubbed me the wrong way. Some of the things she said are so insensitive! Did she not have a purpose before? Were Bella and Connor not gifts?! I don't know; maybe it's just me. Read on... (italics and bolding mine)
'I've been given a gift'
'I've been given a gift'
By James Kaplan
Publication Date: 11/02/2008
Nicole Kidman is tall—much taller than you’d expect. Shoeless, she stands close to 6 feet; in heels, the sky’s the limit. In addition, her contours are roughly those of a pipe cleaner. “I’d love to look like Sophia Loren,” she says with a sigh. Kidman is in London with Loren filming a small role in the movie musical Nine. “Sophia is drop-dead gorgeous. And as curvaceous as they come—still. Do I look like that? No.”No. The 41-year-old star and I are talking in her hotel near Buckingham Palace. With her hair pulled back, and wearing jeans, black boots, a man’s striped dress shirt, and a sleeveless sweater, Kidman looks more handsome than the drop-dead gorgeous she has been in so many films. In her latest movie, the epic Australia, due out Nov. 26, Kidman plays an uptight English lady of the 1930s, but in real life, she speaks in the flat tones of her native Sydney, Australia, and has a humor to match. “Part of being Australian is being able to make fun of myself,” she says, “because if I can’t do that, then someone else is going to do it for me.”
Kidman has been in the spotlight for close to 20 years, and it’s often been rough territory to navigate. Her 1990 marriage to Tom Cruise, his embrace of Scientology, their adoption of two children (Isabella and Connor), and their 2001 divorce made international news. Maybe, when Kidman married country singer (and fellow Australian) Keith Urban in June 2006, she thought she’d left the tabloids behind for a while. But four months after the wedding, Urban checked himself into rehab. Then, last July, Kidman gave birth to her first child, daughter Sunday Rose. Suddenly the long lenses were back, behind every bush and mailbox.
The new mother has reacted intensely with “whatever that primal thing is, the need and desire to keep her very protected,” Kidman says. “People say, ‘Oh, it would be so much easier if you’d just let them get a photo of her.’ And I can’t. I’m like, ‘I don’t want to. I want her to stay out of that.’ Maybe that will wane as she gets bigger, and I’ll be easier with it. But for now, I’m still keeping her in a bubble.” Her eyes turn red and moist.
“I’m raw and emotional,” Kidman admits. “I cry even thinking of her. But they are tears of joy. Because I suppose I never thought I would get to have it. To have been given it so late in life—I’m so ready for it. And I think giving birth to a child, as a woman, is what we’re born to do. I don’t mean that to sound sexist, because many women don’t get to do it, and I thought I was one of them. But at the same time, if you are given that gift, it’s an extraordinary thing.”
On the other hand, Kidman says, “It’s very bittersweet. Because, at 41, I think, ‘I want to see her 21st birthday, and I want to see her get married.’ My relationship with death used to be far more ambivalent, I think, and now it’s very much about staying in the world. That’s why in the past I could jump out of planes and take a lot of risks. Strangely enough, I think when you have children at 25, you still have that ‘what will be, will be’ attitude. It’s such a different way of parenting. Bella and Connor were very free and easy, probably because they had parents who were very young and jumping around the world and pretty easygoing.” Kidman and Cruise share custody of their adopted children and, as she confirms, they were raised in Scientology. When the subject comes up, though, Kidman stiffens. “I just don’t talk about it,” she says.
What she’d clearly prefer to discuss is the present. “Bella and Connor are 15 and 13, so we’ve taken them, Tom and I, almost into their adult life. To then have a birth child that I have to take into adult life, give her her wings, it’s a big purpose. I know my place. Put it that way.” She suddenly laughs boisterously. “I like knowing my place, though. I feel grounded with it.”
I ask Kidman what her new daughter is like. Can she tell so far? “Well, I’m her mother, so she’s special!” she exclaims. “I’m devoted. I’m totally devoted to her.”
She’s also devoted to Urban. The baby looks like him, Kidman tells me. “I’m glad, because when he goes on tour, I say to him that he leaves a little bit of him with me.”
Separations have always been hard for her. “I was the child who would lie awake at night when my mom went to work, and I’d cry, scared she wasn’t coming home,” she recalls. “It’s why, I suppose, in my relationships as well, I get very attached and fiercely protective, fiercely loyal. It takes me a long time, and once I do, that’s it.”
When Nicole was 17, her mother, a registered nurse, was diagnosed with breast cancer. “That shook our household to the core,” she says. “I think it probably still reverberates through both my sister and me. She’s 25 years in remission, which is an extraordinary story. But it somehow takes a grasp of your heart and does something. Which is life. As my mom said, ‘Life is not easy. It’s nitty-gritty, and you get in it and get your hands dirty and live it.’ ”
With Kidman’s marriage to Urban, the nitty-gritty turned up sooner than either of them expected. “We were thrown into his alcohol problem three months into the marriage, and that was big,” she says. “We became the closest we could become, because we had to bare our souls. We did 10 years of marriage in three months. You go to hell and back with this—when the addiction takes control of the life, it’s terrifying. But there is hope, and we work on it every day, and we are in a place of actual peace right now, which is a beautiful place. I love him so deeply, and he has done an amazing amount of work, and he is an amazing husband, and I am just very, very grateful. I think we are both in a place of humility.”
When she was younger, Kidman says, she was “a little disconnected. Now my ability to notice things and respond to things and be here is far more profound. With that comes happiness, with it comes sadness.” She smiles. “But it’s a beautiful life.”
