The Peter Pan sisters just too selfish to grow up
So many women seem to be slipping out of marriage with the gleeful ease with which they once slipped out of silk stockings. First Brad and angelina split at her insistence, after being together for 12 years and raising six children. Then came the bombshell break-up of golden Hollywood couple naomi Watts and Liev Schreiber, because she reportedly needs her freedom. They never married but have two beautiful blond boys and 11 years together.
now television presenter Zoe Ball and her husband norman Cook have ‘reached the end of the rainbow’ and split following an 18-year relationship. They married in 1999 and have two children, a boy aged 16 and an eight-year-old-daughter, but Zoe is ‘bored’.
of course marriages and relationships break down all the time. Couples make plans and then life gets in the way. However, the common thread running through these freshly broken families, the ribbon of mortification that connects them all, is the reason for the split. or lack thereof.
Boredom, ennui and selfish parental power struggles all loom large. Instead of being responsible adults in charge of little children, these women seem to be behaving like spoilt teenagers themselves.
according to sources, angelina and Brad have been having screaming rows about the kids for years. He is the disciplinarian who wants them to have a settled upbringing and education; a proper base in one of their homes, preferably in new orleans.
In contrast, she wants to keep shuttling the brood between their homes in France, Los angeles, new orleans, new york and wherever the couple happen to be working. Jolie once said: ‘I’m trying to raise them to live a truly global life.’
To which the question must be: For God’s sake, why? Wouldn’t they be better with regular teachers, schoolmates and a toy box always in the same place?
I’m with Brad on this point: children need stability and routine.
one has to wonder why the Jolie-Pitts went ahead and had three children and — even more crucially, adopted more — without first agreeing on a joint approach to the basic principles of parenting. It seems to me that ange is always keener on impressing the watching world than tending to her own troubled flock. and, ultimately, it is all about the pair of them, not the kids.
MEANWHILE, naomi Watts has split from Schreiber after more than a decade together. The couple said in a statement ‘The best way forward for us as a family is to separate as a couple’.
That must be confusing for the children.
But apparently Schreiber, 48, wants to settle down but Watts decided that she wasn’t ready for this step.
Whaaat? She’s a 47-yearold mother-of-two, not a dimpled ingénue standing on the kerb, wondering what to do with her life. If she didn’t want to settle down, shouldn’t she have thought about that before bringing children into the equation?
In the meantime, down on the Hove seafront, Zoe Ball is finding teetotal hubby norman ‘boring’ after 18 years together. This is not a new situation. She had an affair with one of his best friends four years after they married, but norman forgave her and they reconciled. now, according to friends of the couple, she ‘wants loads of booze and sex with a new lover in his 20s’.
To be fair, perhaps quite a few bored 45-year-old mums feel the same way, but are far too responsible to throw it all away for the cheap thrill of a housewives’ fantasy.
not Zoe. Last year, she was photographed snogging boy band star TayTay Starhz (yeah, right) in a London nightclub. The 23-year-old told the Sun newspaper this week: ‘She gave me the impression she was single. She lunged at me and I bet I wasn’t the first or the last. There were tongues. I’m cringing now, because she is old enough to be my mum.’
How charmless of him — and how embarrassing, particularly for Zoe’s teenage son. But should we be surprised by her behaviour?
In 1999, Zoe was the original ladette, moseying off to her wedding with a cowboy hat on her head, a cigarette between her lips and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in her hand. now she is surely far too old to be behaving like this?
Time for some Jan-advice. earth calling Zoe Ball. Come in, Zoe, your time is up. First, it’s not the nineties any more. Second, it’s not about you when you have children. and third, the grass is never really greener on the other side. It is strewn with pitfalls and snakes. as you are finding out.
Sometimes one wonders why these people bother to get married, establish partnerships and have children, only to throw it all away with such casual cruelty.
Surely there comes a time in everyone’s life when you must put childish things behind you? yet there seems to be an entire generation out there for whom the normal rules don’t apply.
They get hitched on a whim and get pregnant without a second thought. and when things are not going their way, they plough all their energies into a Search For The Real me instead of trying to repair the family they created.
midlife crises may affect women just as much as men, but let’s not cloud the issue or tart it up into something it is not. Quite often it is selfishness: Peter Pan’s pretty sister who just won’t grow up.