Emily Ratajkowski feels 'pulled in many directions' as a newly single mom: 'If I want to make money, I have to take jobs'
No one can accuse Emily Ratajkowski of holding back.
The supermodel mother, 31, recently opened up about how she once felt her beauty kept her from being "taken seriously" as a writer.
"I would cover myself up or not put on makeup, because I'd want writers to think of me as somebody who didn’t care about those things," the My Body author told Elle UK. "God, women can't win. I bump against that every day. Even my mom: working in academia as a beautiful woman, it was something she talked a lot about, how she wanted to be perceived in the world."
These days, however, she's done trying to make other people happy.
"Right now, I'm in a place where I do not care!" she explained. "I will wear whatever the hell I want, as much makeup as I want, and make myself feel good, which sometimes means being sexy and sometimes doesn't. I can feel how uncomfortable it makes people."
In October, Ratajkowski shared on TikTok that she was ready to enter her "b**** era."
"I really mean it," she told Elle UK. "We should all be in our b**** era. I’m so tired of adjusting. Maybe this is coming out of COVID, being 31, or being recently single… We'll see. Maybe I will regret it."
Ratajkowski is mother to 1-year-old Sylvester Apollo Bear, whom she shares with ex Sebastian Bear-McClard. Since giving birth, the model has been open and honest about her approach to parenting as a "self-employed" single mom.
"It feels like I should always be choosing him over anything I do, but if I want to make money, I have to take jobs," she said. "Especially now, as a single mom, where I'm the breadwinner. But I feel pulled in many directions. You sacrifice so much of your identity when you become a mother. And I feel like my life is just beginning. My twenties felt like how people describe their teenage years, where you’re like, 'God, that was awkward and painful.' And as much as I did things that I love, I'm also just like, 'Goodbye!' Now, for the first time, I am enjoying the world more. And yet now I have this incredible responsibility of raising a child."
Ratajkowski's level of independence has also inspired her parenting style.
"I want [my son] to have an example of a mom who is happy, which serves a selfish thing, but actually a happy parent is a better parent," she said. "These aren't questions that men ask themselves in the same way. They go to work, and it's work. There are so many expectations around what kind of moms we are."
Aside from motherhood, Ratajkowski is finding joy in other areas — especially when it comes to reclaiming her own body.
"I think a lot of women in your early 20s — because it's sort of like, you're sexualized, and you're coming into your sexual being, you're an adult, you know, but you're still really young – have a really kind of sick relationship with your body in that period," she recently told Yahoo Life. "Mine especially was that way because I was commodifying my body and it was my living and also like, how I became famous, and it became my career and my whole identity."
That level of attention, she said, limited herself from knowing her true self.
"I didn't want to just be a body, I never had. And [My Body] was really, I think, just kind of born out of a depression, essentially. And being like, 'Wait, this has not made me happy,'" she said. "I wanted to give this one dimensional kind of caricature of myself that had been out in the world a voice. And it felt super important."
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