Ina Garten: Not having kids is a choice & that was the choice I made
Ina Garten is a domestic goddess. I covet her life. I covet her Hamptons house. I covet her kitchen. I covet her herb garden. I covet her fabulous friends. I covet her poker nights with all of her gay-dude friends. I covet her marriage to the happiest man in the world, Jeffrey Garten. Jeffrey is the dean of a college, and he’s away from the Hamptons for half the week. When he returns to the Hamptons for long weekends, Ina always cooks him a special meal (and it’s usually kosher). In Jeffrey’s absence, Ina is mostly just cooking for her friends and for herself. Jeffrey and Ina have been together for 48 years. They know what’s up and they have their relationship completely figured out. And as it turns out, having kids was never on the menu.
Ina Garten and her husband Jeffrey have one of the most coveted marriages on television. Over the course of 48 years together, they’ve shared laughs, love, and not to mention very good food, but the pair decided early on that they wouldn’t share kids together.
“We decided not to have children,” the Food Network star says in a new episode of the Katie Couric Podcast airing on Thursday. “I really appreciate that other people do and we will always have friends that have children that we are close to but it was a choice I made very early. I really felt, I feel, that I would have never been able to have the life I’ve had. So it’s a choice and that was the choice I made.”
When Couric brought up the stigma that often surrounds married couples who decide not become parents, Garten says she never felt judged for her decision. “I never felt that people did,” she says. “I think the one thing that we miss is a lot of people’s friends are the parents of their kids’ friends. So we never had that connection with other people that I see, that network. But no I never felt judged by it—maybe people did but I didn’t notice.”
Ina worked for years/decades to get where she is – she often talks about the years she spent getting up at 4 am to make chicken salad for her restaurant, The Barefoot Contessa, or the time she spent in Washington working as a policy wonk. Her career as a professional chef/cook started somewhat later in life, and she’s probably right – she wouldn’t have been able to work as much as she has throughout adulthood if she had kids. She’s also right about how it’s a choice and it’s a choice some women make. It’s a choice I’ve made too. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Photos courtesy of WENN.
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