Gwyneth Paltrow Admits to "Waves of Grief and Sadness" After Both Children Go Off to College
She's welcoming the new chapter.
Gwyneth Paltrow is officially an empty-nester.
The Goop founder has just spoken candidly about what it's been like for her since her second child, son Moses Martin, 18, left for college. (Her daughter, Apple Martin, 20, started college at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, in 2022, while Moses just enrolled at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, this fall.)
"It's very different. I have waves of grief and sadness," Paltrow told her followers in an Instagram Stories Q&A this week (via the Daily Mail).
"I am kind of getting back in touch with this part of myself that I haven't felt like since I was in my 20s before I had kids. Like, a little more space and imagination, maybe. A little more inner space for what I might want to do that day, stuff like that.
"So, it's evolving. It's interesting."
The Avengers actress had already addressed how she might feel about her newly child-free home ahead of Moses finishing high school, in a March 2024 interview with the Sunday Times. Things were compounded by the fact that her husband Brad Falchuk's son Brody also started at Yale this fall.
"I’ve been so defined and so fulfilled by motherhood. It’s been kind of the central … it’s been like the central kind of … I don’t know even how to articulate it!" she said at the time.
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"It’s like the guiding force. It’s what I return to. I observe a lot of my friends who’ve had kids who’ve gone off to college. Your kid … it changes. And, you know, they come home a lot and all that stuff, but it’s not quite the same as living under the same roof all the days of the year. So I’m just trying to be open to what that means."
Paltrow shares Moses and Apple with Chris Martin, to whom she was married between 2003 and 2016. She's also become a loving stepmom to Brody and his sister Isabella, after tying the knot with Falchuk in 2018.
Iris Goldsztajn is a London-based journalist, editor and author. She is the morning editor at Marie Claire, and her work has appeared in the likes of British Vogue, InStyle, Cosmopolitan, Refinery29 and SELF. Iris writes about everything from celebrity news and relationship advice to the pitfalls of diet culture and the joys of exercise. She has many opinions on Harry Styles, and can typically be found eating her body weight in cheap chocolate.