Ayesha Curry's delayed reaction

Over the weekend, Ayesha Curry’s August appearance on Call Her Daddy seems to have picked up steam. Despite the fact that it’s been over a month since she sat down with Alex Cooper to talk about her marriage to NBA superstar Steph Curry, motherhood and how different her life is now compared to what she initially thought it would be, the episode seems to have made its way over to an unintended audience (read: sports fans).

Multiple sports outlets began sharing the most clickbaity and out-of-context snippets and soundbites from the conversation, prompting a negative online reaction to some of the things she revealed on the podcast – like the fact that she didn’t initially want kids and wasn’t in pursuit of marriage.

“So I didn’t want kids,” Ayesha told host Alex Cooper. “I didn’t want to get married. I thought I was going to be the career girl and that’s it. And I had my eyes set on my goals…I was never the little girl that dreamt about the wedding dress and all of that.”

Despite that, she described meeting and marrying Steph pretty early on after sharing a whirlwind romance with him that saw them supporting each other at the very early stages of their respective careers. He wanted to be a basketball coach and she wanted to be an actress. But with the support of both of their families, their relationship progressed to marriage in 2011, and before they knew it, she was pregnant with their first daughter just three months after tying the knot. 

“I just knew that I loved him, and I’d never, like, experienced anything else. I’d never felt any differently than, like, this is who I want to spend the rest of my life with. So we kind of just dove in,” she explained.

But she says that taking such massive steps in her early 20s came with new realities. 

“I didn’t even have time to think about what I wanted anymore, it’s so interesting. I spent my entire life trying to work towards something, and then it kind of just disappeared, and I didn’t think twice about it,” she said. “But after my daughter turned one, I remember there being a shift and being like, I have goals for myself. Like, this doesn’t feel right. I love being a mom, but I love doing other things too.”

My story is pretty similar to Ayesha’s, except the part where she fell for a budding NBA star before 25 and legally tied the knot. But the part about becoming a mom at a young age and just going with it, I feel that. And so do a lot of other women. Which is why all was quiet on the western front when the episode first came out. That is, until her revelations ended up in the hands of men – like the sports bro kind – a cohort that has proven themselves unequipped to handle the nuances that come with the female experience. 

The backlash we’re seeing to what Ayesha revealed is similar to how people have responded to what Tracee Ellis Ross revealed during her appearance on Michelle Obama’s podcast earlier this year, when she described being content with her decision to not have a husband or children, but acknowledged that there is a sense of grief that comes with that. I wrote about that here.

And we’ve also seen this kind of backlash towards women like Jada Pinkett Smith and Michelle Obama when they have spoken candidly about their marriages and admitted that it’s not perfect all the time, far from it. It seems like whenever a woman is married to someone wealthy and successful, it renders her unable to speak candidly about the experience she as a human being outside of her partner is having, and the expectation is that she sit there and shut up. Ayesha even said this in her talk with Alex.

“A reporter actually literally said on live television, she needs to sit there and look pretty like other people,” Ayesha recalled.

It was made obvious throughout the episode that this was a rare occasion where Ayesha got to talk about her life before it became the life she has now. When Alex posed questions to her about her early life, like her move from Toronto to L.A. to pursue acting, it was clear that it wasn’t a frequent topic of conversation for her – which substantiates much of what she was saying about feeling like she lives in the shadow of her husband. 

One example of that is her saying with every piece of success she’s had in recent years, from the launch of the Sweet July magazine to publishing two cookbooks, she knows there will always be questions about whether she was able to do that because of her own raw talent or because of who her husband is. 

I think this is where we see how impossible it is for women to not put our foot in it. To not fail. To meet society’s expectations. Look at Michelle Obama, who quite perfectly executed her duties as First Lady by holding the first Black president of the United States down while he governed the country over two terms, FFS, all while mothering two growing girls and navigating a decade’s worth of marital hard times, which I touched on here. 

Then you look at someone like Jada Pinkett Smith, who was famous in her own right when she met Will Smith. She’s always been able to hold her own and a modern and open-minded mom who loved Will’s son from a previous relationship as if he were her own. Yet she was dragged for doing what she felt was best when her marriage was in a state of collapse.

Then you have someone like Tracee Ellis Ross, daughter of a legendary and iconic diva, who decided to forego marriage and children and focus on her career and her joy instead, the way Ayesha intended to. But the minute she admitted it came with some grief and that there were moments of loss, she got lit up by the internet and was told her standards were too high and that she should’ve made different decisions.

Then you have Ayesha Curry, who had her sights set on an acting career and moved to L.A. in pursuit of it. She fell in love with Steph before he became the legend he is today. They did things the “right way”. They got married, they started a family. And yet she can’t openly and honestly reflect on her life or feel like the success that she’s had is her own without being taken to task by people on the internet.

“I was excited to talk to you because as women, there’s just like so many things that happen in our life that we want to plan for. And then obviously life just doesn’t go as planned,” Ayesha told Alex at the start of the episode. People hear that and extrapolate a lack of gratitude. But she said she wouldn’t change a thing, even if none of it was on her bingo card.

When she said “as women”, that line sticks out to me because with each passing day it becomes clearer and clearer that sometimes, we are the only safe space we have. But it sticks out to me in this particular scenario because it’s clear that this conversation was never meant to make it over to outlets like Sports Illustrated and Heavy Sports. But with a history of going viral for all the wrong reasons, and for being a bit too open and honest about her experience being the wife of an NBA superstar, she was aware it was a possibility.

“I’m really nervous to be here…hoping I don’t get in trouble for the things I say,” she said at the top of the episode.

It will always be very validating for me to hear the experiences women have, even when they are wildly different from the experiences I’ve had. And the reason for that is because it affirms to me that we’re all on our own paths. We’re all just doing life for the first time, learning as we go and trying to do what works best and what feels right for us. And perhaps that makes the case for less of these podcasts. Because for every one person, like me, that finds solace in hearing a woman’s story, there are three more internet trolls lying in wait to deny women their own truths.