The actress welcomed her eldest child in 2004.
Gwyneth Paltrow had a scary experience when she gave birth to her daughter. During the latest episode of Spotify's Armchair Expert podcast, the 49-year-old actress recalled nearly dying while giving birth to her daughter, Apple, who's now 17. Paltrow shares Apple, as well as 15-year-old Moses, with her ex-husband, Chris Martin.
"I had two caesareans," she said of her children's births. "My daughter was an emergency. It was crazy. We almost died. It was not good."
While Paltrow didn't elaborate on the complications on the podcast, back in 2006 she called her 70-hour-long labor "traumatic."
"We started having some trouble and they had to do an intervention," Paltrow told ABC News at the time. "It was a traumatic experience. I won't lie. But it was worth every minute. It's amazing. I came out of it thinking, 'Well, I would have amputated my legs for her.' So that [labor] was nothing."
The topic came up on Armchair Expert during a discussion about body image and expectations. As a result of her C-sections, Paltrow said, she has "a big scar" across her body that she had to get used to.
"You're like, 'Oh wow, that didn't used to be there,'" she said of the scar. "It's not that it's bad or you want to judge it but you're just like, 'Oh my god.'"
Paltrow said that the scar, along with other postpartum body realities, make Paltrow grateful that social media wasn't around when she had her kids.
"Thank God there wasn't Instagram when I had babies," she said. "Now it's like if I see someone, 'Oh I just gave birth two weeks ago and I have a completely washboard stomach,' and I'm like, 'Wow that's not what I [looked like].'"
"Great, more power to the lady with the washboard [abs], but that is totally the exception," Paltrow added. "Now we're being fed all of these other images of what we're supposed to look like all the time -- babies, no babies, whatever."
Instead of placing unrealistic expectations on each other, Paltrow believes that "women really need to be friends with each other and [stop] all the judgment around how you have a baby, do you breastfeed, do you not, this that, are you going to work, are you not going to work."
"Guess what? Whatever it is, it's OK," she said. "I feel like we also have this weird thing around, it's past perfectionism, it's like, 'I can do this gargantuan task that's superhuman.' Why? For what?"
"I think a lot of it comes from a good place of people wanting to share what worked for them if they had a good experience," Paltrow added, "but sometimes it can sound judgmental."
Now that her kids are teenagers, Paltrow recently told ET that she wants to encourage them to "really listen to themselves, listen to their instincts, listen if something feels right, and to act from that place."
That's especially true when it comes to sex, a topic Paltrow doesn't shy away from in her new Netflix series, Sex, Love & Goop.
"I try always to be neutral on the topic [of sex when speaking to my kids]. I think my generation, we got a lot of messages around sex that made us feel bad about it," she told ET. "I try to just be curious, and teenagers are never going to want to talk to their parents about sex, ever. I sort of follow their lead and luckily, in middle school they had a very thorough sex education, so the school handled the kind of birds and the bees parts. Then I am there for any questions, but the questions are pretty minimal."
"I think the main thing that nobody ever tells you, is you have to stay really close to your own truth and you have to stay really in integrity with that truth," Paltrow added. "Because when you are in a relationship and you are not being your full self, you are sublimating things or you are white knuckling through something, and I think it can be pretty damaging to how you feel about yourself."
Watch the video below for more of ET's interview with Paltrow.
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