Parenting & Family Quote by Sarah Michelle Gellar

Gellar’s punchline lands because it treats motherhood like a desire you can audition for, not a destiny you’re obliged to sprint toward. She opens with the polite, PR-friendly “Absolutely” and “eventually,” the safe language celebrities use when they don’t want to invite the glare of “why not now?” Then she swerves into a brutally practical coping mechanism: borrowing friends’ kids as a trial run. It’s intimate and communal, the kind of off-camera village parents always say they need, repurposed here as a reality check.

Calling other people’s children “the best birth control in the world” is the quote’s slyest move. It punctures the sentimental script that says being around kids inevitably awakens baby fever. Instead, she frames childcare as labor that produces exhaustion, not just joy. That exhaustion is the point: “I’m so tired afterward” isn’t a complaint so much as evidence. In a culture that still expects women to justify their timelines, fatigue becomes her argument, the one you can’t really debate.

The “Okay, maybe in another two years” tag keeps it light while signaling something sharper: control. She’s not rejecting motherhood; she’s rejecting the pressure to perform readiness on someone else’s schedule. The humor does double duty, making the boundary socially acceptable while hinting at the real subtext: wanting kids and wanting a life that doesn’t disappear into them are not mutually exclusive, but pretending they’re easy to balance is.