“I think that if you’re awake in your life, you fear being alone,” the 58-year-old says in the December/January issue of AARP The Magazine. “But if you face that fear, realizing that ultimately we all come in alone and will end up alone, you enjoy your alone company.”
Shriver, who split with her husband of 25 years in 2011, after learning that he’d fathered a child with the family’s longtime housekeeper, comes from a big family and admits she’s “not a big fan of living alone.”
“Do I prefer a house with 20 kids in it? Yes. Do I feel that I can’t wait until they’re gone? No. But do I think I’ll be okay when they’re all gone? Yes,” she says. “And I’ve worked to make sure they know that.”
While she still has one child in high school, her youngest, Christopher, 16, Shriver admits she’s already talking to her older kids – Katherine, 23; Christina, 22; and Patrick, 20 – about when they’re going to make her a grandmother. It’s something she can’t wait for.
“Christina says that when she has kids, she’s going to give them to me! I’m counting on that!” says Shriver. “If not, I’ll probably take someone else’s kids! I might start a day care center! Who knows?”
Back on TV
Shriver recently went back into TV journalism, after quitting in 2004 when Schwarzenegger became governor of California, and says that while she’s busy with work, which also includes running two websites, and her kids, she’s also taking time to focus on herself.
She says that she’s had to re-imagine her life since splitting with her husband. “You have to be willing to let go of the life you planned in order to make the life you’re meant to live.”
And while her divorce is still not final, Shriver isn’t rushing out to find someone else to spend the rest of her life with.
“We’re so consumed as a society with ‘Do you have a boyfriend?’ or ‘Are you married?’ We miss the love that is staring you right in the face,” she says. “I’ve been blessed by my parents’ love, by the love I had with Arnold, by the love of my children and my friends … I feel surrounded by love. I feel blessed now here in my life. Yeah. I feel blessed.”
