Angelina Jolie said just one word: “Yeah.” It was delivered in a soft tone, adorned with a small smile and a wistful look as if she were already considering the joys of adding yet another child to her brood.
There are six children now in the household she shares with partner Brad Pitt, and, Jolie told TODAY’s Matt Lauer Thursday in New York, the question isn’t whether they will adopt another child, but when that will happen.
Born July 12, Jolie’s twins, Knox Léon and Vivienne Marcheline, are just three months old. “You can’t even start the process until any new children are at least six months old,” Jolie said, explaining that adoption agencies want to see how new children are fitting into a household. So the question, she said, is, “When is the right time to bring another child in?”
‘The right person’
According to the tabloids, the Pitt-Jolie partnership has been strained by the addition of the twins to four other children ranging in age from 2 to 7. If that is true, Jolie gave no sign of it.
Lauer did not address the reports directly. Instead, he told Jolie of something she said in 2005, before she settled down with Pitt: “I’m better alone.”
But Jolie doesn’t believe that anymore. “I met the right person,” she said, referring to Pitt. She started to add something, but caught herself, saying, “I’m not going to say anything that’s going to embarrass me. I don’t like being without him. I don’t love being alone like I used to be.”
With six kids, that’s not a problem. Jolie all but melts when she talks about them. The twins, she said, are doing great, and the other children have welcomed them into the family.
“We have so many children that they’re not really stunned anymore when kids come home,” she said. Her oldest, Maddox, 7, “is like the professional big brother. He’s done it so many times.”
Jolie and Pitt made sure the other children — Pax, 4, Zahara, 3, and Shiloh, 2 — knew that a new brother and sister would soon join the family.
“We prepared them,” she said. “We talked to them about what was coming, and they are all at that great age that they aren’t threatened, that they are independent enough to not need Mommy and Daddy all the time, and to be able to enjoy the kids. They play with them. They change their diapers. They call them their babies and dress them up.”
Citizens of the world
Pitt and Jolie lived in a villa in France while she was pregnant with the twins. They have recently moved to Berlin, where Pitt is making a movie. Before France, they had lived in New Orleans, where Pitt spent a lot of time helping to rebuild the Ninth Ward, which was virtually wiped out by Hurricane Katrina.
Jolie said they have no immediate plans to plant themselves in any one place.
“The children will probably dictate,” she told Lauer. “One day they’re probably going to want to stay in one place for a very long time, when they start to get friends. So far, we’ve moved them a lot and they like moving. They like making new friends wherever we go. We’d like them to be those kinds of adults where they can find friends anywhere in the world. We’re more focused on that than where we’re going to settle.”