Blake Lively is currently the cover girl for the American edition of Marie Claire – I covered that interview last week, that was where she was talking about her baby’s “meaty eyelids.” Well, Blake covers the August issue of Marie Claire UK and it feels vaguely like this is just a reprint of the American editorial, but… maybe not? What can I tell you? The photos are different, the quotes are different and Marie Claire UK says they spoke to Blake. Maybe the problem is that Blake looks the same in every editorial and she sounds the same in every interview? You always get a sense of déjà vu, only you’re too bored to even notice. Some highlights from this new interview:

Baby James won’t be trotted out for photo-ops: “My husband and I chose a profession and a side effect of that is your personal life is public. Our child hasn’t had the opportunity to choose whether or not she wants her personal life to be public or not. So in order to give her as much normality as possible, we want her to have a childhood like we had. So we can’t really throw her into the lion’s den that is LA, not that we really want to.’

She hasn’t been transformed by motherhood: “When women become mothers, it’s all: ‘How’s your style?’, ‘Do you dress differently?’, ‘Do you go to Mommy & Me classes?’ I wanted to go to a Mommy & Me class before I was a mom. People really expect that you’re suddenly a different woman, and I think it strips a woman’s identity in a way that is kind of strange, because I’ve always been innately maternal my whole life.”

Her work-life balance: “I’m always ambitious about film-making. But I love my personal life so much—and my family so much—that it takes a lot to make me want to leave the house. Most of the things I do, I fight for. But to want to fight for something? I have to be really stimulated by it.”

[From E! News]

While I eye-rolled a lot at “I wanted to go to a Mommy & Me class before I was a mom,” there are absolutely women like that in the world. And there’s nothing wrong with that – some women know from a young age that they want to have children, that motherhood is their goal and they want to be young mothers and all of that. Some women ARE maternal without ever giving birth too. But the way Blake describes herself… she exhausts me. At the start of that quote, I thought she was standing up for women who still want to retain their identity separate from motherhood, but nope! Blake wants you to know that motherhood was always her identity, even before she was a mother. While she may be completely authentic about all of this, doesn’t she often come across as pandering to the mommy-mafia types?

Photos courtesy of Marie Claire UK.