I feel more like a woman, ready for kids: Shakira

Madrid: Colombian singer Shakira has said that at 32 she feels "more like a woman and in touch with my femininity" while feeling the need to become a mother so much that she almost shelved her latest production "La Loba" (The She-Wolf), about to be released.

"The truth is that I`m dying to have a baby and Antonio (her boyfriend) is too. I want two or three," she said in an interview published by the Spanish magazine XLSemanal, adding that she`d like her babies "to come when everything is peaceful", but right now her busy agenda is taking up a lot of time. "Hopefully afterwards we can dedicate ourselves to reproducing, because when you get to be 30 it`s something weird, as if your body is pleading for it," Shakira said. The artist quoted the Roman poet Ovid in saying that she shares his vision that a woman flowers when she reaches 35, "and I`m getting close", she said, adding that "I think life has the hands of a sculptor and I`m just beginning to understand my form." "I`ve been dancing as long as I can remember. After I went onstage the first time I could never come down again. I told my dad that I wanted to be a singer and that was it," she said, recalling that her first performances were in a mining camp with a repertoire of four songs, two of them by Madonna. The singer kept up with her music because that was her vocation, but also because she promised herself success in order to help restore her parents` prosperity after they went through a crisis that forced her father to sell off his businesses. "We lost everything," Shakira said. After that experience, the artist also decided to do something for poor, abandoned children like the ones her parents showed her in those difficult moments of her childhood so she would understand that she was really not so unfortunate. That led her to create, when she was 18, the Pies Descalzos (Barefoot) Foundation whose mission is to educate. She considers education essential and said that in her meeting with US President Barack Obama she took the opportunity to talk about it. "We talked about education, about early childhood development, two subjects that I`m obsessed with, about his interest in understanding Latin America better," Shakira said. After a well-earned rest at her house in the Bahamas and after a visit to the University of California where she studied the history of western civilisation, Shakira, who said she feels afraid when she performs in front of few people, has "entered the bullring once more to take on the bulls". IANS