Hailey Bieber made her Vogue cover debut this week. Underneath paragraphs of chatter about her billion-dollar skincare brand and the maze of gates that protect Bieber’s “farmhouse” mansion in Beverly Park from paparazzi, however, is an important conversation about what it means to be a mom.
There are several universal truths about motherhood folded into Bieber’s iconic interview. The first is there will never be a perfect time to start a family.
Bieber married at 21 years old and became a mother at 27 without using a surrogate, a popular option in her world of celebrities and supermodels. By Hollywood standards, she was basically a child bride whose decision to procreate with her husband as opposed to a noncommittal baby daddy did not align with celebrities’ typical childbearing order of operations.
Yet, she’s better off for it and even “thought she would have had more than one [child] by this time.”
Bieber claims her pregnancy, which manifested around two years after she suffered a mini-stroke and launched her $1 billion brand, was a “surprise.” Even then, she didn’t buy into the lie that someone’s life and career conditions must be perfect for them to keep a pregnancy.
Instead, even in the face of fears about bodily changes and interruptions to her routine (“Hailey likes nothing more than a routine”), Bieber leaned into the motherhood she “always knew she wanted.”
Here she discovered the second truth: motherhood changes women. The good news is, that change is almost always for the better.
The Vogue writer suggests the arrival of Jack Blues Bieber in August 2024 threw the Biebers’ “entire world off its axis.” Bieber concedes that his arrival transformed her life, body, and relationships as she knew them, but she’s okay with that.
“You’re not the same person that you were before. You change head to toe. And I think there was a minute where I kept really hyper-fixating on getting back to what I was. And then I had to go through that acceptance of, I’m not going back. So it’s really about how do I want to move forward? Who do I want to be?” Bieber said.
Bieber still devotes her time, money, and effort to things that most normal mothers do not. As a seven-month postpartum full-time working and stay at home mom, I can’t fathom her “regular rotating schedule of strength training [sic] and sculpt classes and Pilates (both hot and reformer), sauna and cold plunge and yoga, chiropractors and breath work and stretching, facials, massages, and microneedling.” I’m lucky if I make it to the grocery store on a weekday or have the time to put on a full face of drugstore makeup.
Yet, Bieber appears to understand that the camera flashes, fame, face creams, and workouts that have defined her life until August 2024 aren’t everything.
“And that’s the thing: I have a real life. My real life is that I get to wake up to my beautiful family and my son and my friends and I have people that know me and love me and I love them,” Bieber states.
“I like who I am so much more than I ever have,” she adds toward the end of the interview.
The third truth, tucked paragraphs down in Bieber’s feature, is that motherhood isn’t easy.
“The pregnancy was difficult for me to wrap my head around. It was a surprise, and you go through a lot of emotions,” Bieber recalled. “There are certain warnings: Your life is never going to be the same again. It changes in good ways, but it’s not going to be the same. You’re never going to be just an individual without a child ever again. And you’re not going to just be you and your partner, just the two of you. There was a lot for me mentally.”
She also revealed in the sitdown that her birth, which involved an unplanned induction and postpartum hemorrhage, was “the hardest thing I’ve ever done.” Even so, Bieber admits to learning yet another truth about motherhood
“It’s been my biggest teacher so far,” Bieber says. “The biggest teacher in my relationship. You see your partner so differently … I think you empathize with your parents a lot more. There’s so much perspective that comes with it.”
Even after enduring both physical and mental hurdles during birth and postpartum, Bieber “says she doesn’t regret a thing, and definitely wants at least one more baby, maybe more.”
Which brings us to our final truth: Kids, despite our culture’s best attempts to discourage and look down on them, are worth it.
Parenthood isn’t a trap. It’s a gift — one that is not afforded to everyone. Receipients of that gift, regardless of their status, would do well to embrace it.
Pain from pregnancy and childbirth, feeding struggles, sleepless nights, teething, sickness, skinned knees, hard conversations, and moments requiring discipline are indisputably difficult. But the hardship that comes with raising children pales in comparison to the joys that parenthood brings.
Less than one year after her son made his debut, Bieber seems to understand that well.
“He’s my priority. He is the most important thing to me,” Bieber says.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on X @jordanboydtx.
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