Getting Sticky With: Jessica Lehrman

This post is in partnership with our friends at Bugaboo, a brand known for creating thoughtfully designed products that support parents through the many moving parts of daily life.

Jessica Lehrman’s photography has appeared in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, and Vice. She is currently finishing an artist residency in Paonia, Colorado (where she spent much of her childhood) while working on her latest exhibition, A Long Road Home.

She is also a month away from finishing her most personal show yet—an eight-year-long project chronicling her home in Los Angeles. It’s an intimate documentation of family, work, romance, pregnancies, miscarriage, new life, and death. The house is now empty, and soon it will be sold.

Our conversation with Jessica got us thinking about the idea of “home.” In many ways, the changing life of a house mirrors something many of us feel: that nothing is entirely fixed, that we don’t always know what comes next, or what we’re supposed to be planning for. This becomes especially true when things don’t go according to plan. But if there’s a silver lining to those moments, it’s often this: people.

Home is friends trudging up a hundred stairs to the cabin that is Jessica’s LA house, dropping off food after her unexpected C-section. Home is her mother-in-law being there when she delivered her second daughter, after her mother passed. Home is reconnecting with a friend she hadn’t seen in decades when her oldest daughter befriended his son.

In other words, home is the community around you—and that only grows and evolves and strengthens with each passing year, despite the absence of people you expected to be there.

Below, we spoke with Jessica about how her upbringing shaped her life, the strange (and exciting) way parenthood can make you feel like you’re back in elementary school, the pressure to suddenly get your life together once you become a mom, and the reality that—even then—you might still feel like you’re figuring it out.

Self-portraits by Jessica Lehrman, with creative direction by her daughter, Story.

Wait, am I an adult now? 

I don’t know how other women experience it, but for me, becoming a mother felt both completely intuitive and completely at odds with everything I’d built my life around. I’ve always thought of myself as family-oriented, but only within the bounds of my own all over the place schedule. Motherhood rearranged that instantly. I had built a career on being available at all times, on saying yes, on stepping into chaos, on throwing myself into situations that were sometimes dangerous, sometimes wild, always unpredictable. That way of working wasn’t just my job, it was my identity for my whole adult life. It was disorienting when I had to take a back seat. 

Right now, I’m learning how to move differently, at a fragmented and much slower pace. There’s a lot more planning and processing everything with my partner beforehand. It feels like there’s a real difference in who I’m allowed to be. Time is crazy when it starts to get structured. I guess I was lucky in my 20s to have a career that allowed so much freedom!

I was never very focused on timing when it came to having kids. I always knew I wanted them, and I didn’t spend much time thinking about what could go wrong. When I got pregnant the first time we tried, it only confirmed the belief that things would happen easily. Then I had a miscarriage at the beginning of my second trimester. I labored at home for 24 hours in more pain than I felt with either of my daughters' births. I was completely unprepared for it. I had a hard time trusting my body after that. It felt like some sort of betrayal, like I should have known, or should have done something differently; drank less bottled water, not eaten the cold cuts. I made up a million reasons that it must have been my fault. 

It took me a while to feel like myself in my body again. And just as I started to feel like I was finally getting it together, my body, my career… I got pregnant again! Before I felt ready. Before I had saved any money, or done any of the things that are, in theory, required.

Hobbling with a breast pump in hand at the My Chemical Romance show

Two years later, I  was shooting a My Chemical Romance show [for Rolling Stone] three months after my first daughter, Story, was born. I was hobbling, carrying all my camera equipment, dragging a breast pump around with me into the concert venue. I was like, “I got this!” After having an emergency C-section that was the opposite of everything I wanted my birthing experience to be, I was feeling confident again. My daughter was healthy, I was back at work sooner than I expected, I was excited that I could figure out how to be this independent, badass, hot photographer mom that I had always envisioned. (This vision also involved strapping my child to my back and having her quietly sleeping at all my shoots. HAHAHAHA. Well, I really thought I had it that week. I had an album cover shoot lined up a few days later, and it felt like everything was going to be ok.

I have the most amazing mother-in-law, and I had the most amazing mother. Both of them wanted to take care of me during pregnancy and postpartum, and I resisted much of their help. I was in the mindset of, “I can do it. I don’t need help. I’m supposed to be able to do this on my own.” The way things unfolded challenged that completely. It felt like the universe pushing me past that way of thinking, forcing me to show up in a way I hadn’t expected.

“My mom was someone who loved getting older. She loved every grey hair.” 

I always knew I wanted to be a mom because I loved my mom. I loved how much she loved life and our family, and how she built this magical world around us all. My mom got diagnosed with glioblastoma, stage four brain cancer, two weeks after that My Chemical Romance show. The doctors gave her about six months to live, maybe less. My dad told me the news on Halloween and everything I had pictured about the future exploded. 

My mom was someone who loved getting older. She defied reality. She loved every gray hair. Every birthday, she’d say, “I’m getting hotter. Every year is getting better.” She grew funnier and more confident as she aged through her 60’s. All she wanted was to be a grandma. She was obsessed with it. 

We set up my mom’s hospice hospital bed in our living room and hung a quilted blanket between where she was and the kitchen. I alternated between breast feeding, cooking, and changing both my daughter and mom’s diapers before she passed away, quietly in our living room exactly six months after the diagnosis. To watch your mom die a painful and slow death in one room while trying to raise your new baby daughter in the next was more than a mindfuck.

I talked to my mom about everything, all the time. I wanted all her advice about being a mom. Frankly, she was the only person I trusted or wanted to hear any opinions from. Not only did we not get to have that final conversation, but we didn’t get to have any of the hundreds of smaller conversations we would have had about being a mom because she was not herself almost immediately after her diagnosis. I began to photograph everything that happened because that’s the only way I know how to process that level of trauma.

​​My grandma, my great aunt, and my mom were the most influential women in my life and they all died within about four months of each other. I still go to call all three of them whenever I’m alone on a drive before remembering they're not here. After they died, a lot of new moms in my community told me their own stories of losing a parent at the same time. I like to think it was all planned out by some higher power and “supposed to be” hippie shit but then sometimes I just think we’re all worm dirt. I read a book about grief that said when you lose someone, your brain struggles to accept that they are no longer findable on a map. I still catch myself trying to locate my mom whenever I have a question about parenting, which is at least a hundred times a day. Maybe that’s why we’ve landed in a small town in Colorado for the time being. A place mapped in memories of her and filled with strong mother figures handing out stinging nettle tincture at school potlucks in pollen-heavy fields, pressing sticks of marshmallow root into my youngest’s hand for teething.

I think all of the women passing away at the same time made me more obsessed with memory and lineage. How can I keep them alive in my kids’ lives if they’re no longer here? How do I explain what a grandma felt like to a three year old?  I wear a locket with my mom’s photo in it and I show Story all the time, the photos continue to be the only way I know how to process. I named my second daughter Betsy June in honor of my mom, although for now we call her June.

You never how your community will evolve, expand, and strengthen

For a few years, our house in LA became a kind of home base for both of our families—my parents, my husband’s parents, all of our siblings, and a plethora of chosen family we’ve gathered along the way.

It’s been four intense years of life and death and I only feel closer to people than ever. So many people showed up for us. People brought food, checked on us, and traveled to spend time with us. I really felt held by our community. I lost my mom, but I also gained my husband’s whole family in a new way. I have an amazing mother-in-law. She was in the delivery room holding my hand when I gave birth to June, just like my mom was when I gave birth to Story.

I keep noticing how connection happens in new ways now. I was at a café in LA when my daughter ran up to a boy. I looked over at his dad and realized it was someone I hadn’t seen or spoken to in ten years. Now our kids are best friends.

It’s strange and exciting to be in your 30s and feel like you’re back in elementary school. Having kids places you inside a whole new community with new social rules, new situations you don’t have experience with. I feel like the new kid, still learning the language and the rules. At the same time, my time feels much more limited, so what I put my energy into has to be far more intentional than before.

House on Haunted Hill (i.e. C-section recovery in a house with a hundred stairs) 

I had always envisioned giving birth in my living room. Calm the entire time, photographing myself while in labor, eventually delivering in a hot tub, unmedicated, lots of great photographs for the book I was working on, no pooping… Of course, the first lesson in motherhood is that nothing goes as planned. I just didn’t really get that memo until my emergency C-section with my first, who was breech.

It was the one thing I didn't want to happen, having a C-section. But it was the best version that experience could have been. My birth plan just said no interventions, no drugs, nothing, nothing, nothing. And I had everything. I definitely spent a while mourning that.  The recovery process was intense. Our house in LA sits up nearly a hundred stairs, and after the birth, going up or down them felt impossible for almost two months. Postpartum was especially hard at first since I was stuck in place. Luckily, I had an amazing community who showed up, bringing food, checking in, and making sure I was okay.

I had a VBAC with my second, which also didn’t go as planned. The hours I imagined listening to ambient music and watching nature videos on YouTube turned into rapid dilation, a rush to the hospital, and then 8.5 hours of pushing and a vacuum assist. Both girls are great. And stubborn. It all makes sense now.

It’s so wild how much we prepare for pregnancy and birth and nursing; then, when that's all over and life really starts to life, you still feel so unprepared. I put so much pressure on having the birth plan I wanted and really, at the time, felt like those details were going to inform how I became a mom and the mom I was going to be. Now looking back, and especially after my second, it all feels so insignificant in the grand scheme of parenting and raising a human… as if one day is going to either make or break my experience of being a mom.

I brought the same extreme mindset and rigid expectations into motherhood that I had brought to every project before kids. I assumed the traits that had carried me through my early adulthood and career would serve me as a mom. But the way things unfolded pushed me somewhere else entirely. It felt like being brought to the edge of a different kind of cliff. I had to show up in a way I had never even considered possible.

The biggest identity shift = accepting any and all help 

I have two daughters now: Story is almost 4 and June is almost 1. I reached my boiling point, or got humbled by the universe, whatever you want to call it. I’ve accepted that I'm going to need to call in the cavalry. I'm going to need my dad, my in-laws, my sister, my friends, anybody who wants to help a little bit to help pull this off.  And I'm willing to accept help this time. I can’t imagine saying that sentence five years ago! It never occurred to me that my mom wouldn’t be around. She was the one person in the world I could ask for help without feeling guilty and I’ve had to learn to expand beyond that fear.

When my oldest was two, I started to feel like, okay, maybe I’ve got this. (This is deja vu and that feeling is never real. I have total memory amnesia around how quickly toddler phases pass and nothing lasts.) My husband and I had found a rhythm? We had a back-and-forth schedule, naps made sense, nighttime sleep almost existed.

When my oldest was two, I started to feel like, okay, maybe I’ve got this. (This is deja vu and that feeling is never real. I have total memory amnesia around how quickly toddler phases pass and nothing lasts.) My husband and I had found a rhythm? We had a back-and-forth schedule, naps made sense, nighttime sleep almost existed.

Then I had my second, and it felt like the world collided with another planet. All the pieces of sleep and sanity I thought were starting to come together just exploded into shards. Our life went from chaos that I could kind of understand to a full-on day-after-a-college-dorm-kegger level of mess. I am currently sitting in a room filled with multiple seasons worth of clothing strewn across every surface with random sticks of some kind sticking out of the piles like flag poles…. And that’s mostly what having two kids has felt like for us.

It feels impossible to make any smart statement about motherhood, or about having two kids, because everything changes so quickly. The second I think I’ve got it or that I absolutely can’t handle it, something shifts or something breaks, or something clicks into place…

Having two girls has been more beautiful and exciting and heart-expanding than I knew was possible. AND it has also been more stressful and consuming and harder than anything I’ve ever done.

An artist residency in the room where she graduated high school

This apartment we’re living in is above the Center for the Arts in the small Colorado town I spent my teens in. I did an art show here about 20 years ago. It feels very full circle to be back, having shown my first jab at attempting to be an artist here at 17 and now coming back and showing a little bit of everything that I’ve shot ever. This room is where I graduated high school. 

As I’m finishing up this current show, A Long Road HomeA Long Road Home, I’m working on the final touches of another show at my house in LA this May. For the past eight years, I’ve been photographing everything that happened inside our house; my pregnancies, the miscarriage, my mom dying, mental breakdowns, existential blowups, all the things that can happen in one space. I’m putting all of that together into a book that I’ll eventually release in collaboration with my husband, who is doing all the artwork for it.

We’re ready to leave that chapter; we’re putting the house up for sale. It will be empty, and before we sell it, I want to do a show where all of the photographs are displayed in the places where they were taken. It’s the best I can do to try to capture all the different extremes that happened within one space, all layered atop of each other. This project is the most personal work I’ve ever done. I feel really proud of it. I’m excited to do more long-form, intimate, personal work. That’s what I’m most interested in right now.

Question from STJ: Does anyone know what they’re doing? 

I loved my upbringing. It was alternative and we had no money and lived in very weird ways, but it totally worked. My parents were creative. I had so many magical experiences with them.

I've been extremely lucky and blessed that in my 20s, I didn't really make money but I did make awesome work and that was the important thing to me. I loved all of my projects. I loved all the people around me. I loved everything I was doing. It felt so special and important at the time. Before kids, it was relatively easy to work literally 24/7. Work was my life and my life was my work.

Now I have to plan. I’m still adjusting. I have to figure out what we're doing because my husband and I are both freelancers and both artists. Now we both want to be 24/7 parents and 24/7 artists, and that's just impossible. (We're both Aquarians and totally all over the place.) We’re currently trying to figure out what the next steps are. Neither of us have the logical, thought-out perspective that the situation seems to call for. 

Freestyling every decision is cute when you're in your 20s without kids, now, we’re a four-person family with four different needs and wants and dreams. I’m overwhelmed by what’s happening in the world right now. There are families living through way more extreme situations than we are with much harder decisions to make than us. I don’t feel like I have the answers right now? Maybe we're just going to be nomadic, like my family was growing up. 

I honestly don’t really know what I’m doing with my career or with my life, but I do know I’m doing that show in LA. That’s a start.