My Jelly: Lexie Smith

Before deciding to have a baby, Lexie Smith approached motherhood the way she approaches her art and writing practice: intellectually. But once she decided to go for it and eventually got pregnant, that shifted and she found herself guided purely by instinct rather than the desire to research and contextualize. Since having Days, now 20 months, anxious tendencies have given way to a sense of purpose. “I think being a mom is a super power,” she says over tea, cradling her belly, pregnant with number two. “I’ve become more myself since having a baby.”

While Lexie has found clarity in aspects of being a mom, she also grapples with the paradox of what being  a “modern mother” actually means. As she builds a life for her family in the Hudson Valley—her partner Dan Colen is an artist and co-founder of non-profit  Sky High Farms, where she also used to work—she is figuring out how her writing, research, and “rambling art practice” fit in with being a mom. After years exploring bread as a social, political, economical,  and ecological barometer through Bread on Earth and a discerning modeling career, she’s reassessing opportunity costs and the  metrics that define success. 

Here, she gives us a window into her motherhood journey from ambivalence to empowerment.

“Okay, we can have kids”

I didn't have a biological compulsion towards children in any way. Thinking about it was always more intellectual—the universe is too fucked up it doesnt feel responsible to bring a child into it. My dad and my stepmom were always telling me what natural I am with my stepsister’s kids, and I never felt that way.  I just never really thought about it.  

When I met my boyfriend we talked about it early on, and he told me he always wanted kids. I told him I was unsure. He was sort of like, yeah, we'll see about that. We would check in over the course of the next couple of years. I became more open but still wasn’t able to envision it. Then a confluence of things came together in our lives. During early COVID when I thought I had it, his caretaking made me suddenly see possibility in a new way. I remember him standing in the kitchen, and I was like, okay we can have kids. Let's have kids. 

Once I decided I wanted to, I needed it to happen right away. It ended up taking six months. I was going to an endocrinologist because I’ve always had a really irregular period and had never been pregnant, so I was convinced I couldn't be. I credit this fertility acupuncturist in Soho for getting me pregnant—he also got my twin sister pregnant. I was thrilled when it  finally happened and had a smooth pregnancy.  Felt great, looked great….but this second time around has been a different!

Down the Reddit hole

Before my first baby I tried to read some books about pregnancy and early parenting and motherhood, and they read, to me, more like misanthropic rants in the guise of feminist screeds. I think that's why I liked Emily Oster’s book Expecting Better, because it was like, Yeah, bitch, do what you want! Here's why and how you can. That felt like actual empowerment. A lot of these other books were coming from this position of women being at a disadvantage and not given the support they need. I didn’t see how getting mad at the world helped me prepare. I didn't feel a relationship to any of that stuff. I didn't feel disempowered being pregnant, I felt very empowered. I felt that way after giving birth too. Let details of all the mountains we're climbing be required reading for everyone else. Maybe then they can actually make themselves useful for us.

What I realized after I had a baby is that the world is held together by mothers who tell each other how to do it. The sharing of useful information and acknowledging the transcendent experience, both good and bad, we're all undergoing separately, together. But my secret sauce to stay really chill throughout early motherhood is Reddit. I would just stay up late breastfeeding, not sleeping, and scrolling through Reddit. Obviously you take everything with a grain of salt, but I mean it's been incredibly helpful.

“Blowing a bubble out of my vagina”

Birth is funny. Unless I almost died, I am supposed to say everything was great, but that's not how it felt.  I had to labor in a hotel for hours because the hospital told me I wasn’t dilated enough, but I was laboring too intensely to get back on the FDR and drive home. When we finally got back to the hospital they were like, I can't believe you went so long on your own, you're already six centimeters dilated. I was like, what the fuck did you expect? Then my labor stalled a bit, and I got an epidural—thank God, I’m really pro-drugs for labor if you need them. I went 17 hours without, and I was ready. When it was time to push I remember being really shocked. I didn't really believe I was going to have a child until they told me I had to push, even after 24 hours of labor. He came out in the cull. It was really fun because  no one in the room had ever seen it before. Everyone was really excited. When I was pushing him out, it was like I was blowing a bubble out of my vagina, and my boyfriend was laughing hysterically.

Storm clouds 

I always had this idea of myself as this anxious, neurotic person but I don't think I am anymore. I think I just used to be really depressed. I have naturally low progesterone levels which can lean toward depression. That's why menopause leads to depression for a lot of women, because those levels drop. Hormones literally gaslight us and nobody talks about it. When I got pregnant the first time my progesterone levels went up and I felt so much happier. I remember my sister being like, you're so much cooler as a pregnant person.” That hormonal boost in my mood stuck around for a while after I gave birth. I still get pretty blue and am definitely depressive, but I think having a kid actually pulls me out of it. Sometimes I wake up in the morning like, I can't do this, and then I'll literally go into his room and it’s a switch. It's amazing. 

“Just something I have to deal with”

After I had Days I took three months off work and really struggled to go back. I didn’t get any sleep until he was six months old and felt incapacitated most of the time. Once he started sleeping my feelings transitioned to more of just… the guilt. I really didn't want to leave him, while simultaneously being grateful that I could.  Every day I ask myself, is what I'm doing worth not being with him?  I’m working on my own project right now, and it's the days that don't go well where I don't feel productive and can’t break through to the creative cognitive place I need to be—those days are hard because I feel like I wasted my time being away from my child. Intellectually I know I have to have those days to achieve productive days, but it’s still really hard.

I feel an incredible amount of pressure to work—which again, I love doing—but there's also this part of me that feels like if I don’t want to work, I am an anachronism. I need to be working because I'm a “modern woman.” There's this anxiety that I’m not performing the role I'm supposed to be performing. But what do I even actually want? The fact is, I want all of it. I want to be able to hang out with my baby all the time. And I want to be able to work until two in the morning and come home and not feel guilty about it. But I always feel guilty because I have a baby that I want to be around. And it's not anyone else making me feel that way. I had a baby. I want to hang out with him. And that’s just something I have to deal with.

Opportunity costs and moral metrics

I guess when you’re a creative person your work is like your first child. You have to try really hard to keep it alive and you have to believe in it more than anyone else. Eventually you have to unleash it into the world. In the early days of a project, it can be all consuming, a solipsistic overwhelm. This is all similar to having a baby, except you're still the main subject. Once I had a kid, I found it to be a reminiscent kind of obsessive devotion except that there was no audience, there's an external subject and object, and I ultimately have little control over the course of events. 

The biggest shift that I've had in my creative practice is that I’m now pretty consumed with the how the fuck am I going to make money question. I always figured it out before. I didn’t make much money until my late twenties and finally built up a little nest egg that was still intact right before I had Days. I was getting much more selective about the work I would do, which was a privileged position that it had taken me years to reach. In hindsight I turned down so much money because I could—I'm frugal by nature and I only had to pay rent on my shitty railroad apartment and care for myself. Now I have a dependent—just that term alone gives me shivers! And the metrics I use for some of my moral judgments have shifted. The opportunity costs are different. Ultimately, I've got the greatest gain I can imagine, my boy, but I won't act like parenthood hasn't sincerely influenced how I conceive of projects, what I'll consider doing for someone else, and what feels worth putting my time into. "Worth" being a key word here because time feels directly tied to money in a much more potent way than it did before. I actually lose money when I go to my studio to write or bake or research. That can't help but impact what's coming out of me, for better or worse.

Screaming at pine cones and hugging chickens

Being upstate is great because my son is so physical. He has been running since he was 10-months. He spends so much time outside and screams at his pile of pine cones every day. Nature is really one of the greatest teachers. We have lots of  animals and that feels so correct for him. I do feel pretty isolated up there a lot of the time, especially as when we come to the city. I love just walking around New York with him and going to museums and galleries. Up there he sometimes doesnt see another child all week, and he’s just obsessed with other kids. There's no perfect place. 

And then there were three

At the end of the day, I am so grateful that I get to be the one with this really intimate relationship with my child. It's just not a one for one. I have to assume his love for me will never, and should never, match mine for him. There shouldn't be an equivalency between us, and I have to remind myself that I can't need anything from him, including his affections—though right now I get the lion's share of a twenty month old's love, and the satisfaction it brings is incomparable.

With my second  pregnancy my main anxiety is about the transition of bringing a new person into my relationship with my son. It wasn’t planned, more of a surprise as opposed to an accident. We knew we wanted to have another kid, but it took me a while to process it. How will I continue to be there for Days the way I'm now once the baby comes? How am I going to love my second child as much as I love my first? He’s just a perfect person. He's my favorite human being on the planet Earth. 

Being a mom is a superpower

Someone shared an article in a group chat recently about a mom wondering if people perceive her as a mother when she’s walking down the street and she hoped not. I don’t feel that way. I want everyone to know - I think it’s so fucking cool. There’s this idea that people perceive mothers as an expired specimen or something, but that’s just not how I feel. I've become more myself since having a child. I think being a mom is a superpower.

Words: Anna Deutsch

Photography: Georgia Hilmer