Jax Says Motherhood Is “The Most Heartbreaking Love Story Of All Time”

Jax has always been vulnerable. The singer-songwriter’s most iconic songs put those emotions on display: songs like “Victoria’s Secret” that relay the deeply relatable feelings about the beauty standards pushed on young girls, and songs like “Like My Father” that are really an ode to her parents’ marriage.

Obviously, Jax loves the details, and motherhood has magnified them more than ever for her. She just became a mom a year ago, but the relationship she’s building with her daughter — the extreme cosmic shift that happens when you become a mother to a little person — is already changing everything. Her career has obviously shifted (now she wants to write songs detailing the postpartum experience, along with a children’s book), and her latest adventure has been a new podcast, Bad Ass Mother Friends. It’s exactly what it sounds like: Jax chatting with other moms about *everything* related to motherhood.

Because once you’re a mom, your world doesn’t shrink down; it expands. “There’s a lot I actually understand less now that I have a daughter,” she tells me from her home podcast studio. And the minute she says it, the minute my own brain chemistry shifts. She’s so right. Instead, we’re all filled with love, desperately wanting to save the world for our kids... all the world’s kids. And in turn, we can save ourselves. (It’s why she’s teamed up with StarKist® and Feed the Children for their “Put Child Hunger to Bed” campaign, using her platform to support families facing food insecurity.)

When we chat, Jax is just a few days away from her daughter Charlie’s first birthday, and we discuss how that milestone feels and how spiritual motherhood — especially when you have a daughter — can be.

Scary Mommy: Happy belated birthday! How does it feel to be 30?

Jax: Dirty 30! 30 was great. There was no tequila at all.

SM: Yeah, hard to have the birthdays you used to have when you’ve got a baby.

Jax: It’s been so crazy. I turned 30 in the same month she turns 1.

SM: How does that feel?

Jax: So painful. So incredible and so painful all at the same time. I feel like every day in this past month, my husband and I rock her, and we just keep looking at each other like, “This is the last time she's not going to be a little baby pre-toddler situation.” It’s painful, but it’s amazing. She’s incredible.

SM: 1 always feels like a really big deal because it's also a year of motherhood.

Jax: Yeah. We're just here. We're still alive. It's every single thing at the peak all at once, and then you blink and it's gone. It’s the craziest feeling. Just yesterday, my husband developed some film of our birth that he took photos of, and I was like, “Oh my gosh, who was I? Who is that baby? When was this?” No wonder people want to have kids so quick again because you just totally block it out of your memory, but it's awesome.

SM: I wish I could tell you it gets easier, but every year goes faster than the last.

Jax: I keep hearing that from moms, too. And you never really sleep again normally, even when your kids are out of the house and stuff like that. Motherhood, the relationship between a mother and her baby, is just the most heartbreaking love story of all time. It's just the most epic love story, but also every day is just like they're getting older and older, and every day is something you can't go back to yesterday from.

SM: You’ve written songs about the bond you have with your parents. Are you trying to build that same closeness with Charlie?

Jax: I feel like everything from this point forward, from having a baby on, has been so absolutely unique, it’s taken me off guard. The way my marriage operates is so much different than it was before having a kid. Our threshold for grace with each other is a lot bigger and also smaller. We’re really also snapping at each other, and then realizing, oh my gosh, in the way I was watching my parents and he was watching his, our daughter’s watching us and she's constantly scanning us. So, now all of a sudden it's bigger than looking out for our partnership, and it's bigger than looking out for our relationship.

Now, there's somebody in the room that's going to look at us and try to emulate that, and look at us like we're her heroes, the two rocks in her life. So now there's this whole new level of pressure and whole new romantic dynamic. It’s just so much in this last year that we’re relearning in our relationship and as we become parents.

SM: It’s such a crazy power to have — our babies watching us.

Jax: It’s healing in a sense. It’s like its own little therapy because you almost feel like you have this clean slate of a human being, and you’re panicking all the time that you’re going to ruin this clean slate of a perfect little angel. And then the other day I remember I snapped on him for something dumb, and then I noticed her see us. I noticed she got quieter. I’m like, “Oh my gosh, something we’re doing is affecting her nervous system, and that’s like 100% on me, and now it’s 100% on me to keep her regulated.”

SM: Did becoming a mother to a little girl bring up anything unexpected for you emotionally?

Jax: Since I was pregnant, I heard a lot like, “You'll understand when you have a girl,” and “Just wait until you have a girl.” And I think we all have heard that kind of thing growing up. I think especially everyone's like, “Look, those teenage years,” and this and that. But I think having a daughter has been... I cry when I talk about it, genuinely, because it's like all these wounds that weren't healed in me, I feel like I’m repairing them by having my own daughter.

There’s a lot I actually understand less now that I have a daughter. I think having a daughter is probably the most spiritual, the closest to God I’ve ever felt in my life. It’s the most spiritual experience I've ever had, and I’ve never felt more empowered than looking at this tiny little girl that looks like me and my husband combined. And I cannot wait to experience this mother-daughter journey with her and to learn from her. Every day she's teaching me something new, and she can't even talk yet.

SM: You mentioned regulating emotions. What do you do if you’re the overwhelmed one?

Jax: Oh my gosh, that’s the big question, isn’t it?

SM: We all have to ask each other because nobody knows.

Jax: Becoming a mother made me look in the mirror a lot harder than I ever have in my life. I think I also realized how unkind I am to myself. When you have a baby, it’s like all you can think about is protecting that life, and you totally forget that you have to protect yourself, too. Sleep and hydration and going outside for a walk — that was a huge part of postpartum. I was like, “I’m sinking,” and then all of a sudden I walk outside, I’m like, “Oh, air, right, oxygen.” I think I’d be a pretty awesome regulated person if I treated myself half as well as I do my daughter, so I'm working on it.

SM: I always say I need to parent myself like I parent my girls.

Jax: It’s not that crazy. Why are we doomscrolling when we don’t let them see screens? My husband and I have a rule in our house where we don’t do a lot of screens with her. Every now and then, she really loves dogs, so we throw on a dog montage on YouTube, but we try to avoid the screens — but I’m not going to freak out if it’s there. Something we really focus on is that only one of us at a time is on their phone.

SM: Oh, that’s smart.

Jax: We have to use them for work, but if he’s on the phone, then I’m locked in with her. But there’s never a moment where she’s looking at us, trying to communicate with her face, and she's getting that dead face response. There’s always one parent, but, by the way, it is not easy to do.

SM: Speaking of work, are you loving your podcast adventure? Has it been so fulfilling to talk to other moms and stuff?

Jax: The best. I had an emergency C, so that was a hard recovery coming out of postpartum. I'm finally approaching that year mark, and I think over the last three or four months, things have started to slowly ease back into feeling like myself again. And all of these moms coming in and out of here have been really helpful. They’re all like people I look up to and I’ve fangirled over forever, but I’m getting it in all stages, so I’m getting some moms that are new moms, some that their children are grown up and out of the house. I also wrote a children’s book, which is coming out in the next year.

Then we just recorded a postpartum album, me and my friend, who is currently in the thick of it as well. We actually used a breast pump as the beat for one of the songs.

SM: Stop. Everyone knows that sound, too. You lose your mind to it.

Jax: We looked at each other, because we were writing and she was pumping while we were writing, and we were like, “Wait a second. Should we just use this as a beat?” And postpartum, you kind of just like block it out of your memory and it's just like a blur. So, if I don’t write it down now and I don’t sing about it now, who knows if I'll even remember what it was like to have my first baby, and same with my friend who co-wrote it with me. So, it’s going to be called “Confessions of a Newborn Mother.” It’s goofy and it’s sad and it’s just me and a piano basically.

SM: I love this so much. And I love your StarKist partnership with Feed the Children. I always cared about others, but becoming a mom really makes you just want to take care of everyone.

Jax: In the same way, I used to love true crime documentaries — I can’t even watch them anymore. It’s like visceral anxiety. My chest tightens up just because the idea that that is somebody’s child. So everything is kind of hitting different in that sense. And I had no idea that one in five children in the U.S. has no idea if they're going to eat their next meal. That’s a real statistic. So, I think just being a new mom and getting involved, it's really fun. In September, for every StarKist tuna pouch purchased, one will be donated to the organization, up to 100,000 pouches.

This has been edited and condensed for clarity.