All the Times Cardi B Got Real About New Motherhood
Since the birth of her daughter Kulture last year, Cardi B has navigated the ups and downs of motherhood while giving her millions of followers a truly real look at the journey. Through a series of refreshingly unfiltered Instagram videos and tweets from her home in Atlanta, the musician has shared insightful wisdom on many parenting issues, from dealing with post-partum depression, general exhaustion and a set of persistent dark circles and dry skin to managing the pressures of bouncing back to her pre-baby body weight.
“When I was pregnant, I used to tell myself, like, when I give birth, I’m . . . gonna snap back right away,” she said recently. But exactly seven days into motherhood? “A bitch look fucked up in the game. My hair’s fucked up, my eyes are so dark and puffy . . . like, I’m wild pale.” It’s this type of next-level postpartum truth, coupled with her direct delivery on social media—and her visible struggle to make it all work—that is resonating with other new moms, all of whom have thought the same things a million times over, as proven by the multitude of re-shares. In fact, the performer has been such an open book that when she admitted the intensity of motherhood caught her off guard, forcing her to cancel her stadium tour with Bruno Mars to physically recover from childbirth and spend quality time with Kulture, fans took the news surprisingly well. Proof that sincerity, and her knack for one-liners, is the best recipe for success.
Here, in honor of her first Vogue cover, seven times Cardi B changed the postpartum game, while cheering on fellow new moms along the way.
On How Motherhood is Motivating: “I could shake my ass, I could be the most ratchet-est person ever, I could get into a fight tomorrow, but I’m still a great mom. All the time I’m thinking about my kid. I’m shaking my ass, but at the same time I’m doing business, I’m on the phone with my business manager saying, make sure that a percentage of my check goes to my kid’s trust. I give my daughter so much love, and I’m setting her up for a future. I want to tell her that a lot of the shit that I have done in life—no matter what I did, knowing that I wanted to have kids made me go harder to secure a good future for my kids.”
On Post-Partum Depression:
“I thought I was going to avoid it. When I gave birth, the doctor told me about post-partum, and I was like, ‘Well, I’m doing good right now, I don’t think that’s going to happen.’ But out of nowhere, the world was heavy on my shoulders.”
On Preparing for New Motherhood:
“Moms always give advice like, ‘Oh, when you have a baby things change, you will see, it’s not easy.’ It’s true. No matter how many books you read—cuz I read some books—you just really have to have a baby to see. I just want to say that I respect mothers more than ever now. I see moms differently, especially the young ones that, like, are so young and barely have experience or money. I don’t even know how they can do it.”
On Bouncing Back From Childbirth:
“I didn’t [think] it would take my body so long to heal, like, I thought six weeks was gonna be good enough. No, bro, my ass is broken, this baby broke my ass. . . . Doing a tour with Bruno Mars in, like, the biggest arenas and I didn’t want to go on tour and not be able to dance or perform properly, not be able to get choreography right, because my body is extremely weak right now. Like, so weak. That postpartum shit is really real, y’all.”
On Breastfeeding:
“I met my match. She is very demanding, like, I can’t believe I have a boss. When my baby wanna eat, she wanna eat. It’s not like, ‘Oh three minutes?’ No. Give me the milk now.”
On the Push and Pull of Being With Your Baby:
“Bro, there's this feeling as soon as my baby came out that is like, I can’t leave my baby now for like one second. A lot of people keep telling me, like, you gotta find a nanny, you gotta start working soon and it’s so hard because, like, I wanna be with my baby every second. Even when I’m doing my hair in the other room, I just gotta be around her.”
On New Mom Beauty Maintenance:
“A bitch look fucked up in the game. My hair’s fucked up, my eyes are so dark and puffy . . . like, I’m wild pale. . . . I can’t really exercise right now because I can’t really move my legs. . . . If you noticed, I changed my nail shape from pointy to square so I won’t hurt my baby. I’m thinking about only changing my pinky nail shape back to pointy so I can take my babies little boogers. . . . Shit, let the snap back begin, I’m about to be a bad bitch again.”
Originally Appeared on Vogue
