Living Her Best Life: Jenny Slate on Motherhood, Spirituality, and Self-Worth
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In our new series Living Their Best Life, Oprah Daily sits down with notable names to find out exactly that—from how they maximize each moment to the daily rituals that keep them grounded. Here, Jenny Slate shares how motherhood has shaped her shopping list, spirituality, and self-worth.
Jenny Slate has cemented herself as a comedy queen, thanks to her work on Saturday Night Live and Parks and Recreation, but she’s also gracefully tackled more serious roles, including a 20-something who gets an abortion in 2014’s Obvious Child. Next up, she's voicing Marcel the Shell, who’s getting a major feature film upgrade in a movie she co-wrote, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (yes, it’s exactly what you think it is).
On the homefront, Slate and her husband, Ben Shattuck, welcomed their first child in early 2021, and she’s been filling her shelves with books on babies, parenting, and human development ever since. Through motherhood, her perspective is shifting in major ways, like coming to terms with the spirituality that works for her and supporting causes that matter. That includes a partnership with Tillamook Ice Cream, which Slate enjoys because it’s a farmer-owned, certified B-corporation, and they use extra cream in all their products. “It’s important to me that there are corporations out there doing work that is helpful and healthy and useful to the planet,” she says.
Even though she’d probably rather be eating ice cream, Slate recently caught us up on the beauty and wellness products she’s shopping for, what she’s learning about the human brain, and how she’s becoming more herself every day.
Her Shifting Spirituality
I’m trying to unlearn my own strict or brutal rules for myself in terms of how I need to look or what the aging process is supposed to be. And what a good parent looks like. I’m unlearning that whole modeling of whatever I grew up with that in one way or another made me feel shame. I’m trying to loosen that.
I’m also creating a new definition of what healthy spirituality means to me. I grew up in the Jewish community, and while there’s so much in Jewish culture and in the religion that I love, I need a genderless or gender-free version of a god. I’m looking at a broader spirituality to pass on to my daughter. When it comes to our hearts and our spirits, why not go be as open and as curious as we can be, rather than being like, God is an old man and he’s angry? That doesn’t work for me.
Her Parenting Projects
I’m reading a new book by Kathryn Davis. I listen to the On Being podcast every week, and I also listen to Buddhist teacher Tara Brach. Those are things that keep me feeling good. I try really hard to still read and listen for fun and for my own enrichment, but I also spend a lot of time now reading baby books. I’m reading Janet Lansbury; I find her philosophy to be really helpful. That helps me feel more secure to take in information, even if I disagree with it. It just is interesting to hear different points of view.
Right now, I’m learning about the development of the human brain. I’m doing a lot of work on just trying to figure out how young people’s behavior progresses, how their brain develops as they grow, and what the prefrontal cortex does. With teenagers, we’re like, “Ugh, they’re hormonal.” Or with people who have a menstrual cycle and experience mood changes, you’re like, “Oh, it’s hormones.” With babies, they can be saddled with the label of being bad or spoiled, but they really just have limited options for what their brains allow them to do with very big feelings. I’ve decided to learn about how my daughter’s little body works so I can care for her in an open-minded and gentle way.
Her Evolution
Becoming a parent is a big clarification of my own personal belief system. It’s like a daily check-in to make sure I’m living by what is important to me. The other part is being real about what’s actually in my life, like staying off my phone and making sure that every day, I take time to read and do a mindfulness practice and keep in good touch with the people I love.
I’m just becoming myself more and more. More than ever. Faster than ever. I feel like motherhood has accelerated my own healthy work that I need to do to build the parts of myself that are asking to be empowered. Honestly, I think the experience of having my daughter suddenly enlarged my own sense of self-worth. It’s so clichéd, but there is no time like the present, whatever that is for you. That’s where I am right now. I’m becoming a mother not just to my child but also to myself.
Her Shopping Cart
I use a lot of Weleda products, and so does my daughter. They have this rose pampering lotion; I’m really into anything rose. Davines makes some lovely hair products that I like to use. I’m also really all about Olaplex for my hair.In my kitchen, I have Tillamook Ice Cream. That’s really what we’re eating. Maybe too much? I don’t think there’s too much. There are just too many good flavors, and it’s an incredibly creamy ice cream. I’ve got the ice cream sandwiches, and the Oregon dark cherry and cookies ’n’ cream flavors. After my husband and I put the baby to bed, we eat ice cream.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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