Inside Jennifer Lawrence's New Life as a Mom

Jennifer Lawrence didn't have to become a mom to enjoy a good anecdote about bodily functions.

And now that she has a child, with all the goops of varying consistency that entails, the Oscar winner may just be in her element.

Not that she's giving anyone a peek inside her diaper pail.

Despite tendencies to regale late night talk show hosts with stories of gastrointestinal distress or wetting the bed at 13, Lawrence has always been quite private when it comes to her off-camera life. And that didn't change when she and husband Cooke Maroney welcomed son Cy in February 2022, the actress not personally confirming his arrival or name for months.

"It's so scary to talk about motherhood," she said in the October 2022 issue of Vogue. "Only because it's so different for everybody. If I say, 'It was amazing from the start,' some people will think, It wasn't amazing for me at first, and feel bad."

Lawrence's empathy has always been at the ready, her aversion to hurting anybody's feelings or making people feel left out expressed at some point in almost every interview. But now she knows firsthand that all roads leading to motherhood are not the same—and that there's not just one destination.

The actress, who's celebrating her 33rd birthday Aug. 15, told E! News in 2017 that she felt her desire to become a mom was waning as she got older, those pangs decreasing in intensity from when she was 21 or 22 and she couldn't wait.

"I don't think that's how it's supposed to work!" she quipped.

Though her case of the shrugs could easily have been attributed to having just made the horror allegory mother!—her then-boyfriend Darren Aronofsky's deeply disturbing take on we're still not sure what that doesn't end well for mother or baby—Lawrence wasn't yet involved with her future husband.

She met Maroney, director of Manhattan's Gladstone 64 gallery, in 2018 through a mutual friend and he ended up suiting the star perfectly.

"He's just the best person I've ever met in my whole life," Lawrence told Entertainment Tonight about her then-fiancé in 2019, and agreeing to marry him was "a very, very easy decision."

And that doesn't mean she was blowing smoke when she told Diane Sawyer in 2015 that she didn't "really plan" on getting married or otherwise was imagining her big day. Rather, all it takes is (the) one.

"I definitely wasn't at a place where I was like 'I'm ready to get married,'" Lawrence explained on NAKED With Catt Sadler in 2019. "I just met Cooke, and I wanted to marry him. We wanted to marry each other. We wanted to commit fully. And, you know, he's my best friend. I feel very honored to become a Maroney."

Since her master life plan included having children, regardless of whether she got married or not, Lawrence suspected that might help her zero in on Mr. Right one day.

"I feel like if I find that one person who I want to spend the rest of my life with, who I want to be the father of my children, that I would absolutely not f--k it up," she told Vogue in 2015. "But I'm also not banking on that."

So far, so good!

She became Mrs. Maroney on Oct. 19, 2019, the pair exchanging vows in front of family and friends in Rhode Island.

Much later, Lawrence reflected on the anxiety she felt before she tied the knot, which coincided with filming the drama Causeway, in which she played an injured soldier who's afraid of getting too close to anyone.

"Then I went back [after making the movie], and when I'm home with my husband making this family, I'm so happy I stayed," she told the New York Times last fall. "I'm so happy I didn't freak out and cancel the wedding and run away and go, 'I'll never be taken down!'"

The pandemic having elongated her already planned break from the spotlight, Lawrence was pregnant when she emerged from her bubble toward the end of 2021 to promote the end-of-the-world comedy Don't Look Up.

"I just had a ton of sex," the visibly expectant actress cracked when Late Show host Stephen Colbert asked what she'd been up to during her acting hiatus.

But she was also admittedly nervous about her return to the whole press tour circuit.

"I haven't spoken to the world in forever," she explained to Vanity Fair at the time. "And to come back now, when I have all of these new accessories added to my life that I obviously want to protect...I'm nervous for you. I'm nervous for me. I'm nervous for the readers!"

While Cy will have his day in the ugh-stop-embarrassing-me-Mom sun one day, as so many children do, Lawrence sounded determined to make sure it's not because she over-shares in an interview.

She didn't want to not talk about having a baby, per se, "but every instinct in my body wants to protect their privacy for the rest of their lives, as much as I can," she said. "I don't want anyone to feel welcome into their existence. And I feel like that just starts with not including them in this part of my work."

But once Cy—named after one of his dad's favorite artists, Cy Twombly—was born, all bets were off.

"The morning after I gave birth, I left like my whole life had started over," she told Vogue last fall. "Like, Now is day one of my life. I just started. I was just so in love. I also fell in love with all babies everywhere."

And, ever self-aware, Lawrence continued, "I wonder what will happen now that I'm witnessing somebody else's childhood. And I wonder what he's going to be talking about with his therapist. She wouldn't put me down. She kisses me on the mouth. She asked me not to go to college."

But overall, she added, "My heart has stretched to a capacity that I didn't know about. I include my husband in that. And then they're both just, like, out there—walking around, crossing streets."

So, all that love had opened up a new can of worries. But what she called "the euphoria of Cy" kept her more happily alert than anything.

Lawrence told E! News in June while promoting the R-rated comedy No Hard Feelings that what type of roles she was interested in hadn't changed, but her main concern now was where, when and for how long a project might take her away from Cy.

"Fortunately," she told Cameron Diaz for an Interview magazine chat in June, "my husband is the greatest father in the entire world, so when I'm working, I don't have any more guilt than the usual every day, all-day parent guilt."

(No wonder she picked a day spa as the destination for her most recent Vogue interview. "Like, I'm a mom," she told the magazine. "I need to just lie down. This is the only time I could come to a spa and not feel guilty.")

Lawrence admitted to Diaz that she considers "dipping out a lot" from acting when she's working, but then another project she really wants to do always comes along.

The Silver Linings Playbook star has her concerns about Cy growing up the child of a Famous Person, and the weirdness that might cause for him, "but kids have advantages and disadvantages when they're born, all of them," she said. "The best thing I can do is just make sure he knows he's loved, and that he's our number one priority, and try to be a good example of kindness. I'm sure there will be challenges specifically from my choices and my lifestyle, and we'll both have to confront that and deal with it when that day comes."

In the meantime, Cy has helped her rise above what has historically been one of her biggest challenges since becoming a movie star.

When it comes to paparazzi, Lawrence explained that she now has no choice but to be "a little bit more Zen" about having her picture taken, because she doesn't want to be a font of anxiety and anger in front of her son.

"You just have to accept it," she said, "and take a deep breath and walk."