Jodie Turner-Smith was never going to have an entirely “normal” experience when it came to becoming a mother. Firstly, there was the fact that she had just completed her breakthrough role in Melina Matsoukas’s critically acclaimed Queen & Slim when she got pregnant – and had a full season of red carpets and awards ceremonies ahead of her. Then there was the devastation caused by Covid-19, and the deep pain brought on by the murder of George Floyd and innumerable other members of the Black community. Yet, in spite of the darkness and grief that 2020 has brought, Turner-Smith has still been able to find moments of clarity and joy.
“Every stage of my pregnancy brought its own challenges and lessons,” the 33-year-old reflects in an essay in British Vogue’s September 2020 issue. “Nobody really teaches you about what your body goes through to bring a child into the world until you’re actually doing it.” In Turner-Smith’s case, her first trimester was defined by constant nausea and fatigue, in addition to subchorionic bleeds – followed by months of shooting her first action movie, Without Remorse, with Michael B Jordan. “God knows what my baby thought was happening, because I spent most of that trimester either on set, tearing around the centre of Berlin with tactical gear and a rifle while blowing things up, or rushing through an airport to catch a flight back to America to promote Queen & Slim,” she writes.
Through it all, her husband, Joshua Jackson remained by her side. “Both of us had watched our own mothers struggle to raise children without such support. Both of us were determined to create something different for ourselves. He kept saying to me, ‘There’s no part of this that I’m going to miss.’ And there wasn’t.” That extended to the couple’s home birth, which saw Turner-Smith labouring for nearly four days in their Los Angeles home. “Early in the morning on my third day of labour, my husband and I shared a quiet moment. I was fatigued and beginning to lose my resolve. Josh ran me a bath, and as I lay in it contracting, I talked to my body and I talked to my daughter. In that moment, he snapped a picture of me. An honest moment of family and togetherness – a husband supporting a wife, our baby still inside me, the sacred process of creating a family.”
And while the couple has been savouring every moment of their first months with their beautiful daughter, Turner-Smith has also been reckoning with how to tell her child about the frequently problematic nature of the world that she has come into. “Sometimes I wonder how I will explain to my daughter what it meant to be born in the year 2020. The historic events, the social unrest, and me – a new mother just trying to do her best. I think I will tell her that it was as if the world had paused for her to be born. And that, hopefully, it never quite returned to the way it was before.”
Read Jodie Turner-Smith’s essay in full in the September 2020 issue, on newsstands now.
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