Victoria Monet on being a pregnant professional

R&B singer and Grammy winner Victoria Monet recently appeared on Michelle Obama and her brother Craig Robinson’s podcast, IMO. During the trio’s conversation, she spoke candidly about the response she got from her team when she informed them she was pregnant. 

She started off by describing the nuance of becoming pregnant while being an independent artist, saying:

“When I got pregnant, I was an independent artist. I was working with this company called Platoon, working out of the UK. And when you’re an artist, though you’re a human, you’re technically the business,” she explained.

After making the announcement, she described having to sit through a one-on-one PowerPoint presentation made by a person on her team about the impact that pregnancy and motherhood would have on her singing career, particularly as an independent artist. 

“I had a person on my team that, though the intentions were good, really, really hurt my feelings because they made a PowerPoint presentation to me about how difficult it would be,” she described, before getting into having to toe the line of simultaneously feeling celebratory but nervous to share the news with her team.

“To have to explain to someone who is a partner in your business that your business may slow down because of pregnancy, it’s difficult. But it's also something that you’re supposed to feel celebratory about because it’s a blessing, and not everybody gets that opportunity…it was a balance for me of being thankful but apologizing to my partners. It was a weird thing for me to navigate.”

She said the presentation covered expenses, childcare costs in particular, with the grand finale posing the question of “what’s the rush?”. Victoria said she was left with the overall impression that her team was encouraging her to terminate her pregnancy in favour of prioritizing her career, which, she said, was “hurtful”.

But according to her, this was a motivator, and she said she left that meeting more determined than ever to succeed, the same determination that brought her to Los Angeles from her family home with nothing but a dream and $4,000 to her name. 

“I know the intention of the person wasn’t to harm me. They just wanted to let me know how big of a decision it is to keep [a baby] and also balance the expectations of what my career may or may not do,” she explained.

Having experienced an unexpected pregnancy myself in the early stages of my own career and just two years shy of the age Victoria was when she was expecting, I’m of two minds when it comes to this. The first is, a PowerPoint presentation, really? But the other part of me thinks that she’s no worse off for having someone sit her down and lay out some important information about the mountain that is motherhood. And I think a lot of mothers might agree, albeit silently, that they wish they had someone who might have done the same for them. With these polarizing thoughts in mind, it begs the question of how we can strike the balance between strategic career advice and plain old insensitivity – for celebrities and non-celebrities alike.

One of the reasons her experience feels so gross has everything to do with the delivery, and particularly the tone of the grand finale she mentioned. Victoria was 27, so this was no teen pregnancy by any means. And even as an independent artist, she was successful enough at the time to have had some notoriety, a few partners and a team, so she wasn’t flat broke. But the messaging about time is particularly frustrating considering the barrage of conflicting information women deal with as it pertains to our fertility and age.

Another factor of discomfort is the implication race plays. It has long been documented that the racism Black women face has had detrimental impacts on everything from the enjoyment of their pregnancy to their chances of surviving labour and delivery. But the uphill battle towards motherhood starts long before a doctor’s visit.

Personally, during my own pregnancy, I was once asked by a colleague of mine if my child’s father was “still around”. Not only was he “still around” but I had just graduated university and paid off my student loans and we had purchased a home together and were really looking forward to becoming parents. We were doing all the right things, but still couldn’t escape the judgement. At the time, a well-known white news anchor was also pregnant and I would have bet my last dollar that no one would think to ask her such an ignorant and loaded question. Sadly, there are so many other women who have experienced something similar, like this author, Ericka Souter, who described a bizarre encounter in a nail salon during her pregnancy. 

But with some of the stereotypes and stigma surrounding Black women being that we’re either single or unmarried, low income, or hypersexual, it’s no wonder Victoria described feeling the way she did during this encounter – or why myself and Ericka were both subjected to such horrible remarks. 

But we’re not the only ones subjected to this. And no fame, wealth, or power can make you immune to the harshness of being a pregnant Black woman in society. The legendary Lauryn Hill has spoken at length about being encouraged by countless music industry professionals to have an abortion when she was pregnant with her first child, Zion, at 24, while recording one of the greatest albums of all time, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. But like Victoria, she said that her pregnancy lit a certain fire in her creatively. 

The other thing that stands out so much to me is the part where Victoria said she apologized for her pregnancy. Because as odd of a thing it is to apologize for, it speaks volumes to the guilt that women carry when we decide to become mothers, even though I’ve also written about the guilt women feel when we decide not to become mothers. Its an impossible situation to navigate, which is exactly what Victoria is saying. 

The other thing to keep in mind here is that the chances of men experiencing anything remotely similar to this is unbelievably low. We frequently hear about athletes who are expecting children from women they either met through the glitz and glamour of being a rich and famous athlete, or rich businessmen like Elon Musk who has fathered multiple children over the last several years. To me, the message here is twofold. First, it's that women are solely responsible for their sexuality, and ultimately, any pregnancies that may come from it. And second, the physical demand of parenthood is so much less on men, so these conversations are simply not pertinent. 

In her reflection, Victoria speculated that the underlying tone of her partner’s message was that she was being encouraged to have an abortion. But there’s another underlying message in her presentation and it's that the potential to market her as a sex symbol will decrease if she is a mother. I wrote about this in relation to Shakira and Cardi B both entering (though, never quite leaving) their “sexy mom era” here.

The answer to the question of how we can give women sage career advice and an honest look at motherhood without fostering a sense of shame and guilt is a tough one to answer. But I imagine that at least a sliver of the answer to that lies in celebrating matrescence and understanding the power you can gain from becoming a mother.

Rather than looking at motherhood through the antiquated lens of it meaning minivans and soccer practices (still very important), as this thing that is going to make you less attractive, less marketable, less profitable and less sexy, the answer lies in understanding that motherhood can make you more of all of those things, too. And we have concrete examples of the women we’ve seen thus with, women like Beyonce, Shakira, Cardi B., Emily Ratajkowski, Rihanna, Keke Palmer – all of whom are very booked and very busy.