Suki Waterhouse calls criticism over playing Coachella 6 weeks postpartum ‘an insane thing’
Six weeks after welcoming her first child with partner Robert Pattinson, Suki Waterhouse stepped back onto the stage, performing a killer set at Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in April. According to commenters on social media, it seems the move wasn’t the right one (cue our eye rolls please!), and the new mom is addressing the criticism she received after her performance.
Waterhouse serves as the cover star for the August issue of British Vogue, and she’s opening up about how mom-shamers will come out of the woodwork no matter what a new mom does.
“Every mum’s morality is in question so much, not just from yourself, but from society,” she told the magazine. “Everyone’s projecting something onto you. That’s an insane thing.”
Of the task at hand—you know, jumping on stage in front of a crowd of thousands just weeks after giving birth—it seems the 32-year-old understandably had her fair share of apprehensive thoughts. “Like, honestly, of course [I was thinking]: ‘Holy sh–, how is this going to work, is this even going to be possible?’” she admitted. But ultimately: “You just have to go, ‘This is what we’re doing, this is what we’re about and fuck what anyone else thinks.’”
It seems Waterhouse has applied those same chill vibes to every aspect of motherhood, starting with her and Pattinson’s initial plans to try and get pregnant. She says the couple, who have been linked since July 2018, “really planned it,” adding, “One day we looked at each other and said, ‘Well, this is as ready as we’re going to be.’ I was like, ‘What can make more chaos?’”
Of her pregnancy, she says she skipped the classes, books, and prep work in lieu of sleep. (Relatable, indeed!) “I really had no concept that there was a baby inside me,” she revealed. “Like, I knew that was the case, but I was like, ‘What do you mean? That’s insane.’”
Her sister, Immy Waterhouse, cosigned that cool attitude, telling the outlet that Suki “approached pregnancy and motherhood the way she does to most things in life; with an almost confusing nonchalance and go-with-the-flow attitude. And all of that calm has transferred to the baby—she’s a true chiller.”
But if it all sounds a little too idyllic to be real, Waterhouse does admit that early motherhood was “shocking” for her, joking that she couldn’t believe how frequently she had to breastfeed in the hours after delivery. “I was alarmed in the hospital when they kept waking me up [every two hours]. I was like, ‘Excuse me? Is this what this entails?’”
It was Pattinson—and a rap playlist—that kept her calm, cool, and collected. “He was there with me and like all dads, he was really nervous,” she recalled, “but for someone who’s quite an anxious person, he’s been very calm.” She calls the Batman star “the dad I could have hoped for,” adding, “I mean a dad and his daughter? It’s an actual love story.”
