Keke Palmer is embracing her role as a mom and sharing how the experience has helped her improve her confidence.
“After having my baby, I’ve just gotten so much more powerful. I’m just so strengthened in a crazy way. Strutting my stuff, enjoying,” Palmer, 29, said in an interview with The Cut published on Tuesday, July 11. “I’ll be honest, I think before I even had the baby, I was really actually quite self-conscious.”
Palmer confessed that before she welcomed son Leodis Andrellton, now 5 months, with boyfriend Darius Jackson, she was always “trying to be on point” when it came to her physical appearance.
“Being slim and being fit in a particular way was always something that I was gunning for,” she admitted. “After having the baby, my body got so much bigger and I started getting fluff in areas I never had before.”
The Nope actress revealed that her trainer told her that they weren’t going to work on getting her body back to what it was before her pregnancy. Instead, Palmer has decided to “embrace” her new physique and focus on loving her little boy.
“If there’s one person on this earth that loves [me] for sure, it’s that baby,” she told the outlet. “[I’m] happy, because there’s no love like it. Somebody loving you like that, hell, who cares [what I look like]?”
Palmer’s words of wisdom come one week after her boyfriend, 29, shamed her for an outfit she wore to an Usher concert.
“It’s the outfit tho … you a mom,” Jackson tweeted on July 5, alongside a video of his girlfriend being serenaded by Usher, 44, on stage while wearing a sheer black dress over a black bodysuit.
After receiving backlash for his comments, Jackson doubled down and explained his stance on the issue.
“We live in a generation where a man of the family doesn’t want the wife & mother to his kids to showcase booty cheeks to please others & he gets told how much of a hater he is,” he added via Twitter. “This is my family & my representation. I have standards & morals to what I believe. I rest my case.”
Jackson subsequently deactivated then reactivated his social media pages following the drama. He seemingly deleted photos of Palmer off his page in the wake of the scandal. Amid the controversy, Palmer posted a cryptic TikTok video on July 7 of herself lip-syncing audio from an interview she did in June with Them. “You ain’t stopping what’s going on with me, sweetheart. So if you about to act up, I’m ’bout to link up,” she stated.
That same day, Palmer also launched a new merch line that was seemingly inspired by Jackson’s comment. “One thing is certain and one thing is true, IM A MOTHA, through and through! 😍,” she tweeted at the time. “‘IM A MOTHA’ and ‘Stevie to the bulls–t’ shirts available NOW!”
