Janet Jackson is the youngest of the nine Jackson children, the baby sister of Michael and the rest of the famous family from Gary, Indiana. She grew up in the spotlight and built a long career of her own. So when she became a mom, plenty of people assumed she would do what a lot of busy stars do and bring in a full team to help with the baby.
She didn’t.
Janet’s son Eissa was born in 2017. A few years later, when he was not quite three, she was a guest on an Australian radio show called “Carrie & Tommy.” The hosts asked her about help at home, the kind of staff a woman in her position could easily afford. Her answer caught them off guard.
“I’m sure I will need someone in the future, some help here and there, but I don’t have anyone [right now] and I love it,” she said.
Then one of the hosts pressed a little. Why do it all yourself, when you really don’t have to?
That is when Janet gave the reason the caption held back. She didn’t talk about money or schedules or how she wanted to be seen. She pointed straight back to the women who came before her.
“My mother did it. Her mother did it. Why can’t I?”
Her mother is Katherine Jackson, the woman who raised all nine of the Jackson children, Michael included. And Katherine did it in a tiny two-bedroom house in Gary, with a living room, a kitchen and eleven people under one roof. She had no staff and nobody coming in to help, and she made it work year after year. Before Katherine there was her own mother, doing the same hard, quiet job in her day.
So when Janet looks at everything she has now, the thing she keeps coming back to is simple. If the women in her family raised big households with almost nothing, how could she turn around and say she needed more than they had?
There is nothing in her voice about proving a point. She talks about it like she’s just picking up where her mother and grandmother left off.
She also made no secret of how she feels about her little boy. “He’s first and foremost in my life,” she said. She went on to explain that pretty much her whole day now bends around him and whatever he needs.
Then she put it as plainly as a mother can.
“He’s the reason I breathe.”
“He’s my heart.”
You can picture it in the photos we’ve gathered: Janet beaming with baby Eissa, a young Janet standing with her mother Katherine, and the small Gary house where this whole story really begins.
See the photos above.