Most moms find out sooner or later that their kids don’t tell them everything. Usually it stings a little.
When Lisa Marie Presley found out, she wasn’t upset at all. She understood it completely, and she said so on national TV.
Lisa Marie was Elvis Presley’s only child. In early 2014 she was 46 and touring with her family, singing her own songs from town to town. She didn’t leave the little ones at home, either. “We bring the babies with us,” she told the show. The babies were her twin girls, Harper and Finley, who were 5.
That’s the stretch of life she was in when she sat down for the OWN series “Oprah: Where Are They Now?” Her episode aired on Friday, Feb 14, 2014.
When the talk turned to being a mom, she didn’t pretend to be a soft touch.
“I’m very, very much a very strong and intense lioness mother,” she said. Then she said it again, even stronger: “Very scary, intense lioness mother.”
A lioness. It’s a picture anyone can see right away. Calm most of the time, and then nobody had better get near her cubs.
So what did her kids stop telling her?
The tough stuff. If something happened to them or someone was picking on them, they kept it quiet. Here’s how she put it: “If something happened to them or someone was bullying or doing something, they knew that I would be very proactive in dealing with it, so they wouldn’t tell me a lot.”
In other words, her kids knew Mom would march right in and handle it. So sometimes they’d rather keep it to themselves.
She didn’t sound sorry about that. She sounded like a mom who knew exactly who she was. “So I’m very, very protective number one,” she said.
But protective wasn’t the whole story. She also wanted to be close to them, saying she wanted to “be their friend and protect them.”
Lisa Marie seemed to know she leaned hard toward the protective side, and she was fine with it.
There was a tender moment, too, and it was about her own father.
So how do you explain a grandfather like Elvis to two little girls? Lisa Marie had grown up at Graceland, his home in Memphis, and in this clip from CBS’s daytime show “The Talk,” she talks about those Graceland years.
Lisa Marie Presley talks about growing up at Graceland
When it came to her twins, Lisa Marie kept it simple and sweet.
“I just say he was a very special person who sang and he touched a lot of people in the world, and, and people loved him and they’re going to love you because of him.”
It’s a lovely thing to tell a child. She skipped the records and the fame and went straight to how people felt about him, and what that could mean for the girls.
And this was the same woman who’d just called herself a very scary mom. Her kids probably knew both sides of her pretty well.