A lot of women know this feeling. Before the baby comes, you’ve got the whole thing mapped out in your head, the kind of mom you’ll be and what your days will look like.
Then real life shows up.
Riley Keough had that experience too, and she’s been surprisingly open about it.
If you don’t know Riley, she’s Elvis Presley’s first grandchild. She was born on May 29, 1989, to Lisa Marie Presley, Elvis’s only child. Today she’s a mom herself. Her daughter, Tupelo, was born in August 2022, and Riley shares her with her husband, Ben Smith-Petersen.
In October 2024, Riley sat down with Drew Barrymore on “The Drew Barrymore Show.” She was there to talk about “From Here to the Great Unknown,” the memoir her mom started and Riley finished. But the two women got onto another subject that a lot of viewers could relate to: what it was like growing up the way they did, and wanting something more ordinary.
Drew knows a thing or two about that, which is part of why this conversation works. Here’s the clip where the two of them talk about wanting a “normal” life away from fame.
Riley Keough and Drew Barrymore on wanting a normal life
What did Riley expect motherhood to look like?
“When I had my child, I kind of had this idea of what motherhood would be like,” Riley told Drew Barrymore, as HELLO! reported.
She explained where that idea came from. “I really relate to this because my life was so wild that I really wanted things like suburbia and cookies.” She wanted “things to be very normal for my kids.”
In her mind, that meant a certain kind of day. She pictured “that I would be at home wanting to bake cookies all day and sit at home all day.”
It’s a sweet picture. It’s also a very specific one, and for a girl who grew up the way Riley did, you can understand why it looked so good from the outside.
Here’s the twist.
“And I’m not that kind of person,” she said.
Riley found out that staying home and baking wasn’t what filled her up. “I realized that I need to write and to perform and to do all these other things,” she said.
And she didn’t pretend it was easy to accept. “And that was really hard for me, you know,” she admitted. “And I was really hard on myself for that.”
She also pointed out that “there’s an idea of what you’re supposed to be as a mother.” Plenty of moms and grandmas reading this know that idea well, and how heavy it can feel when you don’t match it.
Riley seems to have landed somewhere kinder to herself. She said, “And I think that when you’re a mother, especially if you’re an artist or a creative person. Those are the things that give you life.”
That’s a nice thing to hear from someone who grew up in the most famous family in rock and roll. She wanted the cookie-baking life for her daughter’s sake. What she figured out is that her daughter also gets a mom who writes and performs, and who’s doing her best to go easy on herself about it.