Adele Sums Up Parenting With One Quote: 'It's F**king Hard'

Image via Getty Images/ Jason Merritt

Adele is finally back in the spotlight: news of her long-awaited third album is everywhere, so the singer gave ID her first interview in three years — the interviews stopped roughly around the same time she and her partner Simon Konecki welcomed their first child in 2012. Obviously any interview would touch on how she feels about motherhood — women can rarely escape the question. So what does the singer have to say about the whole parenting thing?

“It’s fucking hard. I thought it would be easy. ‘Everyone fucking does it, how hard can it be?’ Ohhhhh…” she sighs dramatically, “I had no idea. It is hard but it’s phenomenal. It’s the greatest thing I ever did. He makes me be a dickhead, and he makes me feel young and there’s nothing more grounding than a kid kicking off and refusing to do what you’re asking of them. It used to be that my own world revolved around me, but now it has to revolve around him.”

Yup. Pretty relatable. There’s no test, no prerequisite, any moron can do it — so you just figure, “Hey, if she can do it, I can!” Then you have a baby and immediately wonder how the heck everyone is so good at keeping their kids alive.

Parenting is hard. There’s no shame in admitting that. And it’s pretty great when someone with such a huge audience and presumably every resource imaginable to make parenting as easy as possible admits it. It’s universally hard, raising a human.

Those first few years with kids, when they require that all-consuming type of attention — there is a bit of relief that goes along with it. There’s a great perspective that comes with parenting: you stop having time for everything so all those unnecessary worries start to fall away. They wither from lack of attention. Yes, having kids is difficult and takes a lot of patience and a resolve you probably didn’t even know you had — but the payoff is pretty damn great.

Adele left her then two-year-old son Angelo at home while she travelled to Toronto to film the music video for her new single, “Hello.” The video went instantly viral, but she says of their time apart, “It was the most exhausting thing ever, being without my baby.”

Motherhood. It is f**king hard — but at the end of the day we’re still all saps who want to be near our babies.