When I took my seat for the last night of Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter tour — sisters and nieces in tow, ass hanging out like a good Beyhive member — I was thinking about motherhood. After all, this is the tour that heavily featured the star’s own 13-year-old daughter, Blue Ivy, and the album that contains both a moving lullaby (“Protector”) and a cover of an iconic song about being cheated on that many speculate is sung from the perspective of Beyoncé’s own mother.
But as I spilled out onto the hot Vegas concrete three hours later — my silver sparkling cowboy hat drenched in sweat — all that was on my mind was desire.
The concert — which included a brief Destiny’s Child reunion — centered Beyoncé’s motherhood. “I can’t explain what it feels like,” she told us breathlessly before she took her final bows, “to be on stage with my babies.” Not only did Blue Ivy dance back up in a dozen numbers and get her own dance solo, but 8-year-old year old Rumi joined her mother and sister during “Protector”, doing a twirl for the audience before snuggling her mom. Several of Beyoncé’s bespoke interstitial videos featured family photos of her children at various ages, as well as snapshots of her own childhood.
Beyoncé’s motherhood was also present in choices seemingly made to acknowledge the presence of her children — whenever one was on stage, she subtly skipped the profanities, and when Blue Ivy joined her dancers, it was for numbers where the content and dress was (relatively) demure.
All the while, from a celebrity viewing tower that also hosted Oprah and Kris Jenner, Beyonce’s mom, Tina Knowles, watched on.
I once heard a compelling argument (meant, I believe, to speculate on Taylor Swift’s future), that our greatest female artists find necessary creative rejuvenation in motherhood. There is Madonna’s Little Star, Lauryn Hill’s To Zion, Halsey made a whole album about it. Of course, it can happen to men too; Justin Bieber just released his marriage album, which we can only hope will be followed by a fatherhood one.
What happens next is often unpredictable. Stars are just like us, in that they can be swallowed up by parenthood or expanded by it. In Madonna’s case, I’m not convinced that, post-motherhood, she ever returned authentically to her early self, or, more admirably, evolved. Lauryn fell apart. But what happens when a once-in-a-generation force like Beyoncé grows up before our very eyes, and does so successfully, is that we see the early sexuality, the young woman’s feminism, as it intersects with the realities of age — marriage, motherhood, and politics. Like many millennials, I have aged alongside Beyoncé. She kept me company when I was young and frivolous. But instead of going harder on a performance of perfection as she moved through life’s milestones, she got raw. She showed us the dark sides of love and marriage. And now, she is doing something we don’t always see on the stage or in real life – being a mother and a sexual being, all at once.
On this tour, when Beyoncé sang “Single Ladies” or “Crazy in Love” (with a lovely but almost hilariously low-key cameo by her hoodie-clad husband), what we saw wasn’t a 43-year-old woman and mother donning the mask of her younger, unreachable self. It wasn’t pre-kids cosplay — it was something new. I watched as she sang “Levi’s Jeans,” telling the crowd of 55,000, many of them mothers with their children (the mother of the family behind us was there celebrating her son’s 15th birthday), “I’m a fucking animal.” With this tour, it felt likeshe told us that she is better than ever, more sexual than ever, not despite her motherhood, but because of it.
A mom is many things. She is, as Beyoncé says, a protector, and also a projector of her children’s light. Sometimes that child’s light is enough to eclipse her own. A mother can be, as the Queen demonstrated, proud of her children, at times to a fault, even a total goober in their presence.
But a mom can also, Beyoncé tells us, want. She can be crazy in love, or even drunk in love. She can, even in the same breath as she declares her devotion to her children, just want to shake her ass. Sometimes, if you are Beyoncé, or even, say, a peri-menopausal woman in a mesh dress closing her eyes while she listens to Beyoncé, slowly swaying, your own light shines through — honest and loving and demanding pleasure, all at once.
Sarah Wheeler is an Oakland-based writer, educational psychologist, and mother of two whose work has been published in Romper, the San Francisco Chronicle, the New York Times, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and more. She writes the Substack Newsletter Momspreading and knows all the words to the rap from TLC’s “Waterfalls.”
