If you’re at a certain life stage, browsing Lindsay Lohan’s Instagram page is just like scrolling through the feeds of your mom friends, only glossier.
Since Lohan and her husband Bader Shammas became parents to son Luai a year ago, the actress, 38, has truly embraced mom life. Days out at Disneyland! Amazing birthday cakes! Cute couple selfies! Nature walks! It’s all good, clean, wholesome fun
If you chatted with Lohan at a baby rhyme time class and had no idea who she was (maybe you had your ’00s memories erased, Men In Black style), you might think you were making friends with a regular mom— not even a cool mom! And yet, we all remember her past as one of the most talked-about party girls in Hollywood. Who could have predicted she’d now be living in Dubai, married to a man with a very sensible job (Shammas is Assistant Vice President at Credit Suisse bank) and posting photos of her son’s adorable car-themed first birthday party.
Lohan herself thinks the routine of family life is helping her thrive as a mom. “I really love structure because I don’t think I had that when I was young,” she says. “Everything was coming so fast, and I had so many things happening. My only structure was filming and being on set.”
She’s not the only star to proudly defy public expectations. Back in the day, Paris Hilton was, like Lohan, one of the ’00s party girls. Now, she’s 43, married to entrepreneur and writer Carter Reum and totally doting on her two kids, son Phoenix, 18 months, and daughter London, 8 months, who were both born via surrogate. “From the moment I laid eyes on him, my heart felt so full,” she wrote shortly after Phoenix’s birth in January 2023. “I feel like my life is so complete now. I always wanted to be a mom.” And in an interview with Vogue she said, “I just had to find the right partner to do it with. It’s so hard to trust people, and I’m so grateful to have found my husband.”
But it got Us thinking, maybe our own mom friends have successfully reinvented themselves too. Due to their fame and fortune, Lohan and Hilton’s teens and twenties were much more scrutinized than most, but we all have a past. And since these days the only people who send Facebook friend requests are scammers and long-lost great aunts, we know nothing of the histories of friends we’ve made since we got into adulting. If we gained access to their pasts and got to scroll their old tagged photos, would we see that, back in the noughties, they weren’t all cupcakes and cuddles either?
Is that back tattoo we once caught a glimpse of when lovely Jen from mommy-and-me yoga was doing the downward dog a sign of a party girl past? Did Emmy, who we got chatting with in the playground when our kid stole her kid’s cucumber stick, once get married in Vegas to a man she’d only known for three days? And what if they saw evidence of our own wilder days? Maybe it’s time to organize that moms cocktail night we’ve been trying to get booked for six months…