Sheryl Crow on parenting and aging: 'It’s hard to see yourself getting older'
Sheryl Crow is a cool mom by many standards with a storied, decades-long music career. Still, to her boys Wyatt and Levi, the 60-year-old joked that she's "the meanest mom that ever lived."
"I got a 12 and a 15-year-old, they don't have social media," she shared with actor Justin Long on his podcast Life is Short. "My 15-year-old, that being said, does have Snapchat. He got it for his 14th birthday 'cause I mean for two years it was like, 'Mom, everybody has it.' Luckily though he's really a naturalist and spends most of his time outside and doesn't really care."
Crow doesn't feel that they've missed out on much and even considers them both tech-savvy despite the fact that they're not on Instagram — to her knowledge, at least. "They're so tech savvy they've probably managed to completely go around me and they probably have a full social media profile with followers and everything," she joked.
The other thing she does keep track of in their household is their language.
"We have a swear jar in the kitchen," Crow said, noting that she practices what she preaches when it comes to telling the boys they're not allowed to curse. "I've never said the 'F' word in front of them, but it is in the documentary. But I have said s*** once."
She even used that slip up from her 2022 Showtime documentary Sheryl to try to entice her sons to watch it after they showed disinterest. "Talking about the documentary I told them, I said, 'You know what, we should sit down and watch it together.' They’re like, 'Hmm no thanks, no thanks.' I'm like, 'Really?!' And they're like, 'No no, we don't want to watch it.' And I said, 'Well someday you will want to watch it and you will. And I do say the 'F' word, so I owe both of you 20 dollars, I'm just gonna say it right up front.'"
Despite those rules that they have to abide by, the boys have undoubtedly experienced a number of perks by way of their mom.
"I mean, they've grown up on the road, they both grew up on tour buses and Wyatt took his first steps in the greenroom at Ellen DeGeneres [Show]. Yes, that was a very big moment," she explained. "It's that thing where they just assume every other kid had the same upbringing. But I think it was during the making of, I made a record called Be Myself and they would come down after school. I made it during school hours, which was really fun. I would take them to school, I'd work out, meditate and then come down here and I'd pick them up from school and then work for maybe another hour or two and they would hang out in here. It was the first time they saw that what I do is actually work. There was a lot of thought that goes into it, there's mechanics, there's doing and redoing and they even got to sing on a song, them and their buddies."
While Crow's life both before and after adopting her kids includes many of those beautiful memories, all of which she got to reflect on during the making of her documentary, the singer acknowledged that she'd be her own harshest critic while watching her career play out.
"I told Amy [the film's director] right off the bat, I said, 'I'm not gonna like this documentary because I'm gonna hate the way I look because I'm old.' And that is just the reality of it," she said. "I watched it twice. It's hard to see yourself getting older, you know, especially when you’re looking at all that footage of when you're like in your twenties and then in your thirties and in your forties."
Even still, Crow admitted prior to the documentary's release that she still feels "hot" at 60 years old. She also told Long that she wouldn't ever want to go backward. "I love my past, but no," she said.
And while she is aware of how much time has passed, Crow remains optimistic about how much life she still has to live while learning to balance it all as a single mother.
"I don't really date much. I mean, honestly, who has time? I don't," she said of remaining uncoupled after dating and even being engaged to a few famous men. "Plus my kids are like, 'You would...you date mom?' And I'm like, 'Yeah, I mean I'm not dead.'"
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