On Mama June’s Road To Redemption, fans have seen Lauryn ‘Pumpkin’ Efird juggle mending her strained relationship with her mom, raising her teenage sister and her own daughter, while also having difficulties in her marriage. In the midst of it all, the 21-year-old just announced that she is expecting her second child with her husband, Josh! On the show, the couple is currently living separately and have had their fair share of publicized disagreements, specifically about Mama June‘s struggle with addiction, which Lauryn opened up about on the HollywoodLife Podcast.
“I think the tipping point for us was towards the end of my mom’s addiction, she was so bad, but I still wanted to communicate, I still wanted to hang on to something. And Josh was just like, ‘You need to let it go. You need to let it go.’ And I think that was really the tipping point for us, honestly,” she explained. “He was like, ‘this is draining you,’ and I just wasn’t listening.”
Lauryn continued, “Even though he may not want to listen sometimes, because I get it, he doesn’t want to see me hurt again with my mom, but even though he doesn’t want to hear it, he is still very supportive of me.” And while the pair might be going through a rough patch right now, Lauryn said “at the end of the day, the things that we go through could be the worst thing in the world, we still give each other a kiss and we still say ‘I love you.’ No matter how bad the thunderstorm was that day, we come back together.”
At the moment, Josh lives and works in South Carolina, while Lauryn and their daughter, Ella, 3, live in Georgia. “It’s very hard, being long distance and then being pregnant and taking care of two kids. It’s definitely a lot,” she told People, after announcing her pregnancy. Following Mama June’s arrest in 2019, Lauryn also became the legal guardian of her younger sister Alana “Honey Boo Boo” Thompson, 15.
“You’ll see more problems this season, definitely with Josh,” Lauryn told HL. “But you’ll also see us trying to work through it. Everybody doubts us and says ‘You won’t you make it, but we’re trying to beat those odds.”