Gwen Stefani admitted that she wasn’t going to let a busy touring schedule get in the way of being a mom in a new interview on The Skinny Confidential Him and Her Show. The popstar, 54, opened up about taking her eldest son Kingston, now 17, on the road with her when he was just months old. Even though it was a lot of work, Gwen seemed very glad to get to spend that time bonding with her son and continuing to perform for massive audiences.
The popstar revealed on the upcoming podcast episode — which will air on February 12 — that just weeks after giving birth to her first child, Jimmy Iovine encouraged her to go in the studio and work on the song that became her Akon collaboration “Sweet Escape.” When she eventually needed to hit the road with her band, No Doubt, Gwen admitted that she needed to have Kingston with her. “I ended up taking the baby when he was 9 months and going and doing a world tour, like 120 shows,” she said, via People. “We’re in a hotel one day and I thought that I had to stop nursing because I was like, ‘How am I going to nurse and be on stage?'”
Gwen explained that she had a strict nursing routine before performing, but Kingston did try to play with her hair while doing it. “I waited my whole life to be a mom. That’s all I wanted, my entire life and so I didn’t end up stop nursing,” she said. “[He] had this fixation with twirling, so I would do my whole hair and my glam and I’d have to nurse him right before I went on stage, and he’d be like trying to pull out my hair.”
While Gwen said that usually she was too tired to get out in the cities she performed in before kids, she said that being a mom led her to do everything she could with her son. “This time, I’d be like, ‘Okay, I got to take the baby to go,'” she said.
Besides Kingston, Gwen also has two more kids with her ex Gavin Rossdale. They also have younger sons Zuma, 15, and Apollo, 9. When the singer went on tour with Zuma and Kingston, she said that that tour left her exhausted. “That was like, ‘I think I’m going to be dead after this tour,'” she said. She also opened up about the difficulties, having to leave her kids to work on new music.