Rihanna welcomed her first child with boyfriend A$AP Rocky in May 2022.

In the lead-up to the birth of her first child, Rihanna spoke to ELLE.com about the kind of mother she’d be. A true Real Housewives fan, she joked that Teresa Giudice was her inspiration. “She will flatten you about those kids. And that resonates with me a lot because I feel like that’s the type of mom I’m going to be. Psycho about it,” she said. She added, “You talk about my kids, it’s over.”

Being a mother also affected her decision to take on the Super Bowl gig. She said in a press conference ahead of the game, “When you become a mom, there’s something that just happens where you feel like you can take on the world and do anything. The Super Bowl is one of the biggest stages in the world. As scary as that was, because I haven’t been on stage in seven years, there’s something exhilarating about the challenge of it all.”

She spoke about managing work-life balance now that she’s a mother. “Yes, it’s very different,” she said. “The balance is almost impossible because no matter how you look at it, work is always something that’s gonna rob you of time with your child. That’s the currency now. That’s where it goes. The magnitude of how much it weighs. When you make decisions on what you’re gonna say yes to, it has to be worth it.”