Glam JLo shows all working mums how it should be done

The singer is an unlikely hero for women as she rolls back the years and conquers the Covid blues, writes Sarah Caden

LAST week, Jennifer Lopez’s fiance Alex Rodriguez was branded a “serial cheater” by his former brother-in-law.

“Really? That’s a shame,” thought forty- to fiftysomething women everywhere. “But have you seen JLo?”

In recent weeks Jennifer has become something of an idol for a certain cohort of women for the ways in which she seems to be winning life’s battles, apparently in direct proportion to how badly the rest of us feel like we’re losing them.

It started in the first days of this new year when Jennifer, like many celebrities, was photographed on her holidays. She took her much-needed break in the tropical Turks and Caicos Islands, where she was photographed in various swimwear on the beach, looking sun-kissed and happy in her skin.

Her skin, we were told, will be 52 years of age later this year.

We gazed on Jennifer in her red string bikini and a diaphanous monogrammed robe, spinning around on the beach, apparently aware of being photographed. We saw that she is strong rather than skinny. We admired her self-confidence. We appreciated her escape.

We, in our Covid confines, feel we cannot escape even for a second.

There was, of course, the holiday itself. A holiday apparently without her 12-year-old twins in tow.

Wow, we all thought, she’s not just hiding headfirst in the washing machine, wondering when the cry of “where’s mum?” will go up. She’s not just out of the room, out of the house, out of the 5km limit. She’s in a different country to her kids. Imagine.

On another level, Jennifer was trumpeted as escaping the otherwise unavoidable — the march of time. “Age-defying” was the most used adjective in the comments on her sun holiday. When she was snapped, strolling along the beach in a high-cut green swimsuit with echoes of the barely there green Versace dress she wore to the Grammys in 2000, it was commented that she hadn’t aged a day in the intervening 21 years.

Of course, she has. She is now 51 and that’s just a fact that can’t be avoided, but the way we talk about someone looking good at this age is to say that they are winning some war by which the rest of us have been defeated.

Jennifer looks so well, so untouched by the ravages of time. This seemed to touch us in a way it might not have a year ago.

A year ago, we hadn’t endured those painful glimpses of ourselves on screen, as a child’s Zoom class suddenly opened and we saw ourselves, brows, furrowed, the anxiety in every line that definitely wasn’t there a year ago. No age-defying here, Covid is stronger than that.

In our right minds we know, of course, that ‘age-defying’ is rubbish. Time passes. No one stays 30 forever. Even if you look fantastic at 50, you still don’t look 20, no matter what you inject, lift or embellish. But who’s feeling in their right mind right now? Not many women I know, most of whom are juggling paid WFH, unpaid WFH and the return of remote learning for their kids last week.

Studies published at the end of last year backed most women’s suspicions that through different levels of lockdown they were shouldering most of the domestic burden. Yes, everyone was at home, WFH or otherwise, but women had absorbed the lion’s share of housework and homework. It didn’t come as a great surprise to see this as a statistic, but it was dispiriting.

Research last year from the Institute of Fiscal Studies in the UK found that for every three hours of uninterrupted work fathers were managing while working from home with children around, the mother’s eked out only one.

So we feel sort of vulnerable to the notion that some woman out there is winning, dodging, escaping what we cannot.

The messages between mothers in my various WhatsApp groups emphasised this last week. “Have you seen JLo?” “Do you hate JLo?” “Have you seen what JLo eats?”

Interestingly, however, the tone of the JLo interest was not spiked with ill will or envy. Instead, there was the sense that she was doing it for all of us. Her high-cut swimsuit didn’t exactly look comfortable, but our Covid preoccupation with comfort is hardly something to be proud of. Yeah, her holiday privacy was invaded by photographers, but who has any moments of privacy anymore?

By the standards of current living, Jennifer is winning and, we’d like to believe, she’s winning for all of us. Who knew? JLo: a hero to working mothers everywhere.

‘Even if you look fantastic at 50, you still don’t look 20’