Jessica Rose Lewis - life in chapters

A snapshot of the past, current and future chapters of this dynamic woman that is Jess.

I am thrilled to bring you this interview. Jess is one of my dearest friends, the fact that we live on different continents and speak once every couple of months (or even once a year, when she had newborns) never mined our friendship… if anything, it almost made it stronger. She’s also one of the very very few people I allow myself to be inspired by.

She makes motherhood sexy and powerful. And somehow it makes sense that she started a landscaping business in this current chapter of her life because she is nature. Not natural, nature.

She lives so as nature
when autumn approaches giving a sign
she sheds the leaves, and unafraid
stands naked awaiting her next spring.

You are a Canadian living in America and are a divorced mom with 3 kids. How does this describe you but doesn't define you?

I would say that describes a chapter of my life. Yes, I am Canadian. Yes, I am living in the US - I’m about to actually become American, so Canadian and American dual citizen. Yes, I’m divorced, however, that’s only a chapter of my life as you know I’ve lived in many other places all over the world. I had a life before I was a mom and I would say I also have my life and my evolving identity even after becoming a mom. I’m now not in the early motherhood phase anymore, all 3 of my kids are in school - which is a whole different scene than when you have the first three or four years when you have the kids around the house all the time. I feel I’m now entering a sub-chapter of my life.  

How did you keep your independence while being a mom? And what I mean with this question is I’ve always seen you being very loving to your kids and at the same time the world did not revolve around your kids.

Absolutely not! I think that’s a critical point to raising independent children and children who know that people have boundaries, including their own parents. That is exactly it, I would set firm boundaries and I do set solid boundaries with my kids, I let them know that mommy has feelings too and mommy’s feelings are also valid and relevant and you need to respect those and you need to strive to understand them even at the age of 3. 

I think that that nurtures a good awareness of compassion and striving to understand and relate to other people; ultimately open-mindedness; that other people are not going to feel the way that you do, people are not always going to think in the way that you do, and that’s ok.

Independence for any mother anywhere in the world is very hard fought and very hard won.

It’s an ongoing thing even for me now. This is gonna vary from woman to woman, some women have the objective of having kids to be a stay-at-home mom and being 100% present for her kids all the time and that’s okay if that’s what she wants. Power to those women if that’s genuinely what you want, then that’s what you should do. We all have priorities that we want to pass on to our children. For some of us, it’s a good work ethic; for some of us it’s social awareness; for some of us it’s exposure to as many things beyond the household and culturally and globally as possible; for others, it’s optimal nutrition… so it really depends on what your priorities are. 

For me, I wanted the kids to grow up seeing an empowered woman and somebody who is not compromising on herself or her goals. Over the years, sometimes all I could do was consult on various social justice projects - especially when the kids were babies and toddlers and I was housebound all the time. As soon as I could I launched my business, my landscaping business Mama Garden & CO. after moving to the country, once the kids were old enough I could then navigate that with them even as a part-time thing. 

But I think it was important for them to see that mommy has a life outside of the house. mommy has a life outside of her job being your mommy. And that it’s possible to multitask and seek fulfilment in many different spheres of one person’s life.

That’s it! That’s it right? I mean we, and I too, judge mothers based on our own very personal meter of priority. And also when we grow up, we judge our own mothers for not having done enough in a sphere that perhaps we deem important… but that for her, was not the priority. I feel society puts a lot of pressure on mothers, expecting them to be these uber-human perfect people who score 10/10 in presence, listening, home cooking every meal their children eat, cleanliness, themselves looking on point and amazing, working and having a career… Need I say more? Oh yes, also she must be the keeper of the marriage and make it work no matter what. 

It doesn’t mean that that person is a bad mother if she doesn’t cook her children every meal, perhaps she’s giving them a tremendous gift of being say, the primary breadwinner for her family as a woman - an anomaly even in this day and age - and that is also nourishing in other ways for developing growing child.

Yes, we can’t offer everything and everything at the same level to every child. Another thing that I found inspiring about you is the level of truthfulness with which you approach your children. You don’t sugarcoat feelings, and proof of that is you walked away from a marriage when it wasn’t working anymore and you were unhappy. You didn’t play pretend happy family. You already had three children with him, not just one, so I feel it’s such a courageous decision ultimately.

I think that that made it - not that every individual child is less but that made it more make me go like ‘there’s 3 kids here, this is impacting all of them’. I find that a lot of the time when people decide to stay in unhappy marriages that involve children, when they say ‘Oh we’re doing it for the kids’ that couldn’t be further from the truth. You’re doing it for yourself! You’re doing it because you’re scared of what the outcome is gonna be, I’ve had these conversations with women that I know that are in unhappy marriages. I always challenge them on it and say, ‘You’re doing it for the kids? Because the kids don’t like this. They don’t like seeing mommy and daddy argue. They don’t like seeing mommy being spoken down to, or vice versa seeing daddy being spoken down to.’ It hurts them and they’re aware that it is happening. 9 out of 10 times when I challenge them on that classic default line, they’ll say ‘Oh yeah actually, I’m doing it because I don’t want the husband to get the house.’ Or ‘ I won’t be able to pay for child support.’ So the reasons, when you challenge them on that one line, are always focused around the parents, what the parents don’t want to happen. If we’re honestly staying in an unhappy marriage with kids, it’s proven at this point, there have been countless studies done globally, across cultures, that are wild obviously to the detriment of the children. 

It’s much more empowering for a child to see, ‘I have these two parents and they’re recognising that they don’t work well together. They love us and want us to be surrounded by happy people, and they know that we deserve to have happy parents.’ That is ultimately more empowering for the kids to bear witness to than seeing someone resigning themselves to a lifetime of dread. It kind of sets the tone for that child for the rest of its life, if that’s what you’re modelling for them what do you expect to happen in their lives? They’ll just learn to “settle”. 

I know I deserve the best and I wanted to relay that message to my children in the strongest sense possible as well.

I know you don’t vision board, however, when you bought the house you now live in you said it was the house you always knew you would live in. Explain… 

I am and have been for many years of my life, surrounded by people, women, and creatives who actively vision-board. We do that in the fashion industry all the time, we call it mood-board. I was never huge on vision-boarding, I didn’t really believe it, and I didn’t want to cut and paste things. But I always had in it my head and this goes a long way I guess with my confident and defiant personality - actually, I said yesterday to a friend of mine that there’s a fine line or the lines are always blurred between ego and confidence, and the same can be said in our society of defiance and confidence. Are you being defiant or are you being just confident about your perspective on any given subject? 

SO….

All through my teens and twenties, I knew I wanted to raise my kids rurally. As you know I spent most of my teens and twenties in the UK, I never even dated an American guy, I never even lived in the US beyond a couple months at a time. The idea of even actually settling in the US was not even anywhere in the realm of possibility but I knew I wanted to raise my kids rurally. I knew I wanted to have this chapter of my life be something that is more connected like hands-on with the land and with a sustainable/self-sufficient lifestyle. 

I had that in the back of my head, and then…

When I met my ex, 12 years ago, we got married and we were living in the city (New Jersey). We had our first baby in the city, we had our second baby in the city, and then the pandemic hit and … we’ve been looking for a weekend house upstate, and we came upon this house that is really down the road from the site of Woodstock. I always knew of the Woodstock Music Festival because my stepdad came from Hungary to Canada the year that Woodstock happened in 1969. He had the poster of the big Woodstock Festival hanging above our kitchen table, so I would eat breakfast every morning as a kid with that image always over my head. So when we ended up buying right down the road, literally a 10-minute walk from the site of Woodstock, that was a huge lightbulb moment in my life. 

So many people said to me, <<OMG Jess I remember doing shows with you in Milan, New York, Paris whatever years ago and you were saying you were going to live on a farm…>> They all thought I was so disconnected from my life, but I was sure I was going to live that.

Whilst I never cut-n-paste a vision of it out, I always had that in my head even if it was so subconscious. By the time I married an American, moved to the US, bought the rural home, and divorced the American… now that I’m almost 40 years old I look back and am in awe WOW that actually happened. It was so much in my subconscious that I wasn’t actively planning for it, I guess I did manifest it. 

I had the vision in my head and I always say to women - and it’s so especially hard after you have kids cuz your career gets derailed 90% of the time, probably more than that, your identity gets derailed and they’re like ‘What do I do now?’ I always say ‘Well what’s in your head? What does the next 5 years look like?’ Most of the time they say they don’t know, well…

You better start knowing! Start putting the picture in your head, even though it may seem completely irrational.

Like, you might have this picture of why sandy beaches and you’re living in upstate New York… it may seem completely irrational but put it in your head because unless you have the vision in your head, it’s not going to happen, you’re never going to create the life that you want. 

And it could seem completely removed from what you’re doing right now, but as long as you maintain that vision, it doesn’t need to have the specific details figured out: I just knew I wanted to raise my kids rurally, I didn’t know where in the world it was going to be or with who it was going to be, I didn’t know that I’d be doing it on my own but I am and it’s OK. 

The details figure themselves out, but as long as you have that literal vision that will be your guiding star.

The fact that it didn’t happen overnight, how do you live with time? Do you consider time your friend or foe?

I think time can be both. More often than not it’s a source of anxiety for me because when I think about the bigger picture and how time plays into that, that prevents me from living in the present moment. Just right now, acknowledging the things that I talked about over twenty years ago are actually happening, I try to remind myself that now is the time to be in the present moment: just soak up your manifestations. 

If you have kids you’ll notice time passing really quickly, can you believe Wyatt is about to be 8 years old? That’s almost 10 years like that! I know you remember when he was born, and I just saw our friend LILY the other day and she was talking about when he was not even 8 months old and there’s a picture of her holding him, <<Has it been 8 years already??>>

And in another 8 years, he’ll be 16 and driving… that is mind-blowing. 

I have four sisters and one of my oldest sisters has 5 kids, she told me <<You know Jess, time… the days are really long, but the years are so short.>> As my kids are growing, I’m realising she’s right. 

In that respect, I already have my vision of what I want my next 20 years to be. I know exactly what it is. I can see it in my head, I want to be spending half the year in Maine and half the year somewhere in the UK and Europe. I don’t know who it’s going to be with, I don’t know what I’m going to be doing for work. I don’t know the details and quite frankly they don’t really matter because my method is pretty proven at this point of my life. I need to see what it’s going to look like. 

You’re one of those fascinating women who’ve lived multiple career lives, how did you get to do what you do now: your gardening and landscaping business? Did you know you wanted to do that?

I didn’t. Just like I didn’t know I wanted to be a model, I had no idea and it was definitely not something I’d pursued - someone literally had walked to me up the street and said ‘Hey hey you can be a model!’

And it’s very much the same as that. I moved up here and realised that the last 20 years of my life had been in media and fashion and that doesn’t exist up here. I do have a lot of family roots in agriculture, we had a huge communal extended family farm in Canada: a beef cattle farm and a 2-acre garden. The way I had it framed in my head was: this is just a part of my childhood, it’s not a skill or a career. When I got here during the pandemic obviously everyone was a city expat and most people had no idea how to garden or do anything outdoors. When you grow up in agriculture, gardening is your second language so I started doing off-the-cuff consults for people in our community. I kept having these conversations with the group of moms that is closest to me that I didn’t know what to do up here, and one of them my girlfriend Kirsten said <<Jess what are you talking about? You’re already doing it! You have a landscaping business, just make a website for it and start charging.>> And Oh my Gosh you’re right!

So I got the website up and running, made some cards reached out to local nurseries, and snowballed from there.

So no business plan?

No business plan because it was already operating. I was already going to people’s houses, I wasn’t conscious… I did not sit down and brainstorm a one-year, 5-year plan. I didn’t run the numbers. At this point Zeta was not in school full-time yet, she wasn’t in school at all actually so I couldn’t afford to take the risk of any overhead, I couldn’t make a huge financial investment as I didn’t know if that was going to actually take off. I decided I could spend an extra 2K USD on getting new tools and making business cards and the website. By the time the season actually kicked in, and I was really going, which was mid-April this year, OMG I was booked for weeks out. I couldn’t believe it, it exploded!

I got back my investment within a week of operating!

And now it’s just a matter of, how fast can we grow. The demand is absolutely there.

That’s just how Mama Garden & CO unfolded.

You’ve got so many tools up your sleeve… No matter where you get planted, you’ll blossom.

Well yeah, I think that that’s a by-product of my life growing up. Being put in so many different markets, and having to figure it out. If the market isn’t working for you, shit! how am I going to pay my rent? How do I get the money for the metro? OK, I have to get a job at a coffee shop, Oh then have to learn to speak this language better so I can make coffee. 

I guess, at the end of the day, it’s really knowing how to be adaptable and grow wherever you’re planted. But also, how much has society influenced our views of ourselves and our capabilities? How many people have these extra kinds of skills that society has told you have minimal or no value? “The only people doing that are broke, there’s no real future in that..” And that’s how I viewed gardening but it couldn’t be further from the truth. Seeing how fast my business is growing in the first year blows my mind, I’m making more for sure than in many years that I modelled. It’s about being able to challenge the status quo, and being able to identify things that you consider a hobby: is this really a hobby? Or is there some potential here to make that into a career? It’s about reframing everything about yourself, and figuring out what can work for you. 

I can definitely relate, like you I did so many things and tried so many things. When I couldn’t make money as a model say in New York, I sold honey at the Farmer’s Market in Union Square. 10 years down the line I too have multiple bags of skills and experiences. 

Exactly and it’s ultimately about having confidence in yourself and exploring every avenue.

Even now, I still reach out to people who’ve been landscaping up here for 30-40 years, they’re getting ready to retire and ask me if I want to take on their clients. In my head, I think ‘Well I haven’t managed that many clients’ but then I tell them ‘Sure I can.’ I can take 20 now and then another 20 in a few months, I can learn how to manage that effectively and I’m confident that I can find the resources. 

Self-doubt is a huge reason that so many people aren’t successful in things that they’re trying out. It’s kind of a little voice in the back of your head like ‘What if this happens/ What if it doesn’t work out/ What if I let this person down and I’m so embarrassed?’ Who cares!

You don’t have to have immediate success with every facet of every new avenue that you’re exploring. I think as long it’s proving to be sustainable, as far as growing the business, explore everything and just take on what feels good for you in that moment. And if you can’t take something on, don’t write it off … just side-bar it for a second and then revisit it once you’re ready to keep growing. 

I wonder if this way of thinking and living is almost an “old way”. We grew up when there wasn’t the internet and you couldn’t google things, you couldn’t watch a YouTube video, and definitely, you were spending your time scrolling look-alike photos… we had to be in the world, immersed in the matrix of reality and as such we would observe and learn hands-on. So in a way, you just learn to constantly bet on yourself by taking upon you little more than you know you can handle, yet you know you can do it by learning along the way…

It’s almost like planting a seed in your mind, ‘Maybe I wanna do this, I have it available to me, let me continue to…’ It’s like giving yourself a pep-talk, and figuring out the logistics until you’re at a point when you say ‘OK I can take this on!’

A lot of it is that traditional structure of: You have one thing that you do, and you do it well, that’s your job, that’s your primary source of income, or that’s your only source of income even, and that’s all you gonna do. You have to have extensive training to do anything else, you have to go back to school for 5 years and spend 300K USD to get a degree before you’re qualified to do anything else. 

In my opinion, that’s bullshit. I have a degree in nutrition and I never use it. I spent the money and I’m not using it. I think more and more, especially in the world that we’re living in, being an opportunist and being open to exploring whatever presents itself is becoming really critical. Especially as a mom you have to have a flexible schedule, that was a big thing for me and figuring out what I was going to do up here - I couldn’t have a 9 to 5 job even if I’m 50-50 with my kids, and I don’t have them 2 days of the week, I still have to be there for them if something happens. I needed something flexible, and I needed to create my own hours. I also need sources of passive income so I Air B&B a camper at the bottom of my property. Occasionally I’ll do customer service calls to fill in the gaps, that’s part of being a parent. 

I own my own house. I own my own car. I own my own business.

I was reading something the other day, I forget what the exact words said but it said something to the effect of

<<Winning is not getting your foot into the house. Winning is being able to hold onto it.>> 

I think it was used as a metaphor but really winning is not just getting into that portion of your life, it’s being able to sustain it. That really resonated, cuz getting the house and getting the business up and running was the easy part. It’s now being able to hold onto it is the tough part, but it’s fine, you just troubleshoot, you do what you have to and that’s it. For this chapter anyway.

For Jess’ landscaping business, click here.
I think it’d be good if I told you a couple of things about Jess’ past chapters. During her chapter as a model, she walked the biggest runways in Paris, Milan and New York (names include Blumarine, Luella, Bartley, Alexander Wang, Vivienne Westwood). When we met in New York, she was the first curve model to shoot for the American Playboy. The transition to the next chapter was also very interesting as she seized the opportunity (due to her vast experience and knowledge of the modelling industry) to become the producer of Straight/Curve Film, which basically is the first documentary made by the insiders of the fashion industry on plus size fashion. Then Jess got pregnant and her current chapter began…

With her story I want to shine a light onto what it means to be an opportunist, since our society doesn’t perceive it positively. In our minds an opportunist is not what the word implies, that is someone who seizes opportunities, but rather someone who takes advantage of others. Yet being an opportunist is like sailing: you wouldn’t go against the wind, would you? You would use the wind at your advantage to push you in the direction of your going…. and that doesn’t mean you’re exploiting the wind.