Leva Bonaparte and son ‘Little’.Photo:Leva Bonaparte/ Instagram
Leva Bonaparte/ Instagram
Leva Bonaparteis a self-described “smotherer” when it comes to parenting son Lamar, Jr. — and it has everything to do with her journey to motherhood.
PEOPLE sat down with theSouthern Charmstar during a trip to her booming Charleston nightclub Republic — the setting of her successful Bravo spinoff,Southern Hospitality.And during the long-ranging chat, Bonaparte got candid about her tight relationship with her son, who turns 6 on Monday, and why she prioritizes time with him over everything else.
“My parenting style can really be traced back to my struggles with infertility because it really had an effect on my outlook on how I wanted to raise my child,” says the 44-year-old entrepreneur. “I don’t think I’d be the type of mother I am today had I not gone through that.”
Leva shares her son, whom she calls “Little,” with her husband and business partner Lamar Bonaparte.
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Leva Bonaparte and son ‘Little’.Leva Bonaparte/ Instagram
Getting pregnant, Leva says, wasn’t easy. “I had five years of undiagnosed infertility — just poking, prodding, poking, prodding,” she recalls. “It was horrible. And there were times I worried it would never happen. I struggled for many, many years.”
Finally, a friend recommended a doctor who suggested Intrauterine insemination (IUI), the process also known as “artificial insemination” in which the sperm is placed directly in the uterus. “That wound up being what helped me conceive,” says Leva. “That’s how Little was born.”
Becoming a mom was the beginning of a chapter Leva long dreamt about. But looking back at the process, she’s keenly aware of how difficult a road it was in ways she never anticipated.
“There’s a lot that people don’t talk about,” she says. “You’re basically being treated like a turkey, and then you’re blasted with all sorts of hormones and drugs — coming off of which arehard.”
“Your body’s so out of whack after being through all the testing and the ‘Clomid crazies,’ which are the side effects you get from the medication used to treat infertility [such as insomnia, irritability, mood swings, and PMS-like cravings]. And because no one tells you about it, you can feel nuts. Like, ‘What is happening to me?'”
“I could talk about this stuff forever,” she adds. “I don’t think the medical system is equipped enough with this information. So you really have to educate yourself about these things and unfortunately, when I learned, it was only after I had experienced it.”
Still, climbing that mountain taught her how to cherish each moment with her son.
“I definitely am very present [as a mom],” she tells PEOPLE. “From the minute he was born, I just wanted to soak it all up and keep it all. He didn’t even go to preschool, you know what I man? Because I just wanted to savor all of it and I was like, ‘I don’t know if I’ll even get it again.'”
“So in the sense, I feel like my infertility issues and the struggles I went through to have Little were a little bit of a blessing in disguise because I never took anything for granted,” she adds. “The worst days, the hardest days. I was just like, ‘I’m just so glad this little guy’s here.'”
Leva Bonaparte at BravoCon 2023.Rich Polk/Bravo via Getty
Rich Polk/Bravo via Getty
Now, Leva will batch her time on her smartphone — either first thing in the morning or later in the evening, after Little goes to sleep. The change, she says, has helped her be a more present mom.
“Time goes so quickly,” Leva says. “You can sit on your phone and you don’t realize you just wasted 40 minutes doing nothing, That’s 40 minutes of learning, 40 minutes of quality time, 40 minutes of bath time or meal time or art time you could have had with your kid. So I’d much rather do that than be on my phone, consuming God-knows-what toxicity on social media. It’s much more rewarding.”
Little, Leva tells PEOPLE, takes after his parents in the sense that he’s “a little bossy.”
“He cracks me up because he really absorbs everything and tries to act way too old for his age,” she says. “He’ll come in the room and say, ‘You’re fired and you ned to go over there and you need to park it.’ And I’m like, ‘Bro, this is a little much. You’re way too young to be saying that.’ Or he’ll tell my mom about something that happened at Republic because he listens to every conversation. So you’ll see this little kid going, ‘Well last night, Joe and Maddie got into an argument…’ It’s hilarious.”
What hasn’t sunk in yet for Little is just how famous his mom is. “He knows when the cameras com around, he calls them the picture frames actually — which is just so cute so I haven’t corrected him,” she shares. “So when we’re filming he’ll be like, ‘The picture frames are coming,’ or ‘Mom’s on the picture frames.’ But I don’t think he really understands it in the grand scheme of things.”
“I don’t know, he’s a kid who I think will be very ambitious in life,” Leva says. “He’s like, ‘I want to be on my own picture frames.’ I’m like, ‘All right kid, relax, we’ve got time…'”
And as for whether she and Lamar will add another to their family, Leva’s still not sure.
“We’ve talked about it here and there,” she says. “I know that it can’t be in my body, so it would be a surrogacy. But I’m not sure I’m ready to do that again. It’s hard those first years because there’s a lot of sleepless nights. And it’s like, ‘I’m in my forties. I need my sleep now!’ Especially with all going on with the businesses and the shows. And what my husband doesn’t understand is how much more pressure there is on mom in the beginning. They really require all of your attention.”
“I don’t know,” she ponders. “Maybe if I can back off a little bit and really not be such a helicopter mom. But we both know I’m not going to do that.”
Southern Hospitalityairs Thursdays (9 p.m. ET) on Bravo. All episodes can also be streamed on Peacock.
source: people.com
