Jennifer Siebel Newsom was not always sure she wanted to be a mom.
Her acting career took her to Hollywood, where she watched how the media exploited the likes of Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan. The City’s first lady worried about bringing children into a world in which gender roles based on “hypersexualized values” begin to seep into the subconscious through cartoons and toys.
But despite these misgivings, Siebel Newsom was pregnant with a baby girl only a few months after her marriage to Mayor Gavin Newsom — and she’s thrilled about it.
At 4½ months pregnant, the strikingly slender, athletic and famously fashionable blonde is showing the slightest hint of a baby bump and seems at ease with impending motherhood and the challenges that Newsom and she will face raising a daughter as they juggle busy lives.
In addition to her duties as San Francisco’s first lady, her acting career, and directing and producing documentaries, Siebel Newsom is an advocate for women’s issues.
And whether it’s considering her pregnancy, the possibility of future children or hopes for her daughter, it’s clear she’s seeing it all through a lens of gender roles and equity.
As for what she expects from her own child, she said if she had a boy — which Siebel Newsom believed she would until her doctor confirmed otherwise — “he was going to be a feminist.”
Now that she knows it’s a girl, she jokingly said her daughter will be a tomboy, but “lord knows, she might want to be a rock star or something.”
Siebel Newsom herself is an athlete, having played soccer, basketball and tennis, along with riding horseback competitively. She hopes sports will also be central to her daughter’s childhood, in part because she believes they can help postpone “those typical teen body-image catastrophic years” until “you’re a little bit older and you can cope.”
So far, she said, pregnancy has brought on a wealth of new experiences, not all of them easy, from insomnia to clogged ears to a love of Häagen-Dazs bars — not that eating ice cream is anything new for her, she said.
“Oh, I ate it all along,” she said, when asked if pregnancy has given her permission to pig out. “My husband teases me because I brought ice cream into his diet, and pizza in spades. And this was before I was pregnant.”
She expects her husband to be “an adorable dad.” The couple grew up with similar values — sports, responsibility, an interest in civic life — so Siebel Newsom believes their parenting styles will be well-matched.
Some aspects, however, have yet to be worked out.
“We tease each other,” she said, laughing. “He’s always like, ‘I’m not going to be the bad guy.’ And I’m always like, ‘Well I’m not going to be the bad guy.’ That part will work out.”
One value that Siebel Newsom is clear about trying to impart on her child is that it’s all right to make mistakes. She grew up in Marin County with her parents — investment manager Ken Siebel and full-time mom Judy — and said sometimes as a child she felt that making mistakes “was the end of the world.”
She still makes mistakes, and reminds her husband that it is OK.
“I tell my husband all the time, ‘I’m going to say something stupid, and either City Hall or your campaign are going to be frustrated with me,’” Siebel Newsom said. “But, really, I’m human, and it’s not the end of the world. And there’s going to be another headline the next day. And if people are so fixated on being perfect, what a boring world.”
Asked what she thinks it will be like to raise a family in the public eye — one that will undoubtedly grow if Newsom is successful in his run for governor — she cocked her head and paused.
“Interesting,” she said. “But you know what? Nowadays, with Facebook and YouTube and all this weird stuff, everybody’s in the public eye, right?”
Siebel Newsom plans to put her acting career on hold until after the baby is born, but she’s trying to finish a rough cut of her current film before her September due date. It’s a documentary with the working title “Miss Representation,” and focuses on gender paradigms and how to change them.
Between that project, fulfilling her duties as San Francisco first lady and helping out as much as possible on Newsom’s gubernatorial campaign, decorating a nursery “will not be a priority. But, I figure she won’t really notice.”
As it stands, the couple is still living in the mayor’s one-bedroom apartment. Though they have put it on the market and are considering moving, she’s not sure if that will happen before the baby is born.
“As my mom said, when she and my father had my older sister Stacey, Stacey was in a closet,” she said. “Sorry, that may not sound like a nice thing to do, but you know, at the end of the day, a lot of people in apartments don’t have extra bedrooms, and they just cope with the situation.”
Also still to be sorted out is exactly how many children the couple will have, and whether they will have them naturally or adopt.
“If my husband could have his way he’d have like 20,” Siebel Newsom said.
Do they plan to have more?
“Yeah, definitely, I think so,” she said. “But I’m open to adopting, so we’ll see.”
But one thing’s for sure, and that’s the baby’s name, Siebel Newsom said. Despite repeated prodding, however, she refused to give it up.
“I’m keeping that secret,” she said. “I’m so excited.”
Impending motherhood lends perspective
Now that Jennifer Siebel Newsom is looking motherhood in the eye, she’s developing a more profound respect for her own mother.
“My mother is incredible,” she said. “She gave up everything for us, and I admire that.”
Siebel Newsom has nothing but praise for mom Judy Siebel, the woman who devoted her life to raising her five daughters. She’s adamant that her mother will play a big role in her granddaughter’s life.
Siebel will become a grandmother for the first time in June, when Siebel Newsom’s younger sister gives birth. Three months later, in September, she’ll have a second granddaughter, when the San Francisco first family’s child is born.
Siebel Newsom said she never really knew her own grandparents, but she hopes her child will have a very different experience.
“My husband likes to tease my mom and tell her we’ll be dropping off the kids — the kid or kids — all the time,” she said.
Though Siebel Newsom admits her relationship with her mother has had its conflicts — for which she blamed her own tendency to be “difficult at times” — as she’s grown older, she’s increasingly found inspiration in her mother.
She described her mother as having been raised in a strict and traditional household where she was not always encouraged to pursue a career.
After marrying Ken Siebel, Judy Siebel devoted herself to raising five children and supporting her husband in his business ventures. She pursued her own interests through volunteer work, becoming the force behind the Children’s Discovery Museum in Sausalito, among other projects. She currently sits on the board of the California Academy of Sciences.
“She juggles a lot, and is always there for all of us and for my dad. So I’d like to be able to do what she does and still have a career,” Siebel Newsom said. “I’ll definitely be asking her for a lot of advice.”
— Katie Worth
Jennifer Siebel Newsom
Age: 34
Born: San Francisco
Raised: Ross (Marin County)
Occupation: Actor, film producer
Married: Gavin Newsom in a lavish Africa-themed wedding in Montana last summer
Parents: Ken Siebel, entrepreneur and investment manager, and Judy Siebel, co-founder of Children’s Discovery Museum of Sausalito
Schooling: Stanford University, Stanford Business School, American Conservatory Theater
Production company: Girls Club Entertainment; currently directing documentary film “Miss Representation” (working title)
Languages: Fluent Spanish, conversational French
Sports: Soccer, basketball, tennis, horseback riding, skiing, skating and blading, ice skating, martial arts
Favorite movie: “Out of Africa”
Favorite actor: Meryl Streep
Favorite pregnancy book to date: “The Girlfriend’s Guide to Pregnancy”
Favorite restaurant in The City: Rose’s Cafe
Biggest pet peeve: Her own tardiness
Typical hours of sleep a night: Lately, not many
Guilty pleasure: Häagen-Dazs ice cream bars
Acting résumé
Movies: “The Valley of Elah,” “Tales of an Ancient Empire,” “Trouble with Romance,” “April Fool’s Day,” “Zen Noir”
TV: “Trauma,” “Life,” “Mad Men,” “NUMB3RS,” “Strong Medicine,” “Presidio Med,” “Days of Our Lives,” “She Spies”
