Minimal Motherhood with Jamie Lyons
Jamie is a staunch minimalist.
It’s a lifestyle that is exacting and meticulous and one she seems to flow in with ease. Living this way isn’t for the faint of heart, and the birth of Clara could have been its demise, after all babies are known to turn their parents’ world upside down with all the things you have to get for them, the endless amount of gendered do-dads, and not to mention all of the gifts people Shower You with.
We’re going to examine how Jamie has kept the chaos of new motherhood at bay in her relentless pursuit of beauty.
Jamie, her husband Brocke and their daughter Clara live in a pretty unassuming home in south Dallas- that is to say that from the outside, it feels like pulling up to the home of any other family friend in Texas where you pretty much know what to expect- furniture chosen for its function and purchased as a steal, each inhabiting a design niche of its own yet all collectively brown. You might also expect the kitchen tiles to be a shade of tan that doesn’t quite match the granite countertops, or maybe that’s just me. Either way, to cross the threshold into the Lyons’ home is to enter a world where not a detail hasn’t gone without careful consideration.
On my first visit to the house a few years back for a Halloween party where the decorations were at once a mix of gorgeous and ghoulish I’d never even considered possible, a tour of Jamie’s closet became the hit of the evening. With a total of twelve pieces hanging up, all black white or grey, there wasn’t much to see. But that was exactly the draw.
It’s interesting to meet or follow someone with such a curated life and not be able to fathom their life before they became such a meticulous editor. Is being a minimalist a Nature or Nurture thing? Do they come from immaculate upbringings or do they just kind of spawn?
ON HOW SHE BECAME A MINIMALIST:
“ It started with clothes. You know how people like to spring clean all the time and you have a lot of clothes but you don't always like all of them- you keep looking in your closet and you don't have anything to wear. So I said ‘I'll only want to keep stuff that I really like’ and that was where it started.
It began in my closet because I feel like clothes are sort of my main thing, then it bled into everything else. I would just go through the house and get rid of stuff if I didn't really love it and then I didn't have a whole lot left so I would either replace it or add more. But that's essentially he whole mentality.
That’s where I started getting into minimalism.”
When we all found out that there was to be a baby Lyons, my first thought (after the pure delight) was that should be the ultimate test in minimalism. I was reminded of a visit to a different friend’s house ten years before with a different minimalist couple (they were a bohemian minimalist couple, so if you’re trying to imagine their space, picture the Lyons home but replace all instances of brass with macrame and all white furniture with finished oak). They had a newborn and the wife told me that everyone was so excited about the baby, they’d send along every brightly colored, plastic noise machine they’d see in the store. But she’d donate just about every single one of them in order to keep peace in their home and continue to live by their values- the use of imagination, buying used, the intentionality of handcrafted pieces, and fostering curiosity about an adult world that isn’t candy coated for children).
One of the first things I asked Jamie about this when I went to shoot and interview for this story. What does she do with the well meaning gifts that people send Clara (because there’s no way that every gift will cut the mustard in a home with brass trash cans).
WHAT HAPPENS TO WELL-MEANING GIFTS THAT DON’T QUITE BELONG:
“I think it's very sweet to me when I can tell that people really trying to think about something that I would want, like if it's black or if it's white or if I can tell that they really thought that I would love it and so sometimes it really breaks my heart if I don't keep it
I've got the joy of knowing that they tried really hard to pick something out that I would like. Sometimes I tell them no thank you, I'm not going to lie, but then when I don't keep it, I'm like at least I got that and that's kind of the whole point of the gift anyway. But we don't have the space and… I have no problems about not keeping stuff that we don't need or I don't think that we will use. I do donate.”
ON THE CHALLENGE OF STAYING MINIMAL WITH A NEWBORN
“The interesting thing is that you get a lot of people that are like ‘I'll just wait, just wait until you have kids’ or ‘just wait until this or that’ so there was a little bit of me and Brocke having this weight in our minds of how we want to raise her and then wondering like how much if it we’ll just eat later.
I feel like your house doesn't have to be a daycare just because you have a kid and that they can still have stuff and still have fun without it taking over your entire house- it can look like adults still live there. At least that's my hope. Which I feel like it is, I think easier than it sounds because now, obviously, she's not mobile so all of her stuff stays in her room. But when it doesn't, just having bins or any way to just easily shove it in, put it up just so you can't see it- that helps a lot.
So, it’s not that storage can't be in the living room, it just needs to have a spot, which I think is kind of the kicker with minimalism. It’s that you have stuff and it all has a spot. You don't have more than you need or want, but it all has somewhere to go. (Talking to Clara) you are going to learn to put it up. Baskets are great.”
And what about dressing the baby herself? A cursory glance at the children’s section of any clothing store you visit will give you sensory overload. Beyond the traditional blues and pinks that have been stirring up their own bit of heated debate, there are the other horrors. The tees with lions stitched onto them like a home sewing project. The girl’s shirts with tutus attached at the seam. The shirts for bands long past their hayday that serve to let the world know that the parents once had cool taste. The cutesy disposable graphic tees. The coordinating pajama sets that you just know almost drobe someone to quit their design job at HQ. And, of course, the watered down Instagram trends packaged for the cool kids on the playground. (A visit from some children’s designers in fashion school and working in mass market retail have put a bad taste in my mouth. Can you tell?)
You’ve got to have a strategy to find clothes that aren’t presumptuous, carry no implicit gendered conditioning and are easy on the eyes. And cutting through that noise is no small feat.
ON HOW SHE SHOPPED FOR A MINIMALIST BABY WARDROBE
“We always knew that we wanted a lot of neutrals so it was really easy to shop specifically for a baby, cause if it's a girl, I'll throw on some dresses and stuff, but she'll still wear onesies so for a while H&M had black onesies, which I used to buy for everybody. That was like my go to baby gift and then they stopped carrying them. We would go in every single time to check to see if they have black onesies and they did not have them since. And so I was like how are we going to dress our children? But we discoveredprimary.comwhich is a website that just has a bunch of basics in like solid colors. They do have a stripe and a dot but they also have a lot of bright colors. But they have gray, black, white and I was like, oh my goodness. And put me back into the business of giving people [those onesies]. I’m really pleased that I found them for myself. It was a close call.”
HOW TO FIND MINIMAL BRANDS
“A lot of it was on Instagram. I kind of started following other moms and I was like what kind of things are they buying? Or sometimes I would just do specific searches like when I found the pacifier I was like ‘there's got to be a black leather pacifier clip somewhere’ and I would put in a search for that. So I cultivated kind of a list of brands that I think are super cool and some of them she can't wear yet cause they start at a year or they're for older kids I felt like Instagram has been really good for that because people always post what their kids are wearing so I noted that. I have a whole file of just cool kid stuff.”
A BIT OF COURSE CORRECTING
“The thing I waited way too long to buy was a pacifier. I felt like when I got one I needed to issue a thank you to everybody who's picked up Claire Pacifier, she would just throw it on the ground and I wish I would have started with that.
We did start with this thing, which I love, it’s the Snuggle Me. It's very similar to a Dock a Tot, if you're familiar with that. It's apparently this big contention in the mom world-are you a Snuggle Me or are you a Dock A Tot? If you are into one of these sorts of infant loungers and the Dock A Tot says Dock A Tot real big on the side so that was a no. And this one hugs the baby a little more and the Dock A Tot just kind of contains the baby. So that's apparently that was to soothe their startle reflex when they're a newborn.
So if I hadn't had this, I would've wanted this. The bassinet that we got her, I thought she was going to sleep in and she does not. We put her in there and she felt too far and I could tell she didn’t like it and we didn't like it either.
I keep it in the kitchen, which sounds weird but it’s like if I go to dishes or make food, I just put her in that. So I ended up finding a use for it for awhile then I was like, I don't know if I really needed this bassinet.”
On The Environmental Impact of Waste & Diaper Solutions
“So for diapers, we use a brand called Dyper, d, y, p, e r, and they are standard diapers and they don't have any prints on them, which is very hard to find. So I love them for that. Also because currently regular diapers take 500 years to biodegrade. So my own baby diapers are still in only 75 days somewhere, so when I heard that statistic I was like well that's disturbing. I was like, I heard 500 years and then kind of made the distinction in my baby diapers were still only half.
I'm 33 and that’s not even close. They're going to be there way past all of us. So the bamboo diapers, I'm like diaper biodegrading 75 days. So she has had diapers that are already gone. So I love them for that. And because they are just plain and they show up at our door, they're on like an algorithm. So they just kind of adjust to what diaper usage you should be going through. You don't really have to do anything. I guess. You're just like this is how old my baby is, this is how much she weighs. And then their algorithm just ships you diapers every month. “
Activities With Style
“We are in the process of learning French and so Clara hears some of it, like when we do our lessons and stuff, we're doing Duolingo right now. So she’ll hear that and then stuff I say to her often I will try also learn in French. I will look up and see what it is, like we would call her nugget. So I looked it up and it’s pépite or we’ll say bonjour for hello.
I would like her to be able to grow up learning two languages and then we were like, well she can't learn a language if we don't know it because hey, we can't teach it and we can't speak at her and then she can talk back to us in another language. We won't even know.”
We go to the DMA a lot, which I feel like this maybe like enriches her osmosis, just to be around art and they have such cute kids areas, but I feel like she’ll be quite awhile before she's old enough before she’s old enough to take advantage of that. And then I'm looking into different subscriptions that I think is kind of a cool thing. Like there's one called Montikids, which is like a Montessori subscription. So you get a new box every three months and kind of instructions on how to introduce it. And there's one called Lovevery that's similar but I'm kind of trying to weigh the pros and cons of that because then they just ship you a whole bunch stuff and I want to make sure it's all stuff that we really want.