Kristin Hensley and Jen Smedley were funny long before they were mothers. The Nebraska natives met while living in California and discovered they had a lot of shared acquaintances back home. They also shared a slightly morbid sense of humor. Not long after they started their families, they got together one evening. As their husbands stepped outside, the two friends looked at each other across the table.
"We just started instantly bawling because we both felt like we were doing a terrible job at motherhood," Hensley says. "And then we started to feel better and to laugh, and we thought, Why don’t people show you this?"
"And the shocking thing is, usually, kids are supposed to be the ultimate career killer," Smedley says. "But they were wrong, because for us it was a huge success."
To say their web series, I Mom So Hard, gets real might be a bit of an understatement. Though there are certainly plenty of women who complain about swimsuits, there are not nearly as many who would try them on for the camera and mock the suits the entire time. Because while these women obviously believe you should never take life or yourself too seriously, I Mom So Hard is all about self-love — as long as it's done with complete irreverence.
"It’s a monster-truck show for women," Hensley says of their national comedy tour. "It’s not, 'Hey, girls, let's get together and talk about our uteruses.' It’s making fun of our uteruses. It feels better to approach it like that. The women are so much fun. We always joke we could just not show up and the women would be like, 'Well, we’re not going home. We have babysitters!'"
Maybe it's their brand of humor, or maybe it's that the moms who flock to see I Mom So Hard are avid watchers of the duo's online videos. Whatever it is, fans feel very
"Women just really start at the middle with us," Smedley says. "So a woman will just come up to you [after one of our performances] and show you her C-section scar or say, 'Look at how long these boobs are!' It’s pretty great. It's like we’re all old friends. There's no kumbaya going on, but there’s definitely a lot of drinking, and the women are all so happy and supportive and holding each other."
I Mom So Hard. 8 p.m. Thursday, January 11, at Hard Rock Live, 1 Seminole Way, Hollywood; 954-797-5531; seminolehardrockhollywood.com. Tickets cost $17.50 to $22.50 via ticketmaster.com.
