Rihanna is officially a new mom.
The pop star gave birth to a baby boy on May 13 in Los Angeles, TMZ reports. The infant is her first child with ASAP Rocky.
The couple first announced the happy news that they were expecting back in January with a series of paparazzi photos taken in the snowy streets of Harlem, the New York City neighborhood where Rocky was born and raised. In the images, Rihanna’s pregnant belly peeks out from behind a pink, partially-unbuttoned Chanel Fall 1996 coat as the pair hold hands and the rapper lovingly plants a kiss on his girlfriend’s forehead.
Those photos set the precedent for the singer’s pregnancy style as, since then, she’s gone on to wear a wide array of daring, bump-baring outfits. She told People at a Fenty Beauty event in Los Angeles that getting dressed up and putting on makeup were two of the only things that made her feel like a real person again. “When you put on a little face and a little lipstick, you transform,” she explained. “You put some clothes on, and it’s like, when you look good, you feel good. I’ve heard that for a very long time, but it’s true. It really can get you up off that couch and make you feel like a bad bitch.”
Rihanna was also already thinking about the type of mother she wanted to be ahead of her baby’s arrival, admitting that she plans on taking her parenting cues from Real Housewives of New Jersey star Teresa Giudice. “Teresa from Jersey does not play about her kids. She will flatten you about those kids,” the diehard Bravo fan explained in an interview with Elle. “And that resonates with me a lot because I feel like that’s the type of mom I’m going to be—psycho about it.” She went on to joke that she’s actually going to be “worse” than the reality star to the point where, “You talk about my kids, it’s over.”
And thankfully, the Grammy winner also has a great partner to help her raise her child. In an interview with Vogue for the magazine’s May 2022 cover, Rihanna gushed over Rocky, revealing that after spending the pandemic quarantined together, “He became my family in that time.” She went on to explain that she knew he was really the one when she took him home to Barbados for the holidays. “It was us who were going home,” she said. “We were going home.” And while her mom is typically difficult to impress, she took to the rapper right away. She continued, “My mother has a really good read on people. She observes first and then she’ll move slowly. I guess I’m like that too. There are some guys that I’ve dated that she won’t even look at to this day. But she was charmed by him from the jump.” She concluded, “I always thought it would be marriage first, then a baby, but who the fuck says it has to be that way. I’m certainly not gonna let that get in the way of me being a mom.”
