Her character Frankie Bergstein in Netflix’s Grace and Frankie may be a wild, yet nurturing mother, but Lily Tomlin isn’t. And she has never wanted to be. She and her wife Jane Wagner have been together for 50 years, and instead of raising children, they’ve spent most of their lives just creating.
Tomlin, a comedian and actress, and Wagner, an experienced screenwriter, have quite the impressive portfolio of professional collaborations, including Tomlin’s one-woman show The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe (which won a Tony) and the movie The Incredible Shrinking Woman.
“We share similar feelings about people and about the world,” Tomlin told People in 1988. “She’s able to verbalize it and I’m able to physicalize it. She writes satirically but tenderly, and she loves farce and black comedy and broad slapstick. When you put all this together and make an audience laugh and be moved, it’s just glorious.”
They got married at a friend’s house in 2013. “It was sweet,” Tomlin told People. “We didn’t have any rings, so I went into our jewelry and was digging out rings. I said, ‘We have to have some kind of rings!’”
Despite their ultimate decision not to have kids, Tomlin has spoken here and there about their reasoning why, even though she’s never owed anyone an explanation.
Motherhood was never an aspiration of hers.
Tomlin has always pursued her goals, and being a mother was never one of them. “I mean, sometimes I think it would be nice to have somebody who looks like a replica of you in some fashion,” the 80-year-old actress told The Guardian in 2015. “But I don’t think it ever was an aspiration of mine.” When The Guardian asked if Wagner felt the same, she answered, “I don’t think so.”
Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner in 2017.
But they once considered making Wagner’s nephew a sperm donor.
“She has a very handsome nephew and we thought, ‘Well, we could get his sperm and I could bear his child,’” she told The Guardian. “I wouldn’t want to, but I could.” In retrospect, she’s glad she didn’t. She said she would “have to get up and fix breakfast for the kids and all that… So in retrospect, we say every day, ‘I’m so glad we didn’t have any children.’ When I think of the world now, I don’t want to even deal with having to raise a child.”
She doesn’t think she has the “behavior” of a good mother.
Tomlin recently went on a hike with comedian Kevin Nealon (wearing a cap that read “Homegirl” and a “Notorious R.G.B” t-shirt) and they made it a video for his YouTube channel. He asked her if she ever wanted kids. She shook her head. “I look at my behavior…” she trailed off. “I’m a virgo, I should be a very good mother.” Then she proceeded to retell the sperm donor story. “I didn’t really think it through,” she said. “It would’ve been terrible if we’d have done it.”
She admitted her lack of desire for kids on The Johnny Carson Show.
In 1973, that was a big deal. Tomlin has often famously recalled the moment later on in life. Vanity Fair once asked her about it, coining it as a feminist comment “before it was considered cool to be a feminist in Hollywood.”
“[Carson] was asking about me not being married, and don’t I want to have children? This was ’73,” Tomlin said. “Females didn’t say that in public then. If you didn’t want to get married or have children, well, that’s off the scale. So the audience just got dead silent, because they were like, ‘What’s she going to say? What’s she going to say?’”
Naturally, she cracked a joke. “And I said what I said, ‘Well, I like children, but I don’t want to bear children. By the way, who has custody of yours?’ And everyone laughed. It diffused the tension in the moment.”
Lily Tomlin (left) and Jane Wagner (right) pose in 1986.
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Kayla Blanton is a freelance writer-editor who covers health, nutrition, and lifestyle topics for various publications including Prevention, Everyday Health, SELF, People, and more. She’s always open to conversations about fueling up with flavorful dishes, busting beauty standards, and finding new, gentle ways to care for our bodies. She earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Ohio University with specializations in women, gender, and sexuality studies and public health, and is a born-and-raised midwesterner living in Cincinnati, Ohio with her husband and two spoiled kitties.
