Over a glass of wine with the video camera on record, comedians and longtime friends Kristin Hensley and Jen Smedley went on an unscripted rant about their fears, failures and frustrations as newish moms.
Ten years later, the #IMOMSOHARD besties have even more to say on the topic.
Their kids — each has two — are now in middle school.
“I like to compare it to Middle Earth from ‘The Hobbit,’ where everybody's really stinky, their teeth are weird, huge feet, hot to hot tempers,” Smedley said. “It's a lot. It's a lot that we're dealing with.”
“We’re in the thick of it,” Hensley added in a conference call last week with Smedley; Hensley was at home with a barking dog in the background while Smedley was sitting in the parking lot of her son’s school. “We've got tweens. We've got teens. We've got aging parents. We've got perimenopause and menopause.”
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All will be fodder for the #IMOMSOHARD “The Crashing Out Tour” pulling into Fox Tucson Theatre on Friday, Nov. 13.
“We talk about all the crap that we're dealing with with the kids, but it's all in the spirit of like, ‘We got this’,” Hensley said. “It's hilarious.”
Since that first video posted in 2016 to Facebook when their kids were barely out of toddlerhood — it went viral with 5 million views — the longtime friends have found solace and sisterhood in sharing their motherhood successes and failures with an audience of mothers — and fathers.
“We try to get each other to laugh about the stuff so that we don't cry about it, and that's what we bring to the stage in these live shows,” Smedley said. “Because women, their heads are always down, focused on the kids, the family, work, getting stuff done, and they need a little break to hear like, oh, they're not alone in this craziness that they're dealing with. We're all dealing with the same thing. Let's laugh about it.”
“The Crashing Out Tour” comes on the heels of the Oct. 20 release of their third book, “The Middle School Moms Survival Guide,” a follow-up to the 2019 New York Times bestselling debut “#IMOMSOHARD” and their 2021 children’s book “The Meanest of Meanies.”
#IMOMSOHARD duo, from left, Kristin Hensley and Jen Smedley, brng their tales of middle school motherhood to Fox Tucson Theatre on Friday, Nov. 13.
Not long after Smedley and Hensley struck social media gold with their viral videos, the pair took the show on the road.
“The decision to go on a tour came almost immediately after I think two or three videos,” Hensley said. “We were just so excited to see all of these comments from women. And both Jen and I had had a long history of performance, and we loved performing together. We were like, we've got to make a live show so that we can go see these women in real life.”
In 2017, #IMOMSOHARD brought the kids along for their “Summer Break Tour.”
“We got a tour bus .. and it was Jen and my face on the side of it like we were Beyoncé,” Hensley said. “But on the inside it was just an absolute hellhole. We brought our kids and we brought my mom and we brought Jen's sister-in-law, and we brought a tour manager, and we went on the road probably all over the country for about four weeks, and our kids were in heaven,” Hensley said.
The pair introduced themselves to Tucson with 2019’s “Mom’s Night Out Round 2 Tour” that played the AVA at Casino del Sol. Their last show here was at the Fox in 2023.
Friday’s show will include the pair trading stories about their middle school kids and navigating sticky situations.
Like the time recently when Hensley’s son beat her in a sex ed quiz.
“Every time I have to learn about reproduction, I'm like, ‘Oh, I do have that’,” she said. “We're in that phase where bodies are changing, things are happening, and luckily there is content out there now that's helping parents talk about those things with their kids. And every time I watch one, I'm like, ‘Huh’.”
Smedley and Hensley are also reviving the Q&A segment that they haven’t done in a few years and will do their popular bag search segment, in which they snag a bag or two from audience members to unpack on stage.
What they unpack ranges from the truly bizarre to the truly embarrassing, from underwear and bikinis to marijuana in all its forms, from edibles to joints.
“One of our favorites was a woman who smuggled rum in her breastfeeding bags,” Smedley said
Another woman at a casino show had $8,000 in a used plastic baggie.
If only she had enough money to buy a bag for all that cash, Hensley mused from the stage.
At the end of the night, the fan gave the duo a $100 tip “to go play the slots,” Hensley said.
“Jen, who plays penny slots, was literally in heaven and was in front of a slot machine for like three days,” she said.
The #IMOMSOHARD duo goes on stage at the Fox Tucson Theatre, 17 W. Congress St., at 7:30 p.m. Friday. Tickets are $24-$67 through foxtucson.com.
Contact reporter Cathalena E. Burch at cburch@tucson.com. On Bluesky @Starburch
Cathalena E. Burch
Reporter
