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Jodie Turner-Smith Breaks Down the ‘Adjustment Period’ of Co-Parenting With Joshua Jackson: ‘Nobody Hands You a Manual’

Jodie Turner-Smith just gave an all-too-real insight into the life of a co-parent, and we can’t help but applaud her vulnerability and honesty. The actress shares 4-year-old daughter Juno with ex-husband Joshua Jackson. Last fall, she filed for divorce, citing “irreconcilable differences,” and a year later, the estranged couple is still working out how to co-parent.

“It’s an adjustment period for anyone when they split up with someone because you’re used to being with your child all the time,” Turner-Smith said. “But nobody hands you a manual.”

While new parents can feel unprepared when they bring a baby home, the transition to co-parenting can be even more jarring. There aren’t necessarily 9 months to get ready. There aren’t as many “how-to” blogs. And, as the Murder Mystery 2 actress said, there’s no manual.

“Everyone’s trying to figure it out,” she continued. “Each parent has a different life, and especially if the reason why you’re splitting up is because you have different lives, it’s only further complicated by how you’re going to co-parent.”

And Jackson and Turner-Smith certainly have different lives at the moment. While Turner-Smith films The Agency in London, Juno is in school in Los Angeles with her dad. Turner-Smith is making frequent trips across the pond, doing her best to not be away from her little girl for more than five days at a time. (Yup, that frequent.)

“This is going to be the thing I look back on and think, ‘Wow, I survived that,’” Turner-Smith told Glamour. “This is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.”

This isn’t her first time doing something hard as a working mother, though. As the lead of Anne Boleyn, which she shot just months after Juno was born in April 2020, she was constantly searching for “f*cking back rooms” to pump breastmilk.

“I was breastfeeding [Juno] every three hours, and then she got sick, getting these respiratory infections,” Turner-Smith said. “We were shooting in these cold, damp castles, and I was in f*cking back rooms pumping. My daughter started getting used to the bottle. She was refusing my breast on the weekends. I was devastated the whole time, thinking my milk was drying up.”

It might be one of the reasons Turner-Smith (and probably most moms out there), called motherhood “literally the most crazy, beautiful, thankless, emotional job in the whole wide world.”

Of course, eyes are also on Turner-Smith as Jackson dates (or perhaps dated) actress Lupita Nyong’o who he hasn’t been seen with in June. Estranged partners starting new relationships is another tricky situation all co-parents have to learn to navigate without a manual.

“He can do whatever he wants,” she said in her diplomatic, seemingly unbothered answer. “Just be good to Juno and be good to Juno’s mum, because I’m going to be Juno’s mum forever.”

And that’s certainly one point that, even without written instructions, is indisputable.

These celebrity exes are getting co-parenting right.

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