Miley Cyrus will proudly admit she’s a mama’s girl —but when it comes to her own life, she has little desire to become a mother herself.
“It’s not something I’m focused on. For being such an opinionated, sure person, this is an element in my life that I’ve never been super attached to a yes or no answer,” Cyrus, 32, told The New York Times in a far-ranging interview published on Saturday, May 31.
“I was talking to my stepdad [Dominic Purcell], and he said, ‘Why are you the only celebrity without a makeup line?’ And I said, ‘’Cause I’m not passionate about it.’ And he said, ‘That’s the right answer.’ I feel that way about motherhood. It’s just never been something that I’ve been overly passionate about,” she continued, pointing out her strong bond with her own mom, Tish Cyrus. “It’s a lot of responsibility and devotion and energy, and if you’re not passionate about that, I don’t know how you do sleepless nights and 18 years of what my mom dealt with. And when I say 18 years, I mean 33, ’cause I’m still a baby. So I’ve never felt the burn, you know? And I think for me, the burn is everything.”
Miley has shared her thoughts on motherhood before, telling W Magazine in June 2024, “I’m 31 now, and I still don’t know if I want kids or not. I feel like my fans kind of are my kids in some way. I’ve heard Dolly [Parton] say that too, because she didn’t have kids.”
Parton, 79, is Miley’s godmother, whom she told NYT she admires for “staying true to herself.”
“You see the celebrities that don’t have joy in their life. She’s someone who obviously had a superprivate relationship and a private life, and it was just something I always admired,” Miley said. “More than the way that she looks or the way that she performs, I admired her staying true to herself and being at home with her husband, Carl [Dean], who she just lost, and having a real life and having a lot of love in it.”
Miley, who was briefly married to Liam Hemsworth after a long on-off relationship, is currently dating musician Maxx Morando. She admitted, however, that despite being a full-blown adult, she still feels overly attached to her mother — so much so that now that Tish, 58, isn’t on the road with her anymore she feels a loss of “safety.”
“My mom no longer travels with me, because I’m 33 years old, and it was getting ridiculous,” she said. “I never want to detach from my mom, because we’re so close. I’ll get tears in my eyes even talking about her. But if nature plays its course in the way that it does, I will be an individual without my mom at some point, and that used to completely paralyze me. So I guess the reason I said ‘I mother me’ is because I don’t have my mom with me the way that I used to. And now I just go, ‘What was it about her that made everything better?’ It was safety, because I knew any situation that I didn’t feel safe in, my mom would get me out of it or make it better. And so now I just imagine what soothed me about her, and then I do it for myself.”
The Grammy winner also discussed how her song “End of the World” is about a “completely ridiculous” time when she and Tish were separated.
“She went on a vacation to Italy without me for one week, and it felt like the end of the world to both of us,” Miley admitted. “That’s what it’s about. I had never had my mom leave the country without me before. I’m too old to feel that way, but that’s how I felt. And my mom called me and said: ‘I don’t know why, but I want to cry today. I’m looking out my window, and there’s nothing out there for me, because you’re back home.’ The first lyric is, ‘Today you woke up and you told me that you wanted to cry,’ and that was my mom.”
Further in the interview, Miley gave insight into her relationship with her father, Billy Ray Cyrus, whom Tish was married to from 1993 to 2022. (They share children Miley, Braison, 30, and Noah, 25. Billy Ray, 63, also adopted Tish’s two eldest children from a previous relationship, Brandi, 38, and Trace, 36, and is father to son Christopher, 33, whom he shares with Kristin Luckey.)
“As I’ve gotten older, I’m respecting my parents as individuals instead of as parents — because my mom’s really loved my dad for her whole life, and I think being married to someone in the music industry and not being a part of it is obviously really hard. And so I think I took on some of my mom’s hurt as my own because it hurt her more than it hurt me as an adult, and so I owned a lot of her pain,” she explained. “But now that my mom is so in love with my stepdad, who I completely adore, and now that my dad, I see him finding happiness [with Elizabeth Hurley], too — I can love them both as individuals instead of as a parental pairing.”
She added: “I’m being an adult about it. At first it’s hard, because the little kid in you reacts before the adult in you can go, ‘Yes, that’s your dad, but that’s just another person that deserves to be in his bliss and to be happy.’ My child self has caught up.”
