January Jones doesn’t regret becoming a single mom at age 33.
“I don’t believe in regret. I just try to be a better person. Try to be a better mom,” the 38-year-old actress says in Red‘s February issue, on newsstands Tuesday. “But I think even missteps are done for a reason. I have déjà vu a lot and someone once told me that when you feel déjà vu a lot, it’s because you are living your life the way it should be lived. And so I feel—even if it’s been a mistake—it has led me to where I am now. So, no: I don’t believe in regretting anything.”
January welcomed her son Xander Jones in September 2011. For personal reasons, the actress has never publicly revealed his paternity. “My younger sisters and my mom and my doula were in the room; my brother-in-law and my dad were next door. I only wanted women with me. Female energy,” she says. “It was a 30-hour process but it was awesome. I’d love to do it again.”
That’s not to say being a single parent is easy, of course. “I don’t want to be bad cop, but to have his respect, I have to be both. I’m an emotionally immature person—I’m an actor for God’s sake. I see myself behaving like a child all the time,” she admits. For example, she says, “This morning, I made Xander eggs, toast, a smoothie. He spat out his blueberries, threw the eggs into the sink, was playing with his toast, and I just lost my shit. And I took the plate and threw it in the garbage, in tears. Someone needs to be the mature one here, but I had a full tantrum.”
In those moments, January sometimes wishes she had help.
“Maybe I should get a manny,” she muses.
As it stands, Xander already has plenty of positive male role models. “Xander has a lot of bro time with the neighbor dads and my dad, who is super young. It’s good to have strong women around a man to teach him to respect women. He doesn’t have a male person saying ‘don’t cry’ or ‘you throw like a girl,'” the actress explains. “All those s–tty things that dads accidentally do.”
Most of the time, she adds, “I just don’t feel I need a partner.”
“Do I want one? Maybe. But I don’t feel unhappy or lonely,” says the Last Man on Earth star, who was last linked to Will Forte. “It would have to be someone so amazing that I would want to make room. Someone who would contribute to my happiness and not take away from it.”
Besides, she says: Dating is overrated. “After I had Xander, I went on a couple of dates and I was like, ‘I’d rather be at home sleeping, watching TV or hanging out with my kid.’ People want to set me up all the time and I’m like, ‘No way.’ If I meet someone and we go out, fine, but I’m not going to go look,” January tells Red. “The moment I see someone who I think is cute, I Google him and, oh, he’s 25, and I’m thinking, ‘What is my problem?!’ I want a manly man in flannel, with a beard and an axe. But then there’s always something wrong. Like he’s a Republican.”
