Jennifer Lopez: I have been crying for two months

Jennifer Lopez was photographed in Rome with her 18-year-old twins, Max and Emme, on a trip that lands just before the fall separates the two of them for the first time. The singer turned 57 on July 24 and arrived in Italy a week later.

The family toured the Colosseum. They walked the city and ate gelato, and Lopez was seen shopping on Via Condotti with heavy security in tow. The twins are from her marriage to singer Marc Anthony.

Five applications, five acceptances

Max and Emme finished high school this year. They applied to five schools and not one of them said no.

They got into all five colleges they applied to. They both got scholarships

Lopez said in an interview with Extra. In the same conversation she explained why that number meant more to her than it looks on paper.

I am so proud that they set goals for themselves

Behind the line about scholarships sits something the singer has talked about for years. Both of her children have a diagnosis that made school harder for them than it was for their classmates.

They have ADHD, so they have to learn differently and there were struggles

Lopez told Extra. She was not talking about grades so much as about how those grades were earned, at a different pace, through a different method, over a stretch she called a struggle.

Why is this trip different from the others?

Because the twins split up in the fall. They are heading to different universities, in different cities, into separate rooms, for the first time since the day they were born. Rome was a handful of days together before that happens, and the singer is not pretending the date is not circled.

I have been crying for two months

Lopez said on Jimmy Kimmel’s show. The arithmetic is simple enough: two months back puts the start of it right around the time the acceptance letters arrived.

From a Miami stage to a dorm room

Audiences first saw Emme on a stage that size in 2020, singing alongside her mother during the Super Bowl halftime show in Miami. She was eleven at the time, and the segment ran a few minutes in front of one of the largest television audiences in the world.

The twins were born on February 22, 2008, during the marriage Lopez entered with Marc Anthony in June 2004. The couple split in 2011, and since then the children have surfaced mostly through short Instagram posts and the occasional sentence in an interview, with no school names attached and no classroom photos.

That is what makes the Rome pictures read differently from the usual holiday paparazzi run. There are no two kids trailing behind their mother in them. There are two adults who are guests on the trip in the same way she is.

What happens next

The American academic year starts in late August and runs into September depending on the university. That leaves Lopez a few weeks before the moment she has been describing for months.

She has stayed working through all of it. Performances, shoots and promotion continued on schedule, and Rome was the pause she described as the last chance to have everyone in one place before the calendar decides for them.

What comes through in all of it is how consistent Lopez has been in public about her children. She does not talk about fame and she does not talk about legacy. She talks about goals they set themselves and about learning that did not come easily. She said the same thing when the twins were in grade school, and nothing in that tone changed once the scholarships showed up.