A podcast. Reality show. Countless headlines about her love life. Underneath it all, Kristin Cavallari is a 'very normal' mom.

Kristin Cavallari wants you to know that her new show is “100% real. This is the realest show I’ve ever done,” she tells me over Zoom. That show — Honestly Cavallari: The Headline Tour on E! — marks Cavallari's return to reality TV for the first time in five years.

Those five years have been busy. Cavallari, 38, got divorced from football star Jay Cutler, 42. in 2022 after announcing their separation in 2020. She’s parented the three children — Camden, Jaxon and Saylor — they share. She also launched her podcast, Let’s Be Honest with Kristin Cavallari, which has continually rocketed to the top of the podcast charts. Earlier this spring, Cavallari embarked on a four-city podcast tour and invited TV cameras along for the ride. Honestly Cavallari: The Headline Tour is the result.

Listening to Let's Be Honest, it seems like nothing is off-limits for Cavallari, who first rose to fame appearing on the MTV reality shows Laguna Beach and The Hills. There is one topic she shies away from, however. “The only thing that I’ve really set a boundary around is my ex-husband,” she says of Cutler. “That’s the only thing. I feel like everything else, I’ve been an open book — probably too much of one.”

Speaking of boundaries, the mom of three used to have a strict one around her kids. Until recently, she never showed their faces on social media and they weren’t featured on her previous reality show, Very Cavallari. But that’s all changed. Now her kids grace her Instagram posts, have joined her podcast and even appear in Honestly Cavallari. Why the change?

“The whole [point] was to let them make that decision when they were old enough," she explains. "And so they are that age.” (Camden is 12; Jaxon is 11; daughter Saylor is 9.) “It’s been nice for me to be able to share that part of my life with people just because my kids are the biggest part of my life,” she adds. Her kids have been asking her to post them “for years," Cavallari says; her eldest son even asks her to tag him in content. “I’m like, I’m not tagging you,” she laughs. “But they love it.” Though her sons have social media accounts, she says she keeps an eye on who they’re following and what they’re doing online.

Cavallari is no stranger to being headline news, but if it were up to her, those headlines would have less to do with the men she’s supposedly dating. “I can’t control what the media writes,” she says. “But I’m talking about a lot of stuff other than men [on my podcast] and that seems to be the only area that they want to focus on.” Though her relationships have been tabloid fodder for over 20 years, she still gets frustrated by it. “It does piss me off,” she says. “I have a lot more going on in my life.”

In fact, Cavallari tells me she hasn’t even gone on one date this year (though in the first episode of Honestly Cavallari, she and her best friend laugh about her night out with actor Glen Powell). And her most recent relationship, with 25-year-old Mark Estes, generated lots of interest.

“I got a lot of hate and I got a lot of praise,” she says of the age-gap relationship. “Guys do it all the time. But when I do it, everyone’s like, Oh my god. Mark was really sweet and we had a very sweet, innocent relationship, and it honestly just worked really well for me at the time. I don’t regret that at all.”

Dating just isn’t a priority right now; between work and mom life, Cavallari doesn’t have the bandwidth. "I’m just maxed out in every capacity,” she says. But she does mention that her kids are with her ex-husband every other weekend. How does she use that time? “Just being at my house without a to-do list really excites me," she says. "I might take my dogs for a walk. I’ll probably go to the grocery store.”

She looks at her life as being organized in buckets. “There’s my family bucket and my work bucket and a tiny social bucket." She's got a "great work-life balance right now," she adds. "Uncommon James [her jewelry and beauty brand] and the podcast fit very well into my life while they’re at school. I hope to just maintain that. I just want to keep things as they are.” But when she does get back into the dating world, she knows what her main ick is. “When someone has zero accountability,” she says. “I’m like, I can’t go down this road with you.”

In the first episode of Honestly Cavallari: The Headline Tour, the cameras follow the star as she takes care of her kids, makes them dinner and gets ready for her podcast tour. Of her divorce, she tells the cameras, “I think deep down I knew” that it was coming. But she's staying positive. “Divorce can be a really good thing,” she continues, and as a single mom, motherhood is her priority. “I never really felt like I was No. 1 with my parents, so that was always a big deal for me — to make sure my kids know they’re a priority.”

People would be surprised to see just how ordinary her everyday life is, she tells me. “I am very normal. I’m at all of the basketball games. I'm on the field trips,” she says. “I’m basically an Uber driver for my kids.”

Her identity as a mom leans more toward the fun side. “Maybe I could have a few more rules,” she laughs. “I mean, there are rules, there are boundaries. But for me, it’s like, if you’re a good person and you’re not hurting anyone and you’re treating people kindly, I think that’s more important than 'you have to go to bed at 9 p.m. every night.'” Of her three kids, she says, Jaxon, is the one who keeps her “on her toes.”

Cavallari has never been shy about ... well, most things, including talking about how her previous stints on reality TV have been less than authentic. "This was the only show I've done where they didn't jump in every five minutes to tell me what to say," she says of Honestly Cavallari: “So it was a really enjoyable experience. And I'm happy I did it because I can finally say this show is 100% real.”

Though it’s the headline tour, she wants to take fans beyond the headlines — the ones about her love life, her sassy teen queen image, etc. If that was all you saw of her, she would understand if you didn’t like her. “I would hate me too, I think,” she says.