Emily Smith, a 37-year-old stay-at-home mother of four from the St. Louis area, says her family once had just $200 to spend on groceries for six people, relied on food stamps and struggled to keep a roof over their heads. Today, she says her adult-content business brought in more than $1 million last year.
Smith is one of six St. Louis-area couples featured on TLC’s new reality series “Double Lives of Suburban Wives,” which follows women balancing conventional suburban family life with unconventional careers they keep largely hidden from the outside world.
Smith told Fox News Digital that the moment her family’s finances truly changed was when a single month brought in $100,000.
“I think staying in the 100K a month that’s the moment we were like, ‘Well, holy moly,'” Smith said. “Who would’ve ever expected something like that to happen? Not us, for sure.”
She said the business is unpredictable by nature, with income that typically rises and falls sharply from month to month.
“You had that really good month… And it doesn’t last. It tapers down, it tapers down and then — this world of content creating is very roller-coaster-y,” Smith said.
But one particular month never tapered off.
“There was a month that really, really hit, and then it never went down and hasn’t gone down, and we’re like, ‘Oh, oh my God,'” she said.
Unusual requests, and a niche of her own
Smith described her work as “kinky weird adult content,” including requests for wedgies, fart content, and videos built around a fetish involving giants. One of her strangest requests, she said, came with a $2,000 price tag for a video in which she was paid to “lay an egg.”
“I love to make people’s fantasies come true — if I can do it, I will do it,” she said.
At just 5 feet, 1 inch tall, Smith said the “giant” videos hold particular appeal for her.
“For me, I think the giant videos are really fun,” she said. “So those have an extra little sense of intrigue for me, because I’ve never been tall, never will be tall.”
Two worlds, one household
At home, Smith says she is a typical suburban mom — cooking, cleaning, cutting her kids’ hair and sitting down for family dinner every night. The Smiths have four children, sons ages 17, 15 and 12, and an 8-year-old daughter, along with six cats and a dog.
Once the school day starts, though, her second job takes over.
“It’s very much like a light switch,” she said. “As soon as the kids leave, you put on your little business hat, and you just get out your notebook and your pen, your iPad and your other phones, and you got to start typing up right away.”
Her husband, Nathan, a former pharmaceutical company store manager, eventually left his nine-to-five job to help run the business full time, handling marketing and other operations. He also runs his own business involving snakes — the couple keeps 23 of them, including rare reticulated pythons.
Nathan has said the couple turned to adult-content creation because they were struggling financially. Smith recalled trying to stretch a $200 grocery budget to feed six people during a period when the family relied on food stamps and lacked stable housing. A friend already working in the industry gave them the idea, and Nathan eventually reached out to explore it.
Smith said the work has also been a personal turning point, helping her reconnect with a part of her identity she had set aside while focused on raising her children.
New episodes of “Double Lives of Suburban Wives” air Sundays at 10 p.m. ET/PT on TLC.
