LOTTIE Tomlinson was seen wiping away tears as she opened up about losing her mum, and how her brother Louis really “stepped up” in a fatherly role.
The two siblings “grew closer” after their beloved mother Johannah Deakin’s death in 2016, aged 43.
Lottie was just 18-years-old when her mother died from leukaemia.
Speaking to her brother’s girlfriend Zara McDermott on her Feel Good Formula podcast with Boots, mum-of-two Lottie, who shares her kids with Lewis Burton, said: “‘It’s really hard having your own kids without your mum.”
Beginning to well up, she said: “(I’m) Not gonna get upset. Literally said to myself, ‘Don’t cry’.
“But yeah, I think my sisters have been a big one, we’ve all sort of come together and tried to look after each other and it makes me feel closer to her in a way because obviously I know how much being a mum meant to her.
“And it means so much to us, I think, because of how she brought us up with being so maternal and I think that’s why we all are how we are because of her but yeah, it’s hard.”
Speaking about how her big brother Louis really stepped up, she added how he took her on tour with him, and supported her.
“I appreciate now that he even let me come on the tour,” Lottie said.
“But it was actually really nice in the end because he sort of stepped into a real fatherly role on that tour, and he didn’t let me get away with anything.
“I think it gave us a really strong bond that you sort of can’t explain because we went through that together.
“We’re so close now, and I think it is because of those few years. Me being there with him, I think in the end he liked having me there for the support.
“And he was sort of fathering me a bit, but I was almost mothering him a bit as well. So I would pull him up on stuff if he was acting a certain way and it sort of worked both ways, which was nice.”
Lottie’s late mother Johannah had seven children, including Louis and Lottie.
But just three years after their mum’s death, the siblings lost sister Félicité Tomlinson, following an accidental overdose, after she took a fatal concoction of anti-anxiety medication, cocaine and painkillers.