Julianne Moore
“Motherhood doesn’t wipe out the person that you are."
by Amy Reiter
March 23, 2009
Have you had to make career concessions to accommodate your kids, and vice versa?
Oh my god. Yes. I'm not really any different than any other working parent. I mean, one thing my job does allow is tremendous flexibility, so I can be there at school drop-off and pick-up and go to soccer and dance. There are times when really, that's all I'm doing. And then there are times like now, where for seven weeks, I'm out of town and home only on the weekends. Which is really hard, except that I have a husband who can do that other stuff. Last summer, he was away a lot and I was the one who was home with the kids and taking them to day camp. Also I think it's imperative that kids understand that parents have to work for a living, that there's an economic model that you have to follow, which is that you do some work and that enables you to take care of your family, and with any luck you do work that you really enjoy, too. That's the truth of the world. And kids understand that.
Did your kids understand early on the trade-off that you go away for a while and then you come back and they get you all to themselves?
No, because this is recent. I didn't go away when they were little; they came with me, which is the other huge upside of being an actress. There aren't many other jobs where you can bring your children to your workplace, but acting is one of them. My joke is that my kids for a long time thought I worked in a trailer, because that's where we would go. We'd go to work and sit in the trailer, and then I'd go do a scene and come back to the trailer, and that's how it was. When I did "Savage Grace," we all went to Spain together. When I was in "Blindness," we were all in rural Canada. We all went away in the summers and made movies. This is pretty new, this me-going-to-Toronto thing. They don't like it at all. But I feel like I'm really lucky to work.
You grew up all over the world. Why have you chosen to raise your kids in New York City?
I love New York. My husband was born and raised and went to school there. His family lives in New York City, so he has a very strong connection to it. I moved to New York right after college and really, really liked it. The thing about New York is that there's a tremendous sense of community — more than anywhere I ever lived — and of history. It's an old city. It has so much to offer. It's incredibly diverse. It's a wonderful place to live. I mean, we always toy with the idea of, well, what would it be like to live somewhere else, or to go live in the country? But so far we've been very happy.
"We're not doing our children any favors by saying, I'm just going to put myself away."
You've said it irritates you to be asked how something affects you as a mother, as opposed to how it affects you as a person.
Absolutely! Because it's reductive. For crying out loud! I do think it's been the major experience of my life, but motherhood doesn't wipe out the person that you are. But because it's so big, people tend to say, "This is going to be the ultimate thing that defines me," and that, I think, is where you get into trouble.
Even in the first couple of years, when you're just in this swamp of motherhood emotionally and hormonally, where you go around like, "Wow, wow, I just am in this. I don't have the time to read or do anything else," there is this kind of immersion, but that does pass. And you're still yourself. You have to be — not just for you, but for your children, too.
That's a lesson our generation of mothers learned from our own mothers.
Yeah! Our mothers were so f-ing miserable!
Your mother worked, though, right?
My mother didn't really work until later. She had children when she was nineteen years old. She had three kids by the time she was twenty-five, and she was not happy about it. And believe me, we knew. But that's a fact that a lot of us grew up with. That's why I'm saying I don't think we're doing our children any favors by saying, "I'm just going to put myself away." I don't think it makes children or parents happy.
©2009 Amy Reiter and Babble
About the Author
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Amy Reiter has written for Glamour, Marie Claire, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Time Out New York Kids and Wine Spectator, among other publications, as well as the anthology "Maybe
Baby." A former editor at Salon, she lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children. |
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