After playing Lynette Scavo on Desperate Housewives for eight years, Felicity Huffman is realizing how alike she is to her alter ego.
“When I am home I want to be away. When I am away I want to be home,” Huffman, 49, writes in her iVillage blog. “I am no longer the person I was before having children, but not quite comfortable with whom I have become.”
Huffman, who has two daughters, Sophia, 11, and Georgia, 9, had a turning point as a mother. ”One Saturday, when my girls were about 3 and 4, we were pulling out of the driveway on our way to the Natural History Museum. I had worked a long week — lots of 15 hour days — and finally gotten to sleep by 1 a.m., and then woke up at 6 a.m. with the kids.”
Felicity’s husband William H. Macy stayed home to relax after working hard. “‘Papa gets ‘Papa time’ and we get ‘The Grump,’” Huffman recalls one of her daughters saying.
“After all my effort and exhaustion and sacrificing, she wasn’t going to remember the museum or the snack or the wonderful adventure. She was just going to remember that she was on an outing with ‘The Grump.’ Something snapped and I knew what I was doing wasn’t working.”
Huffman later realized that “any damage I would inflict by trying to be a ‘good mother’ far, far outweighed any damage I would do by just being myself.”
“Maybe good mothers can pretend to be Poobah for two hours and go on endless trips to museums and parks. But I can read out loud for hours, I can build forts all afternoon, I can really listen when things go wrong and I am great when the flu hits,” Huffman writes in her iVillage blog. “I now try and accept my limits.”
Photos by Fame
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