Mary Louise Parker Feels Blessed
And that’s really who Parker is—a professional balancing work and family like so many people. Her next balancing act involves a return to Broadway. Parker, who won the Tony for best actress in 2001 for her performance in Proof, will play the lead (a widowed mother of two boys, though that’s where the Nancy Botwin similarities end) in The Snow Geese at the Manhattan Theatre Club, a WWI-era drama written by Sharr White (The Other Place) and directed by Daniel Sullivan, who directed Parker in Proof and also directed the acclaimed 2012 revival of Glengarry Glen Ross. “It’s a really lovely play,” Parker tells me. “And it’s the longest that I’ve gone since doing one. It’s been more than three years. So that feels very odd to me. But when you have kids, it all changes. Doing a play once you have kids means giving up some of your time with them. You have to give up their bedtime and you have to give up weekends, and they’re only little for a very brief period of time, so it had to be something that I really, really wanted to do.”
Parker is a mother of two—William, 9, and Caroline Aberash, 6—and it’s clear that her relationship with them is her priority. Our conversation never strays far from what parenting means with respect to the rest of her life. “Before, nothing came before my career,” she says. “Now, nothing comes before my children.” While part of this is just a natural condition of parenting, it’s also that Parker’s role as a single parent—the only kind of parent she’s ever been—influences all her life choices, including the move to Brooklyn. “I never thought I would live anywhere in my life other than Manhattan. And then something happened around the time my TV show was ending. It felt so arduous to me, and there just seemed to be some kind of freedom in Brooklyn, some kind of tranquility.” Parker and her children have roots in the city (her son’s father, actor Billy Crudup, lives in Manhattan), so she couldn’t just go anywhere. “I’m a single mother. I wouldn’t have the confidence to pick up and make the kind of decision where we move to the south of France or something.”
Yet she doesn’t seem to feel like she’s giving up anything. Rather, it seems like she just adds more and more to her life, figuring out along the way how to manage everything. At a time when women are told that they can have it all if they just learn how to balance every part of their lives, Parker keeps an honest perspective on what she can and can’t do. “The thing is that I don’t balance,” she says. “There are days when I just feel so wildly imbalanced. I was at a press junket in London, and there I was texting my daughter’s camp and my son’s doctor at the same time, and it just does not stop. Unless, of course, you’re willing to delegate, which I’m not. The thing is I’ve always been a single mother, and when I adopted my daughter it was as a single mother. I knew I was getting into something that was going to be too hard. And it is too hard. But I never would have not done it.”
As is always the case when any woman (or man) tries to have it all, though, something has to give. “I’ve been told so many times that I need to do more for myself, and I’m just starting to see that it’s true,” she says. “But it’s hard to have a relationship if you have kids. It’s really, really hard—I’d say it’s almost impossible. It’s not as important anymore.”
This is easy enough for many single mothers to relate to: there’s only so much of you to go around, and because your children come first, other things suffer. I tell Parker that I understand the fierceness of both a mother’s love for her children and the love that comes right back. I also tell her that my sons’ father calls our children “Oedipus 1 and 2.” Parker laughs and says about her own son, “I used to call him Oedipus when he was a baby! You know no one will love you like your kids. And you’ll never love anyone like them. That’s the problem. The other kinds of love seem so, like”—she sighs and then continues—“much smaller. I mean, if I didn’t have children, I would not be moving to Brooklyn. I’d be moving to Paris. But instead I have all this.”
Part of “this,” her son Will, joins us for a while because he and Parker are preparing to go to their home upstate (which is also home to those goats), where they’ll be joined by Parker’s daughter, who’s finishing up a session at sleepaway camp. Will is charming, intelligent, polite, and funny; it’s easy to see why Parker can look at her son and say, “I feel like I never saw myself accurately, really, until I saw my child.” Parker leans in toward me and recalls a time when she was in a relationship and felt herself pulled in too many directions to handle, remembering that once her kids were in bed, she wanted just to be by herself, realizing, “I need sleep more than I need love. I have love. And I realize how callous that sounds, but it’s true.”
But it doesn’t sound callous at all. Not any more than her comment about hating the toxic atmosphere of the Internet sounded sensational. The thing about Mary Louise Parker is that she sounds honest; she sounds like herself. And being herself means being an intense, opinionated woman who isn’t afraid to say what’s on her mind, because she has better things to do than worry about how everything she says will be interpreted by strangers. She has her children to take care of (and those goats) and her life to lead. •
Follow Kristin Iversen on twitter @kmiversen
Stylist Dianna Lunt, Hair Tina Turbow, Makeup Peter Butler, Manicurist Candice Idehen using Deborah Lippmann, Location Colony Studios, Catering Kurent Event Catering
