Uma Thurman Urges Moms to Make Time for Themselves
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Many moms find themselves in need of a break, but Uma Thurman says that several years ago she found herself contemplating one — on doctor’s orders! “He said, ‘I’m going to write you a prescription,’ and I went OK, what’s he giving me a prescription for?,” she recalls in a new interview with The Times. “And he wrote down on the pad: ‘‘Hotel: one night a week.’” She never followed through, in part because the 39-year-old actress says she found the idea of curling up alone in a hotel room with her books “unthinkable.”
Uma has since reconsidered her stance, however! “When my son turned 7, I sort of stood up straight and I suddenly realized I had been like this [makes expansive gesture of exhaustion], in one way or the other, for the past 10 years,” she notes.
“My big wish now is to make a little time for myself. I think many women, working women, get this. I mean how do you justify that hour and a half to yourself? When you have this to do and that to do and you want to be there…So I really want to do that. I really think it’s necessary.”
Uma feels that motherhood is about “the chaos and the confusion, and also the loss of yourself.” Not that the latter is a bad thing; “There is a good part to losing yourself,” she notes. “Any mother that doesn’t give herself up isn’t a good mother.” At the same time, however, Uma cautions that “you can get to a point where you can’t reach the identity that helped you be stable in the first place — and that is quite a frightening feeling.”
“I must have gone through years of it. Just years of confusion. Guilty when you’re here and guilty when you’re there, of being torn in half. Your happiness depends on where you measure in your sense of duty: what’s your shame level today? What have you forgotten, what did you do wrong, what could you do better?”
Uma is mom to Maya Ray, 11, and Levon Roan, 7 ½, with ex-husband Ethan Hawke. Her new movie Motherhood opens in October.
Source: The Times
– Missy
