I don’t really want to be in a dysfunctional relationship or think, “I can’t sleep because you’re snoring.” I like my single life, but I would open up to love. There’s a part of me that I don’t really want to be sharing right now. I do have a hard time making time for other people because I’m lucky that I love my work and also love going home and making jam with my kids. I think kids can handle truth far easier than we imagine.Īs for being a single mom, there’s a lot to be said about being single. I’m pretty straight up with my kids I don’t waste a lot of time sugar-coating events. Forgiving is a powerful thing to do, but it didn’t mean that I wasn’t in pain. Try to remember what you loved and move on.
But I realized it just doesn’t make any sense if you’re a parent. I always saw people who loved each other, but when the marriage fell apart, they forgot that they loved each other and turned it into hatred for the rest of their lives. What I really talked about was my hurt, and my ex-husband knew that our break-up was very painful to me. There were a lot of things I didn’t include in the book that I could have. Like my mother says, “Filling your head with good, loving thoughts is a thousand times better than carrying on the animosity of loss.” MGH:I decided that we would be friends for the kids - just because it makes sense.
You and the father of your children, Thaddaeus Scheel, were splitting up. Your mother may not have understood what you were going through, but we can feel it on the pages of The Seasons of My Mother. JW: While you were facing your mother’s illness, your marriage was also falling apart. We need to figure out what’s causing it and get rid of that. Now what I want to help do is create a world where there are survivors and research and a drug that allows you to live with the disease. It’s frightening because the disease leads you into abject loneliness. It was that realization that she’s not in control of her memory, and that was scaring her. The look on her face as I realized that she just wanted to have a sequence of moments strung together where she would remember what happened the few moments before. I could see her anguish as she would forget. What affected me so much was the repetition of her forgetting. I know now that Alzheimer’s lives in you 10, 20 years before it shows signs. She never drank, never smoked, ate well, exercised, was mentally active. She was the poster child of what to do not to get Alzheimer’s. With my mother, it was literally a realization that it could happen to anybody. MGH: Alzheimer’s is a thief, a cowardly thief because it sneaks in and steals your mind. JW: You don’t hide your rage and frustration as you watch your mother suffer and you learn about her horrible condition. I couldn’t always live up to her image of what I should be because I liked to curse and drink and smoke. My mother kept trying to teach me to be gentle and forgiving, mildly disapproving but never outright harsh. I think that’s what audiences relate about in me. If you don’t, then it becomes everything you hate as an actress: about being cast in a bad role that has no real downsides or weaknesses.” I want my audience to relate to the moments when we’re not the hero - when we think we’re cowards. I thought, “You have to include your divorce, your mom’s Alzheimer’s, the deaths in the family. Marcia Gay Harden: I wanted you to laugh but also to cry. Jeanne Wolf: It took strength for you to write about your mother as she weakens and also to share your own joys and struggles. In it, Harden reveals the agony of watching her beloved mother, Beverly, suffer with Alzheimer’s. The Seasons of My Mother: A Memoir of Love, Family, and Flowers, is bold, funny, and sensitive. Marcia Gay’s own nurturing and outspoken personality are now exposed off the stage and screen, in her first book. Leanne can be a nurturing mother and still be as strong as she needs to be.” It’s more fun to play someone who is slightly unsafe. “They’re exploring a softer side of me, but I don’t really want her to become safe.