Becoming a parent is like falling in love — you can read about it, talk about it, worry about it … but nothing can fully prepare you for it. For an actress who hasn’t been there, playing a woman who struggles to conceive, then finally adopts, then finds she might not be cut out for parenting was a special challenge.
“Every mother told me you don’t know until you’re in it. ‘You think you know, but you don’t know.’ Well, great. That’s helpful. Basically, you’re saying, ‘Good luck, you’re going to fail,’ ” says a laughing Kerry Washington, one of the stars of Rodrigo Garcia’s drama “Mother and Child.”
Washington is Exhibit A of the brainy beauty: magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa at George Washington University; spokeswoman for L’Oreal; a political activist (”A fearsome debater,” director Garcia has said of her) serving on the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities; just named to People magazine’s list of most beautiful people. But when it comes to this mother-and-child thing, she’s as adrift as the rest of us.
“Here is somebody we literally used to live inside of, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to figure out how to individuate from that person and still remain close,” she says. “What are those challenges when we don’t know who that person is we lived inside of; or when [the child] actually didn’t live inside us?”
Read more here.