Felicity Huffman offered very honest insight into the "bewildering and impossible and lonely" parts of being a mom during a HuffPost Live interview on Monday.
"Mothers are both marginalized and also idolized," Huffman told host Caroline Modarressy-Tehrani. "We're not really interested in sitting next to the stay-at-home mom at the dinner table, but mothers are responsible for how their kids turn out completely -- whether they're gonna climb a tower and shoot people or go to Harvard might depend on how you handle this meltdown. It's an amazing amount of pressure."
And that pressure doesn't just take a toll on mothers -- it's also a big stressor on relationships, Huffman added.
"Your marriage is like a piece of paper, right? And when kids come along, the piece of paper is unfolded, and those fault lines that exist because of the folding part get pulled, so it rips along those fault lines because you're stressed, you're over-tired, you have different ideas, you've never done this before, and it's really important," she said.
Huffman admitted that giving birth was a challenge in her own marriage to actor William H. Macy.
"I remember after my first daughter was born, I was in the shower, holding the baby, crying, and Bill's outside going, 'Honey, come out of the shower.' And I was going, 'It's alright, we can get a divorce, we can go back to Colorado...'" she recalled.
To open up the dialogue for mothers who felt like she did, Huffman created What The Flicka?, a site where bloggers can be completely honest about their struggles with parenthood.
"Many people go into motherhood with great equanimity and grace, and that's fantastic, but it's got to be OK if you don't," Huffman said.
See more of Felicity Huffman's frank take on motherhood above, and click here for the full HuffPost Live conversation about her work with Warriors In Pink for Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
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