Anne Hathaway feels ‘defeated’ as a mom

Actress Anne Hathaway just got real about the struggles of juggling work with motherhood and it is painfully relatable.

During a recent interaction, the mother of two opened up about how she feels “very defeated” by the concept of balance.

The “Devil Wears Prada” star, who is mom to sons Jack, 6, and Jonathan, 10, said before she became a mother, there was a “really uncompromising and uninterrupted” focus, but with children, there are more ebbs and flows that make balancing things out a little harder.”

“Before, there was this focus that was really uncompromising and uninterrupted,” Hathaway said. “And I just can’t tell you anymore what life is like without kids, but kids interrupt you all the time.”

“My friends and I talk about it a lot, and we actually feel very defeated by the concept of balance,” she said. “If the weight shifts in one direction, you then have to bounce it up on the other side, and we find that it winds us up as opposed to making us steady.”

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Instead of looking for balance, the 43-year-old actress shared that she and her friends aim for a concept that is more forgiving. “We seek to harmonise our life,” she said.

Hathaway has been very open about how her life changed since she welcomed her children, and she has often shared the impact motherhood has had on her.

“I didn’t feel fully landed and fully here until I was a mom,” she said in a March 2022 interview. “It’s not like I was lacking integrity, but it made me want to be completely, on every level, true to my word.”

Anne, whose own mother Kate McCauley Hathaway is also an actress, previously shared that she hopes her kids stay out of acting. “I would probably take the same tack that my parents did with me, which is: You have all the time in the world to be a professional actor; you can only be a child once,” Hathaway said.

“So I would encourage them to study, to go to classes, to read, but I would strongly discourage them from starting too young,” she continued. “I think that they’ll be in a position where they’ll be able to go to college and figure out where they want to go from there.”