Hannah Waddingham opened up the “relentless mummy guilt” she feels “daily” during an interview on Drew Barrymore’s talk show.
The Ted Lasso star paid a visit to The Drew Barrymore Show earlier this week, where the host asked her how she “handles” working and being a parent.
“Part of your brain’s going, ‘I still need what I call a sliver of me time’, but you feel guilty about doing anything else,” Hannah admitted.
“I always say, my ‘sliver of me time’ is when I get out of a car, I walk up my garden path, and that’s my sliver of me time, and then I go into the house and I’m mummy.”
The British actor – who has a nine-year-old daughter – went on to reveal she and her child share a personal “mantra” for when her work takes her far from home.
“I always say to her, ‘are you cool with me going here and there or whatever?’,” Hannah explained. “And we have a mantra that I’ve always taught her.
“I say, ‘what does mummy always do?’, and she goes, ‘mummy always comes back’.”
“So we’re very much a little team,” she added.
Hannah revealed earlier this year that her daughter had recently moved her to tears with a “beautiful” comment about her work.
“She’s eight years old and she said, ‘mummy, we were talking at school about who inspires us, and I said Harry Styles and you’,” she told Michelle Visage’s BBC podcast Rule Breakers.
“I mean, I was slightly gutted about being second billing, I mean nobody can beat Harry, he’s ridiculously hot. But I was taken aback.
“I said, ‘baby girl, you have literally made my day, my week, my month, and my year. You know mummy struggles with being away from you’, and she went, ‘yes, but mummy, you’ve got to go away and do all the things, so we can do all our things!’.”
When Hannah won the Emmy for her performance in Ted Lasso in 2021, she said she would keep the award in her daughter’s bedroom “to show her that her mummy will only ever be away when it’s for a really, blooming good reason”.
“I think it shows her, when she’s older, she just has to fight that little bit harder and magical things happen,” Hannah said.
However, Hannah later explained why the Emmy had to be rehomed when she finally got it back to the UK.