Emmy Rossum used to feel silly being silly. Somewhere in a childhood spent working — playing pretend as a job, growing up fast — the actual playing had gotten trained out of her. "And I secretly missed being silly," she says.
She got it back the way you get a lot of things in motherhood: without asking, and from the person you least expect. When her daughter was born, the first thing Rossum noticed was how completely present she'd become — there for the hard hours and the "peaceful little snuggly stolen moments I wanted to linger in." Then the baby got older and started playing, and one day was old enough to issue the command every parent eventually receives: Play with me. So she did.
"I felt this total sense of unseriousness. Silliness and joy! Real belly laughter." Her kids, it turned out, were fluent in the language she'd forgotten. "My kids helped me remember that part of myself."
The playful self wasn't gone, exactly — it surfaced now and then over the years, in rare, unguarded moments. Ask Rossum whether any version of her pre-motherhood self is still with her, and the answer comes back all exclamation points: "When that early 2000s pop song comes on, I am here for it! Let's get it, Britney!" She points out that she's even got the receipts: a photograph of herself at twenty-one, out dancing after a film premiere abroad, holding a bottle of champagne and, for reasons lost to time, wearing a MILAN T-shirt over her premiere dress. "I've never danced or laughed more," she says. "One of the best nights ever." The playful woman her kids coaxed back out is the same one in that photo. Motherhood wasn't a reinvention. It was a reintroduction.
The Games
Rossum takes all that reclaimed silliness and builds things out of it.
Take the bedtime ritual her family invented after a lazy-river trip everyone loved. It's called "What color is your donut?" The premise is that when they all drift off to sleep, they'll meet on a lazy river, each floating on an inflatable donut. So every night, right before lights-out, the question goes around: What color is your donut? Everyone answers. "Okay," Rossum tells them, "now I know what color yours is, so when I get there I can look for you, and you can look for me."
It sounds like whimsy. It is a little. But her explanation reveals something deeper: "This became a sweet way of saying that even though I'm not right there while they're sleeping, in a way I still am. I know how to find them, and they know how to find me, wherever our dreams take us." The game is a small machine for staying connected across distance: the nightly one of sleep, and the longer ones her work sometimes puts between them.
The most elaborate one is the goodbye ritual at drop-off, which she reports is "quite embarrassing to do" and gets longer roughly every week. It began as a secret handshake — "hug, kiss, heart explosion, high-five-too-slow" — and has since accumulated a fruit basket pose, a sequence where they pretend to eat a burger and fries and sip a mocktail, a butterfly pose, and, of course, "the rare and elusive golden butterfly pose, which comes immediately after the regular butterfly pose." Sometimes Rossum can't remember the order, and her kids have to help her. What started as a way to say goodbye has become, she says, "its own little language, a way of saying, 'You're safe, I love you, and I'll see you soon. Now get in there!'"
She explains the theory underneath the games: "We're building our own language and identity. It gives us something to look forward to, something predictable in an unpredictable world." Taco Tuesday, sushi Friday, movie Sunday. "Even the smallest traditions become little markers that say, 'This is who we are.'"
Even the smallest traditions become little markers that say, this is who we are.
Rossum's favorite trick is the one she engineered to solve a problem every parent knows: the total intelligence blackout that descends when you ask a child how their day was. Direct questions got her nowhere — "radio silence or a shrug." So she started deliberately getting things absurdly wrong. She'll ask whether, during recess, a classmate pretended to be a penguin, and her daughter will erupt — No! — and correct the record in full, unable to resist. "I get much more out of my kids by playing the ditzy mom who gets it all wrong than by asking direct questions," she says. It is, when you look at it, her whole connection method in miniature: play your way in.
The Pancake Problem
If the games are what the joy builds, the pancake problem is what it costs.
Here is what happened. When Rossum's daughter was about ten months old, she was trying to make pancakes and shower, all before heading out to a sixteen-hour workday. With the batter on the stove and the timer set, she got into the shower. Just as she was ready to shampoo — ding! Rossum got out, ran naked to the kitchen to flip the pancakes, ran back, and slipped on the wet floor outside the shower. Her ankle caught under the door, and she went down hard. The ankle turned purple and swelled.
Her first thought: "Someone save the pancakes on the stove!" Her second: a call to work to say she'd be a few minutes late, and could someone maybe pick her up from the ER, because she just needed "a super quick X-ray." After the X-ray and in a boot, Rossum made it to work thirty minutes late, where they shot around the boot. The pancakes were fine. Her daughter was fed. "I was the collateral damage."
"This is what I call the pancake problem," she says. "Something has to give. We can make everything work — our children are cared for, our jobs get done, the pancakes get made — but too often the person paying the price is us." And then the line that could be tattooed on the inside of every mother's wrist: "Even when I was crushing it, sometimes it was crushing me. As moms, we cannot always be the cost."
Rossum would like it on the record that a torn ankle was, in fact, not enough to permanently teach her this lesson. "Every few years, I start thinking I'm Superwoman again and forget that I'm actually human." As evidence, she offers a day on a recent family trip: shooting at 5 a.m., meeting her kids at the zoo at 9, a zipline in full hair and makeup, lunch, back to set, then bath and bedtime, capped by a work call at 8 p.m. "I was burnt out and also slightly sunburnt. So I'm still working on it."
The loneliest version comes at bedtime, when her husband, the writer and director Sam Esmail, travels for work. Two overtired kids, one depleted parent, and the negotiation that will not end — just as they're finally going under, someone urgently requires an apple, a glass of cold water, one more hug, some reason they could not possibly sleep. "Certainly not now! Maybe not tonight! Maybe not EVER!" By then, Sam is asleep somewhere on location, and Rossum is, she says plainly, "very alone in it."
She's quick to add that this goes both ways — the same is true for him when she's the one away. And she recognizes that even that is a luxury. Not every parent has someone on the other side of the equation. She was raised by a mother who did it alone, so to the moms doing it all by themselves, she offers recognition: "I see you."
And to all the mothers underwater, partner or no, she talks like someone who's been there, because she has: "Look at my broken foot and sunburn!" You cannot be an island, she says. You have to find a village. "It's okay to do some things a lot less well." For Rossum, delegating what mattered least or drained the most was a lesson she had to learn over time. "It doesn't matter if things are not done how you would do it. It's okay." It will feel new and weird, she promises, "until one day it doesn't feel new and weird. It just is." And the part she wants to land most: "You cannot and should not be alone. You're not alone."
How Emmy and Sam Split the Invisible Load
When the mental load of running a household started to feel invisible and uneven, Rossum and her husband turned to a system: Eve Rodsky's Fair Play, a deck of cards that assigns each recurring domestic job to one person to own outright. (It's findable at most bookstores and online.)
They divided the deck roughly evenly and can trade cards whenever they want. Sam's cards include school forms, scheduling and attending doctor appointments, kids' friends' birthday parties, holiday cards ("he thrives!!!"), weekend dinners, dishes, and middle-of-the-night comfort. Rossum holds after-school programming, weekday dinners, school lunches, teacher communication, laundry, groceries, travel, and pet care, among others.
The key isn't just who does what — it's a shared minimum standard of care on every card. Whoever owns a job owns it fully, but both agree on the floor: the kids brush their teeth twice a day, the trash goes out before it hits the tippy-top, the weekend restaurant has something the kids will actually eat. Full ownership, agreed baseline — so nothing has to be re-managed by the other person.
Coming Back to Herself
Rossum has many selves to keep in concert (which is her word, and a telling one from a former singer). Before kids, she worried that motherhood might make her less ambitious, less "creatively desirous." It didn't. "It just made me love a new person so much." What changed was strategy, not appetite: she's choosier about what she takes on now. "My identity as an artist is no less strong, but I am learning to hold all these parts of myself in concert together."
The holding is not abstract. It's a ritual of its own and maybe her most elaborate one. When she comes home from a day inside a character (at the moment, a role dark enough that she has to consciously climb out of it), she has a whole practice for becoming herself again. First, a long, sustained breath that she learned in order to calm herself — sssssssss — before she walks back into her family. Then a shower, because water grounds her; she pictures the character and the entire day rinsing off, and alternates the water between hot and cold, rapidly, "almost as a way of shocking myself back into myself." Then her own moisturizer — nothing like the products they use on set — "so everything immediately starts to smell like me again." Her own soft T-shirt and sweats. Her wedding ring, back on her hand.
Then she goes to her own kitchen and eats her own food — "usually my kids' dinner leftovers, which makes me feel close to them." Sometimes there's a specific comforting snack: pretzels, salty and crunchy, dipped in cream cheese and jelly. If the kids are still up, she reads to them, and usually falls asleep not long after they do. It is a small liturgy for putting oneself down and picking up another — the actor rinsed off, the ring returned, the mother reassembled scent by scent.
Even when I was crushing it, sometimes it was crushing me. As moms, we cannot always be the cost.
What She's Passing Down
Rossum learned how to hold a lot at once from a master. Her mother raised her alone — "both a mother and a father" — and modeled, she says, "how to be an independent woman who could take care of herself and make it in the world on her own terms." She is, at seventy-nine, undimmed: she recently fixed her own dishwasher, regularly teaches herself anything she pleases, and "rarely gets frustrated because she just trusts eventually she'll figure it out," adding, "I wish I were that patient."
Motherhood rearranged Rossum's view. "Before I was a mom, I thought maybe some moms were more perfect than others," she admits. "But now I realize we are all just doing our best." It's the pancake problem's gentler cousin — the same permission she extends to overwhelmed strangers, turned toward her own mother, and then forward toward her own kids. "I have a newfound softness and understanding for my mom now. I'm certainly going to need that kind of grace from my kids, too."
These days, her mother thrives in a new role — the kids call her MooMoo — and she is folded right into the family's rituals: coming over for Taco Tuesday, arriving on Sushi Friday with chocolate-covered strawberries. When Rossum names what she wants to pass down from her own mom, it isn't anything having to do with glamour or achievement. It's the plainest thing: her mother "really knows how to mobilize when someone needs help. She's loyal and reliable." And then she distills the inheritance to a sentence: "I want my kids to know they can count on me like that."
The Magic
Which brings us to the horse.
On a recent family trip, Rossum's daughter tossed a coin into a river and made a wish out loud: she wished she could ride a horse. This was news to Rossum, who had never once heard her child mention horses. But the next day, the girl asked impatiently when the wish would come true. And the day after that, again. This was not a passing thing.
So Rossum told her the truth as she understands it. "The thing about wishes," she said, "is that you have to make them come true." Her daughter was baffled; she'd thrown the coin, hadn't she? She'd done her part. "There is magic in the world, for sure," Rossum told her. "But also, we can make things happen."
You can guess some of what comes next, but probably not all of it. Walking near that same spot the next day, they came upon a police officer standing beside his horse. "It's magic!" the girl cried and ran for it. The officer was kind; he let her pet the horse, who goes by Chief, but explained that the animal was working and couldn't be ridden. And here Rossum did the thing that is the entire point — the move underneath the games and the rituals and the pancakes and the wedding ring. She turned a moment that could have ended in disappointment into proof of her own thesis. "Remember when I said you make it come true?" she said to her daughter. "Let's ask if he knows someone who can get you on a horse."
As it turns out, the officer knew a horse trainer. Two days later, Rossum's daughter climbed onto a horse for the first time — and loved it, though by Rossum's account, her younger child loved it even more. "I still think that horse and officer by the river was a little bit of magic," she says. And then, without knowing she's writing her own last line: "But sometimes, magic needs a little help from us to become real."
Emmy Rossum is an actress, producer and director, and a mother of two. Best known for The Phantom of the Opera, Shameless and Angelyne, she now leads and executive produces Furious, a Hulu thriller created by Elizabeth Meriwether in which she plays FBI agent Alice Black. Follow along at @emmy, and watch Furious, streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+.
