Underneath every part she’s played is the same instinct: there is always another way to try. Motherhood just made it personal.
Three flights up
Picture her three flights up in a Williamsburg walk-up she’d rented for the winter, wrapped in her coat like a human burrito against a cold she could not get warm enough from. She was prepping to direct four episodes of Doctor Death. She hadn’t told anyone she was pregnant yet. It was early, and there was a set to run. Her husband, Gerardo, was finishing a job in another city, so the beginning of the nausea was hers alone to manage. She couldn’t figure out anything she could put in her mouth that her stomach would agree to, and she still needed to eat, and she still needed to walk into work every day looking like a person who had slept.
“It was like being ungodly car sick while also starving,” says Jennifer Morrison, the actress most of us know first as Emma Swan on Once Upon a Time, Dr. Allison Cameron on House, and Zoey Pierson on How I Met Your Mother, and these days, more often, the woman behind the camera at her own production company, Apartment 3C.
What she remembers now, alongside the vertigo of it, is what saved her: grapefruit, and more grapefruit, and the occasional peanut butter. “Our bodies are such insane miracles,” she says. “It really blows me away that my body basically built a person while I was thriving on only grapefruits and the occasional peanut butter.” Looking back, she wishes she had told more people sooner and asked for more help. But the tenderness she has now for the woman waddling up those stairs, wrapped for winter and telling no one, has its own kind of mercy in it.
Motherhood does not check a resume before it hands a person a body that no longer runs on schedule and asks her to direct that instead.
There is always another way to try.
Everything is negotiable
There’s a version of having it all that gets sold to women, and it always assumes the day holds more hours than it does. And that women somehow have a neverending supply of energy, capacity, and sheer tenacity. Morrison unlearned that early. “There is still only so much time in the day,” she says. “You are always shifting those three pieces around in different versions of balance. Sometimes parenting is consuming most of your time and personal and work stuff falls away a bit. Likewise, sometimes work pushes forward and you need to be prepared to adjust to having help with your child.” The truth nobody says out loud, in her experience, is that all three never sit still at the same time. “It is more a constantly shifting system where you must adjust to stretches of being spread thin next to stretches of pivoting quickly based on what need is the most urgent. It’s all a bit messy. As someone who always likes to have a plan, I have had to let go a lot more and trust my instincts, both as a parent and as a professional.”
“I think at this phase of parenting, everything in my life is negotiable,” she says. “I used to have a lot of non-negotiables, but now it’s all on the table.” She used to need the perfect journal and the perfect pen at four in the morning to write. Now she needs a Post-it and a marker while waiting for school pickup. “Adapt, pivot, expand, repeat feels like the name of the game as a working parent,” she says. “I’ve just accepted that the living is in the moment, and that is not only acceptable but invigorating if I embrace it.”
What she wants her daughter to inherit
Ask Morrison what she wants her daughter to inherit, and she lands on a way of being. “I hope she remembers that everything I do, I do passionately. I parent passionately, I love passionately, I work passionately, I create passionately. I hope that shines through for her.”
She points to her own parents as the blueprint. “I often think about how I want to raise her to feel confident to choose whatever life lights her up,” she says. She counts herself lucky to have built a career around work she is genuinely passionate about, and what she wants for her daughter isn’t a specific path so much as the two things she’s found there herself. “Doing what I love every day and coming home to the people I love the most every day are the greatest blessings of my life,” she says. “I wish for both of those things for her.” The example, as she tells it, runs backward too. “I watched them pour so much love and passion into their work, and I have no doubt that example shaped the way I see the world. Being free to enjoy the journey comes from seeing them enjoy the journey.” That inheritance showed up in practical form the spring her daughter was nine months old, when Morrison was cast in The Penelopiad at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre. Her parents packed up and moved into her Chicago apartment for the run, so her daughter could stay close to family while Morrison worked. “They embody what it is like to really prioritize family and take pride in your work at the same time,” she says. “When we are trying to make the Jenga of moving around for work happen, I also must remind myself, there is always another way to try.”
I parent passionately, I love passionately, I work passionately, I create passionately.
The hardest part
Ask her about self-care, though, and she answers candidly. “This is the hardest part for me. I am not good at this one yet.” When her daughter was very young, she rented a small office near home, just far enough to buy herself a few uninterrupted hours. “If I could work uninterrupted for a few hours a day, I could have the relief of filing that work away in my mind as complete, and I could be totally present at home.” Some days she schedules herself down to the minute to sneak in a workout or a chapter. Working out and reading for pleasure, by her own admission, are still the first two things to fall off the list when she’s directing. “It’s an imperfect and ever evolving process,” she says.
Another working mother once told her something she’s held onto since. “You have to just accept you won’t be the fittest you’ve ever been and you won’t be the most rested that you have ever been, and that is just fine,” the friend said. “As the child spends more and more time in school, you will reclaim those things for yourself. Just embrace what it is now, because you will miss those sleepless nights with your little one someday. It all flies by.” “I LOVE this advice,” Morrison says, “and I take it to heart every day.”
What restoration looks like now bears almost no resemblance to what it looked like before. A day at the spa has been quietly replaced by a flight alone. A movie watched start to finish, one she actually chose, counts as real recovery. “My perspective on a genuinely restorative day now is not even in the ballpark of what it once was,” she says. “It’s like becoming a parent makes you way more efficient at restoring. The little joys in life are highlighted in a totally different way, and a little bit of time to recharge goes a long way.” When she needs a fuller reset, she is drawn to water. “I have a massive bandwidth,” she says, “but when I am really feeling spread thin and I know I need to just take a moment, a bath is my best bet. Water is super healing for me, and it feels like an amazing reset.”
The modeling happens in the smaller, less deliberate moments too. She and Gerardo eat well, vegetables and protein on the plate, and their daughter has started asking for broccoli on her own because she wants to eat like they do. “We are all human,” she adds, “we also love a good popsicle here and there.” He built a home gym. She sees them use it. None of it is a lesson delivered on purpose. It’s simply what gets absorbed when a child is watching, which, Morrison has learned, is always.
Guilt, and the refusal to double it
To the mothers who feel guilty carving out time for their own health and their own dreams, Morrison’s answer starts with a small piece of jiu-jitsu. “Guilt is just a normal part of being a parent,” she says. “You can’t feel guilty for feeling guilty, it just doubles the problem.” Her actual practice is quieter than a mantra. “I try to do whatever it takes to be the best parent that I can be when I am around my daughter,” she says. “If that means taking a little extra time to finish work, or to be in a good head space for the moments I am with her, I am protecting the quality of the time by sometimes sacrificing the quantity.”
That trade runs in the other direction too. She pushes through more now than she ever did before, sleeping less, taking calls from the car, rearranging her whole day around an extra pickup, because the exhaustion is in service of someone else. “I truly believe that being a parent kind of makes you superhuman,” she says. “Don’t get me wrong, it is exhausting, but when I am pushing through exhaustion for myself, it is nothing compared to pushing through it for her. Having that purpose in my life has revealed how much further I can push myself.” It is precisely because she is operating at that pitch nearly all the time, she says, that she can tell when rest is actually owed to her. “Because 97 percent of the time this is the energy with which I am operating, it does give me permission to take the moments I really do need for rest.” She and Gerardo plan date nights, and occasionally a night away, while her daughter stays with grandparents she adores.
What surprised her most about becoming a mother, she says, was the sheer scale of the love. “How much I totally obsessively love being a mom,” she says. “I knew I wanted to be a mom, but if I’d started sooner, I think I’d be trying to have like six kids. I totally love it. Even in the hardest moments, I am floored by how fulfilled I feel by having this part of myself awakened by being a mom.”
She hasn’t thrown out a single piece of parenting advice she’s ever received. “Everything kind of has merit if you put it through the lens of your life,” she says. “Every kid is so different. Every family ecosystem is so specific.” She built her acting and directing career on trusting her gut, and she’s applying the same instinct to raising her daughter. “The stuff that feels right seems to rise to the surface and stick,” she says, leaning on a community of mom friends who catch her doubt in late-night voice notes and hand it back to her reframed. The line she returns to most isn’t really about parenting, even though that’s where she found it: “Your child isn’t giving you a hard time, they are having a hard time.” It has talked her off more ledges than she can count, at home and at work both. “It works at work too,” she says, and you can hear the smile in it.
Your child isn’t giving you a hard time, they are having a hard time.
Another way to try
There’s a particular kind of belief Emma Swan had to keep choosing before her story could resolve: the willingness to keep believing in spite of the darkness, over and over, every time the plot handed her a reason to quit. Morrison spent years playing that arc for a camera. What she describes now is the unglamorous, unscripted version of the same discipline: showing up for a body that wouldn’t cooperate, a schedule that wouldn’t hold still, a definition of having it all that had to be renegotiated on a near-daily basis.
What surfaced instead looks a lot more like trust than like balance: trust that the plan can fall apart and there will still be another way to try, that guilt will show up uninvited and can be refused permission to multiply, that passion, not perfection, is the thing worth handing down to the next generation watching from the doorway.
If you are the mother reading this at the end of a day that didn’t go the way you needed it to, that is what she would want you to take from it. There is no universal formula or framework for motherhood, except love. Lots of love, lots of hugs, and always another way to try and show up in the ways that you can for yourself and your family. It’s the reminder she gives her own daughter, and herself, on the days the pieces will not stay where you put them.
There is always another way to try.
Jennifer Morrison is an actor, director, and the founder of the production company Apartment 3C. Follow her at @jennifermorrison.
