Last week I traveled to Los Angeles to attend the Bad Moms junket. It was a total Moms Day Out experience. I was overwhelmed with all the pampering and spoiling. Spa treatments, mimosas, desserts…wow! All in the name of Mom Appreciation. Before the movie at iHeart Radio theater, we were treated to a cocktail party. Drinks, food, fun slow motion cameras, drinks, and oooooo, a special appearance of the cast of the movie! Let’s not forget our own private FloRida concert as well! So. Much. Fun. Oh, and the movie. So. Incredible. But more about that later.
The interviews took place on the SLS Hotels Garden Terrace, which was beautifully decked out with small intimate tables with super fun shiny, shiny pink tablecloths and amazing desserts to keep us super sugarnated throughout the event. Finally, we moms got to eat all the sugar and run around and have fun! Did I mention more mimosas and tables of desserts were available? Yum! As a virgin press junket attendee (Thanks! Pick me again!), I thought, “I will get used to this!” Kathryn Hahn and Mila Kunis looked gorgeous and Kunis mentioned she reads mommy blogs herself!
When asked how they felt about being in a movie that had such a mom-empowering script that was so funny and relatable and written specifically from a female perspective, Hahn replied “Well, I feel like had I not been lucky enough to be in this movie, I would have been so excited to see it. And I would have started an email chain and got all my mommy pals. I just feel like so often moms and mommies in movies are kind of painted with like a saintly glow around them. And we know that that’s just not the truth. I was so excited to just to see mommyhood examined from the way that we all know it, or at least would love to experience. I know there’s a ton of wish fulfillment in this particular movie. Like, it would be real. So much of it looks like a ball, like this afternoon. Like, how decadent does this feel? And we deserve it, damn it.”
She continues “I have a 6-year-old and a 9-year-old and I found it really, really helpful especially because my parents don’t live in LA, so, it’s not the same culture where your mom comes over to help you babysit.”
“At least, I wasn’t lucky enough for that. You depend on your pals or other amazing women that are going through it or have gone through it, so, thank God. You can’t do it by yourself. And it takes a village. And I think this movie is such an awesome message of the solidarity. Like, we’re all in it together. We can’t just lessen those expectations.”
I’m pretty sure she’s my mommy soul mate. I may have just a little bit of her character, Carla, in me as well.
What it something that you learned after becoming a mom that you would never have thought would have been a thing?
“I think the truest form of unconditional love. Like, I love my husband. I thought that that was to me the purest sense of love. I love this human being. I love my parents. This is love,” Kunis said. “And maybe it was the hormones, but I remember after giving birth to Wyatt that I looked at her, and I was like, ‘Oh, my God, I would murder someone for you.’ And I couldn’t get over truly how much I love this little, tiny, little human that I’ve had only for a couple hours. Like, the truest, truest, truest, most honest, guttural reaction of love I think I never knew until I had a child.”
“I think what I didn’t expect was that feeling of that impossible, inevitable heartbreak of knowing that how short it is,” Hahn said. “I didn’t realize. I heard everyone say it’s so fast. It’s so fast. And my mom would say, ‘The days are long, the years are short and all this crap.’ And it was kind of like I didn’t really know what that meant until I experienced it, and knowing like that he is now you know, my oldest is 9 and we spoon still…I just know I don’t have that much more of it. And so, then all the other noise just becomes such nonsense. We as mamas, it’s such a short amount of time, their childhood. So, you know, it’s just like I guess enjoy it.”
On Mom Guilt
“Oh, and Mom Guilt. You know that thing. We all have it. Your kid is screaming about his dropped goldfish crackers while you are in line at the DMV and you have this morning’s applesauce in your hair and you just realized you have two different shoes on. You just want to quit. Over it. You just can’t win. But tomorrow morning on your silent ride to work you can’t really enjoy having clean hair and matching shoes, because you miss your child so badly you could just cry. Why? Because we’re moms and that’s what we do. So, Mom Guilt, do you subscribe to it or park it? I know I totally subscribe.”
Mila Kunis took no time at all to say it perfectly “A hundred percent subscribe to it, not intentionally. It’s like that subscription that you want to go away, but it’s just constantly there.It sucks to not be putting your child down every night. It’s something that I think our hours are just so erratic that like 17-hour days when I was 20 was like a piece of cake. Seventeen-hour work days now where I’m not there when she wakes up in the morning, and I’m not there to put her down at night, and I see her for my 20-minute lunch break is very empty. And so, yes, it’s constant.”
“There is a healthy dose of teaching your children, though, in that mom guilt,” Hahn says “Yes. Now that they’re a little bit older, I’m lucky. I feel so blessed that I have a job that I really, really dig, and that when I’m not with them, it’s somewhere where I’m excited and inspired, and hopefully they’ll be able to see their mommy, you know, that she’s doing something she loves and but, yes, of course. Of course. It sucks.”
Today, as moms, what advice would they go back and tell their pre-mom selves?
“Apologize to my mom sooner would be my advice.” Kunis said “I’m not kidding. I apologize to my mom. When I was like 22, I was like, ‘I’m so sorry.’ I wish I can go back to my 16-year-old self and say, ‘They’re not against me.’ I just wish I realized and understood just how much my mom and my dad, not to alienate my dad, but just how much my parents loved me, unconditionally loved me.” Kathryn Hahn replied “I would say absolutely just don’t waste your precious brain space worrying about that nonsense. So much nonsense was I worrying about that I wish that I hadn’t been, and it goes so fast.”
BAD MOMS IS IN THEATERS JULY 29TH. GET TICKETS NOW BECAUSE YOU KNOW YOU ARE GOING TO WANT TO SEE IT WITH ALL OF YOUR GIRLFRIENDS.
Thanks to STX Entertainment for inviting us to LA to cover the Bad Moms press junket!
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[…] a healthy dose of teaching your children, though, in that mom guilt,” Hahn offered during an interview with Merlot Mommy while promoting the film. “Yes. Now that they’re a little bit older, I’m lucky. […]