Now this is a candid cover story. Kate Hudson penned a revealing essay titled, “Sometimes I Feel Like a Bad Mom” for InStyle‘s May 2016 issue. In the piece, she details the struggles of raising her sons, Ryder and Bing, as a single working parent.
Hudson, 36, shares her oldest child, 12, with ex-husband Chris Robinson, and coparents Bing, 4, with ex-fiancé Matt Bellamy. “I was really young, like, 23, when I had Ryder,” Hudson shares in her essay. “So, our relationship has always been [a little unusual]. I mean, we’re close, and I am his mom. I’m big on manners. I’m big on politeness. I’m big on gratitude. But I’m a bit of a wild mom.” (Since her split from Bellamy in 2014, Hudson has been linked to pop superstar Nick Jonas, who’s 13 years her junior.)
She continues: “Some days I feel like I should win best mom of the day award. And some days I find myself doing strange things that don’t have any real purpose, in faraway corners in my house, and I realize I am literally and deliberately hiding from my children.”
The Almost Famous star wrote the essay while promoting her new book, Pretty Happy, last month. “I’m so happy to have some time to myself and excited to have this experience,” she shares with the mag’s readers, though she emphasizes that she misses her little ones. “There’s this tight, pulling sensation that never goes away that it comes at the cost of missing a week of my children’s lives, and it aches. [However] I wouldn’t be the best mom I could be if I didn’t follow my creative endeavors. I would feel an emptiness that would be felt in our home. So a stay-at-home mom will never be my life and that will never be my kids’ experience of me.”
The Mother’s Day actress has been torn between duty and career. “Even though every primal ounce of the nurturing, domestic woman in me gets pulled, I’m a hunter as well. And I love to hunt!” she continues. “And as a woman I feel that somehow we are supposed to feel apologetic about wanting both. But I don’t want to apologize for that anymore. Being both already comes at an emotional cost, without adding society’s antiquated idea of the traditional roles of man and woman in the home.”
Some of these traditional duties, like schoolwork, are very mundane to the How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days star. “Yes, I help my kids with their homework. But I also get bored doing it,” she admits. “I will sit and listen to my children pontificate and discuss their ideas till the day is long because it warms my heart, but I really don’t want to do math! I’m gonna say it: I’d prefer to watch The Bachelor rather than do fractions and divisions.”
Hudson’s full essay in the May 2016 issue of InStyle is out April 15.
