Jodie Foster Talks about Being a Child Star and Working Mother

Jodie Foster has been in the spotlight since she was a child and talks with Parade about what it was like being a child star, why she’s never fallen in love and being a working mom.

On being a child prodigy:
"Being a child prodigy is inherently lonely. I was one of them. You’re different from other kids. No one else can understand. There’s a longing to connect, a craving to say, ‘Here is the deepest part of me, the part that people don’t see.’"

On her long career:
"I’ve been working for 42 years. Sometimes I think, ‘What the hell are you doing? What’s the value of all this?’ I have fantasies about the things I might have done. I wish I’d been a ski bum or maybe had a job at a Starbucks in a ski place."

On why she hasn’t truly fallen in love yet:
"Oh, my life is basically from the head up. I’m definitely not proud of that. I’m very analytical."

On her childhood attitude toward acting:
"To me, acting didn't seem like much of a profession. My mom always said, 'By the time you're 16, your career will be over. So what do you want to do then?' She was correct. Most child actors' careers end early. They're lost."

On being a working mother:
"I’m still not sure where I’m going in my life. There are times when I don’t really know what I am here for. When I had my kids, I was burnt out on the film business again and wondering if this new identity as a parent was going to be fulfilling enough. I was forced to ask these really hard questions about myself: Is being a mother everything? Are you supposed to lose yourself in the process of being a mother?"

On being a child actor:
"People ask me if I missed anything by not having a normal childhood. The truth is, if I’d been an ambassador’s daughter or grown up on a farm in Missouri, I wouldn’t have had a normal childhood either. I had the only childhood I knew."

On raising her boys:
"Boys are easy. I mean, there are just a lot of bruises when they're young. With boys, you get a lot of accidental jabs in the eye and stepping on your feet, and those tantrums they cause when they don't want to leave the toy store. But my boys are getting older now. They go to school all day, and then one wants to do T-ball and the other wants to do karate, so they're actually gone until four-thirty. I want them to have curiosity about things they don’t know, and a desire to see places bigger than where they grew up."

Source: Parade