No matter how long you’ve been in the parenting biz, there is still so much to learn about being a mom. Marin Hinkle and Caroline Aaron may be empty nesters, and they may have been playing the iconic matriarchs on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel since 2017 — (Psst! The fifth and final season drops on Amazon Prime Video today!) — but even they are still growing into their roles of “Mom.”
And while they can soak up lessons from other mothers in their lives and countless other sources, they are also taking direction from their characters. Hinkle plays Rose Weissman, the mother of the main character, Miriam “Midge” Maisel (played by the brilliant Rachel Brosnahan who, by the way, is taking some seriously enviable props from the set). Weissman is an Upper West Sider who is all about the upkeep of her home and keeping up appearances.
“I don’t think Rose, at the beginning of this trajectory, has led herself to believe that it was okay to have her daughter be different from her,” Hinkle tells SheKnows’ Giovana Gelhoren. “I mean, the apple really needed to fall exactly next to the tree.”
Hinkle has had to learn in her own life that there’s no reason to be “afraid” of the differences between herself and her son Ben. There are things, she says, that Ben is passionate about that she doesn’t understand. And then there are things that she understands that he couldn’t care less about.
Well isn’t that relatable?
“So I think letting kids be different from oneself, that’s something that I will say as a parent is there to be learned,” she says.
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She’s also having to learn to let her son fly the nest, and boy, if recognizing and accepting differences with your child is scary, having them away at college is downright terrifying. She says she is having “the hardest time letting go,” and so she is trying to embrace how she believes her character and others in the show’s time period would have handled the situation.
“I think that people [in the 1950s] were better at giving some degree of space to their children,” she says. “So I’d like to say that I learned from this time period, but I have not learned, and I’m going to try and continue to educate myself.”
Meanwhile, Aaron — who plays the titular character’s mother-in-law, Shirley Maisel — has learned why her mother always told her, “I’m not your friend, you have lots of friends, I’m your mother.”
“For me, I always wanted to be popular with my children,” Aaron says, with Hinkle agreeing. “[Hinkle and I] want them to like us, and to want to be with us, and to spend time with us.”
“And what I’ve learned from Shirley,” she continues, “is that it’s not even a question that they like us. They have to like us, they have to love us. And I don’t need to spend as much time as I do trying to make my children happy. Shirley doesn’t try and make her children happy. She just thinks, ‘You should be happy. You’re loved, you have food in your belly, and a roof over your head.’”
Even with that knowledge, she knows that her kids expect much more from her than a meal. Growing up, she says she and her peers “weren’t allowed” to be depressed. But now, her kids’ feelings are “the foreground of their lives.” If that were the case for Shirley’s son Joel, she says there’s no way she would put up with that.
“I’ve learned from Shirley that if I treat my children the way Shirley treats Joel, they would go and divorce me,” she says. “That’s for sure.”
Well, what we know for sure is that there are undoubtedly more parenting insights sprinkled throughout this season. And while we are sad to see the hit series come to an end, we are grateful for all the final laughs and lessons.
These Hollywood parents are an absolute hoot.
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