Parenting & Family Quote by Sheena Easton

Motherhood turns glamour into logistics, and Sheena Easton names the unphotogenic part out loud: leaving your kids doesn’t just sting, it grinds. The line works because it refuses the usual celebrity script where touring is framed as “blessed” and separation is softened into “missing them.” “Any time” widens the claim into a pattern, not a one-off bad day. “Have to” quietly removes choice, hinting at the trapdoor beneath professional success: even when you’re winning, obligations still own your calendar. The phrase “get on a plane” is a blunt little symbol of modern work - distance made routine, intimacy made intermittent.

“KInd of tortuous” is doing careful emotional labor. Easton doesn’t say “I’m devastated” or “I can’t handle it,” which would invite judgment or tabloid melodrama. She hedges just enough to stay socially legible, but the word “tortuous” spikes the sentence with disproportionate intensity, telling you the pain is real even if she’s trained to understate it. That contrast - a mild qualifier wrapped around a harsh adjective - captures the way working parents often speak: minimizing as a form of survival.

Context matters, too. Easton’s career was built in an era that sold female pop stars as polished, mobile, always available. This sentence pushes back against that frictionless image, insisting that the cost of being “on” is private, repetitive, and not remotely romantic.