Motherhood Quote by Lisa Kudrow

Kudrow’s line lands because it’s both a confession and a small revolt against the way pop culture trivializes her labor. She’s not rejecting acting as craft; she’s rejecting the caricature of the actress: vain, unserious, perpetually “on.” The phrase “shove it out of my body” is doing heavy lifting. It frames performance not as a job you clock into, but as an invasive identity other people insist you wear even at home. That bodily language also hints at guilt: if acting is something embedded in you, trying to expel it reads like a penance.

Her most cutting move is the word “silly.” In a comedy star’s mouth, it’s almost weaponized. Kudrow built a career on being funny, yet she’s naming how “funny” gets converted into “frivolous” once it’s filtered through gendered expectations of motherhood. A father who acts is “dedicated”; a mother who acts can be imagined as self-absorbed, unserious, or unreliable. She’s anticipating that judgment and trying, briefly, to outmaneuver it.

There’s also a generational context: a woman who came up in an industry that routinely punished aging and motherhood is describing an old survival instinct. The quote exposes the double bind: society asks mothers to be fully present, then punishes them for having a self outside their children. Kudrow’s honesty makes the bind visible, and that visibility is the point.