"I feel like I'm a stay-at-home mom, which I was for the five years before this. She's absolutely been my focus. That's the choice I made. Desperate Housewives is perfect for me. I get to go back to work and still be able to take my daughter to school and pick her up"
About this Quote
The subtext is negotiation. "That's the choice I made" reads like agency, but it also hints at the narrow menu of choices available to women in entertainment: work that consumes you, or work you decline and risk disappearing. When she calls Desperate Housewives "perfect", she isn't reviewing the script; she's praising an industrial arrangement. Network television, with its regimented production calendar and home-base shooting, becomes a rare machine that can accommodate domestic routine. The show is framed as an employer with benefits, not merely a creative opportunity.
There's also a clever inversion embedded here. Desperate Housewives was built on the spectacle of suburban motherhood as performance, a glossy satire of the home. Hatcher uses that very image to rebrand her own labor as responsible and appropriately feminine: she can be on-screen and still do school drop-off. In 2000s celebrity culture, where mothers were routinely judged for either leaving their kids or leaving the spotlight, the genius of her quote is its calm insistence that ambition can be logistical, not ideological. The fantasy isn't fame; it's a life that fits on a school schedule.
Quote Details
| Topic | Work-Life Balance |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Hatcher, Teri. (2026, January 15). I feel like I'm a stay-at-home mom, which I was for the five years before this. She's absolutely been my focus. That's the choice I made. Desperate Housewives is perfect for me. I get to go back to work and still be able to take my daughter to school and pick her up. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-feel-like-im-a-stay-at-home-mom-which-i-was-for-164598/
Chicago Style
Hatcher, Teri. "I feel like I'm a stay-at-home mom, which I was for the five years before this. She's absolutely been my focus. That's the choice I made. Desperate Housewives is perfect for me. I get to go back to work and still be able to take my daughter to school and pick her up." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-feel-like-im-a-stay-at-home-mom-which-i-was-for-164598/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"I feel like I'm a stay-at-home mom, which I was for the five years before this. She's absolutely been my focus. That's the choice I made. Desperate Housewives is perfect for me. I get to go back to work and still be able to take my daughter to school and pick her up." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-feel-like-im-a-stay-at-home-mom-which-i-was-for-164598/. Accessed 5 Feb. 2026.




