“Orange is the New Black” alum Laura Prepon had fought bulimia and won. Still, this does not mean everything is all rosy afterward.
In a new book, she revealed that her experiences after her bulimia struggle had been both quite intense and healing at the same time. Most of these revolved around her deeper exploration of her relationship with her mom and how this is affecting her as a mother to her own children.
Prepon is usually very private, so her interviews are few and far between. However, she did not hold nothing back in her own book, “You and I, as Mothers: A Raw and Honest Guide to Motherhood.” The actress, 40, already a mother of 2, shared everything in this book, from her loss of pregnancy to motherhood.
In the book, she wrote that she was out of the house so much while she was young that she never really got to evaluate her life or her childhood. She never felt the need to, she wrote. However, her mom triggered her into confronting her past, and she realized that she experienced quite a lot of dysfunction. She’s using her childhood life to know what to pass down to her own children and what not to continue.
“When I looked back at that, I really started to realize that there was a lot of dysfunction that was passed down. There were a lot of amazing things, but there was also a lot of dysfunction,” she wrote. “Trying to come to terms with that now being a mother while trying to figure out what to continue and what to prevent from being passed down to my daughter was a real eye-opener for me,” she added.
She also wrote that she had an epiphany that her mom was not perfect. However, this came with a realization that everything her mom did was her way of raising and helping her.
She came about this by exploring how she was mothered and how her mother was mothered. It was an intense process for her to get down to what her life with mom was truly like and what kind of mothering she will do to her own children.
She sometimes questioned how her mother taught her certain things and how sometimes her mother’s actions were even damaging to her. She realized that her mom never meant anything bad for her, but it was only her way to help Laura reach success in life. “It’s a complicated relationship with your parents, especially with daughters and mothers. Some days it’s good and other days I have a hard time understanding,” she concluded.