Sarah Jessica Parker on having it all

There’s far more to Sarah Jessica Parker than Carrie Bradshaw. Chrissy Iley talks movies, marriage, and motherhood with the star.

There’s an instant kinship when you meet Sarah Jessica Parker. All she has to say is, “How are you?” and she oozes empathy.

She has an uncanny ability to relate to vulnerability, whether you’re single in Manhattan or juggling a job, kids and a husband, as she does in her new movie, I Don’t Know How She Does It.

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Throwing off her Giuseppe Zanotti patent leather shoes in her New York hotel room, she gives off a hint of tiredness and jokes that the geranium red corset-bodiced Oscar de la Renta dress will be returned tomorrow. “You can wear it next,” she says.

As an actress, playing “everywoman” is Sarah’s stock in trade. I don’t know how she does it and I’m sure many have asked her that question countless times, long before she was in a movie with the same title.

“People have,” she says in a half-purr, half-giggle. “I always talk about all the other women with far less support than me who do it because they have to, rather than because it’s something they want to do. And that’s one of the things I love in this movie.

“We are telling the story of a woman who isn’t wealthy at all. She’s worked hard in what is considered a male-dominated business [finance] and she’s also a devoted mother. It is many women’s story and other women do it in a far more heroic way than I,” Sarah says with typical self-deprecation.

The question is not only how you do it, but why? If you don’t have to juggle career, children and husband for financial reasons why choose to? “The beauty of the times we live in is that we do have choices,” Sarah says.

“For me, it has been hard to say no. I wanted a family and I was a career person. I tried to marry those two things; sometimes it’s successful and sometimes it’s not,” she says.

It must have been quite an adjustment. Sarah was famous for playing the world’s most famous single woman, constantly looking for love and making bad choices as Carrie in Sex And The City.

She was born in Nelsonville, Ohio, 46 years ago and has been married to 49-year-old Matthew Broderick for 14 years.

It was quite a leap for women identifying with Carrie and her single-girl lifestyle when, in 2002, she became pregnant with James Wilkie, now nine.

As Carrie, she was accessorised with increasingly large tote bags to hide the baby bump during filming.

Was it a big adjustment for Sarah? “It wasn’t,” she says. “I stopped working a year after James Wilkie was born, so I had a nice amount of time with him. I think a bigger adjustment than becoming a mother has been to go from one to three children.

“In retrospect, one child seems a cake walk compared to where I stand today. My children are a great blessing and I love them. They are the main source of all the joy in my life.”

After the couple had struggled to conceive, twin daughters Marion Loretta Elwell and Tabitha Hodge, nicknamed Kitty and Babe, arrived in June 2009 via a surrogate, using eggs that Sarah had had frozen and Matthew’s sperm.

Did she know they would be welcoming twins? “No, we didn’t,” she says emphatically, the shock still clearly resonating. “We didn’t know. We understood that it was a possibility.

“We were just hopeful that we had one healthy child and everything else was the cherry on the sundae. It was a wonderful surprise,” Sarah says.

Was it different meeting your children rather than giving birth to them?

“It is definitely a different preparation experience,” says Sarah. Surrogacy, she reveals, wasn’t her preferred choice.

“I would give birth as often as I could,” she says. “I loved all the aspects of my pregnancy with our son —’ the good and the bad.”

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A few years ago, I read that she said Matthew was a complicated person and they have had a sometimes bumpy ride as a couple. “I wouldn’t say that’s entirely true,” Sarah says.

“We’ve been together for 20 years. You have good days, you have decent days and you have bad days. That’s a marriage. That’s a relationship. That’s a friendship.”

I Don’t Know How She Does It was released nationally on November 3.

Read more of this story in the November issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly.