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How Catherine O’Hara Taught Me Everything I Need to Know About Motherhood
Published 2/4/26
Remembrance
Motherhood can sometimes feel like a continuous string of identity crises. Each phase brings new challenges and with each of them we sort of have to find ourselves over and over again. Who am I now? With these demands? With these circumstances? There are plenty of books and courses out there to guide us through, but I have found some support in a less direct place. Movies! Shows! I need a little humor to soften the blow that comes with every new wave of motherhood overwhelm. It feels heavy! Help! Then on from stage left comes Catherine O’Hara.
When I saw the news of her passing last week all of her mom roles flashed through my mind. I realized she really has been a guiding light for me in my motherhood, as silly as that might sound. But she helped me feel seen and less insane through it all. She normalized stuff before it was cool to normalize stuff.
My favorite video going around of her now is a clip of her being asked what her favorite role has been. She responds, “Mother to my children.”
There’s a certain kind of relief that comes from watching a Catherine O’Hara mom on screen. Not because she’s calm, or nurturing, or doing everything “right”. It’s because she isn’t. She’s anxious, dramatic, loving in strange ways, occasionally selfish, deeply devoted, and very, very human. And somehow, in all her extremes, she feels familiar.
Catherine O’Hara doesn’t play idealized mothers. She plays real ones, or at least the ones we recognize in ourselves on our best days, our worst days, and all the messy days in between.
Take Moira Rose from Schitt’s Creek. On paper, Moira is an emotionally distant, fashion-obsessed former soap star who seems wildly unqualified for motherhood. And yet. Beneath the wigs and mispronunciations is a woman who loves her children fiercely, even if she doesn’t always know how to show it. She struggles to connect, stumbles through vulnerability, and sometimes chooses self-preservation first, something many mothers quietly recognize but rarely admit feeling tempted by. Moira reminds us that love doesn’t always look soft or sentimental. Sometimes it looks awkward. Sometimes it wears couture.
Then there’s Kate McCallister from Home Alone, the mom who forgets her child. The ultimate nightmare. And yet Kate isn’t careless, she’s overwhelmed. Desperate even. She’s managing a chaotic household, extended family dynamics, travel logistics, expectations, and mental load before we even had a name for it. Her panic, guilt, and relentless determination to get back to Kevin taps into something universal: the fear that we’ll fail our kids in a way that really matters, and the lengths we’ll go to make it right.
Even her animated roles, like the anxious, overbearing, deeply loving moms she voices, echo the same theme: mothers who worry too much, love too hard, and don’t always get the balance right. But man we are trying so hard!
What makes Catherine O’Hara’s portrayals resonate is that none of these women are framed as villains or saints. They’re allowed to be contradictory. They can be self-involved and sacrificial. Exhausted and devoted. Clueless one moment and deeply intuitive the next. Just like real mothers. They show that moms aren’t just moms, they are human.
In a culture that often demands motherhood be either aspirational or tragic, Catherine O’Hara gives us something far more comforting: permission to be imperfect. To laugh at our shortcomings. To love our kids deeply even when we don’t know what we’re doing. To be works in progress.
Her mom characters don’t tell us how to mother better. They remind us that motherhood itself is messy, evolving, and deeply personal, and that there’s room to be ourselves in it. That there’s not only one right way to be or to do things.