Christina Applegate Says Having MS Has Changed Her as a Parent: ‘It’s Heartbreaking’ to Say ‘I Can’t’ (Exclusive)

‘Dead to Me’ actress, diagnosed with MS in 2021, misses dancing with daughter and picking her up from school: ‘It’s a loss for her too’

Christina Applegate says living with multiple sclerosis means she can’t always be the mom she wants to be to her 13-year-old daughter Sadie.

“She had to see the loss of her mother, the way I was a mom with her,” Applegate, 52, tells PEOPLE in this week’s cover story. “Dance with her every day. Pick her up from school every day. He works in his school, he works in the library. To be present outside the house, outside your bed. She doesn’t see those things anymore. This is a loss for her as well. And we’re both learning as we go.”

Christina Applegate and her daughter Sadie Grace LeNoble at the Emmy Awards on January 15, 2024.

John Salangsang/Invision for the Television Academy/AP Images

Applegate, who launches a new podcast, MeSsy, on March 19 with close friend Jamie-Lynn Sigler, says there are times when her MS symptoms are so painful and overwhelming that she can’t be with her daughter, who she shares with husband Martyn LeNoble.

Applegate and Sigler’s new podcast MeSsy debuts March 19.

Production of wires

“He’ll come into the room and if he sees me lying on my side, he knows he can’t ask me to do anything,” says Applegate, who was diagnosed with MS in June 2021 while filming her Netflix series Dead to me. “And it breaks me, it breaks me. Because I like doing things for my child. I like to prepare food for her. I love bringing it to her. I love it all, and sometimes I just can’t. But I’m trying. I am trying.”

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Sigler, 42, who was first diagnosed with multiple sclerosis — a chronic disease that affects the central nervous system — more than two decades ago, faced similar challenges as a mother to her two sons, Beau, 10, and Jack, 6, with whom she with husband Cutter Dykstra.

Jamie Lynn Sigler with her husband Cutter Dykstra and their sons Jack (left) and Beau.

Courtesy of Jamie-Lynn Sigler

“My children only know me with MS. But there were a lot of moments as a mom that I had to leave to someone else, and that was very difficult,” The Soprano family says the actress. “It was hard for me to feel like I wasn’t everything to them.”

Sigler says she’s often too tired to play pileball or basketball with her boyfriends. “There are other ways we can work with each other and we have found that. But as a mom, you want to do everything,” she says. “When I pick up my kids from school, most of the time I just park, wait in the parking lot and wave to them. Every other mom stands up and waits for her children with open arms when they run out the door. And my children will come and walk to me. And while that’s fine…I want to be that mom, and I want to do those things, and it’s hard.”

And sometimes, Sigler says, other parents don’t want to let their kids in their car. They are afraid because I have MS,” she says. “I would never drive if it wasn’t safe for my children. But there are moments like that that you run into, just as a human being, that are really hard.”

For Applegate, the ride can be scary, but she still wants to do what she can for Sadie. “I try to take her to the bus stop in the morning… but if she sees my hands shaking, she doesn’t want me to drive her. She gets very nervous about it,” he says.

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But one recent morning, when Sadie missed the bus and no one else was home, Applegate had to drive her 25 minutes to school. “I haven’t driven that far in three years,” she says. “I didn’t drive for more than eight minutes. Because I’m afraid. I’m afraid. But this morning it was just the two of us, and she was in the car, holding her hand, and she said, ‘Mom, I can tell you’re nervous.’ We drove down the hill almost giggling about it, because both my hands were 10-and-2, my shoulders were in my ears. She says, ‘Mom, you’re driving me crazy!’ And we just laughed about it.”

One of the hardest things about living with the disease, Applegate says, is knowing that it’s not going away.

“This is forever,” Applegate says. “It’s heartbreaking when you have to tell your child, ‘I can’t.’ As a mother, that is the worst feeling in the world. You are their protector in life. When you have to say, ‘I can’t,’ it tears your soul apart. It drives me crazy every day.”

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Source: HIS Education