Julia Louis-Dreyfus Says Being a Mom on ‘Seinfeld’ Was ‘Super Challenging’

Motherhood is hard enough when you’re not hooked on Shanghai Sally.

Elaine Benes is one of the most brilliant characters in sitcom history, in part because of how the Seinfeld writers managed to avoid most of the tropes that plagued women on TV. On Seinfeld, Elaine is an independent, self-possessed, sexually adventurous and entirely selfish businesswoman who doesn’t have time for serious romantic entanglements and certainly has no plans of becoming a mother. 

Whereas most sitcoms featuring a single woman will inevitably force upon her a plot line about how she wants to have a baby, or she’s having a baby unexpectedly, or she becomes so baby crazy that she accidentally kidnaps someone else’s baby (somehow, that one was 30 Rock), the closest Seinfeld ever got to turning Elaine into a mom was the time she dated a guy who’d had a vasectomy and made him get it reversed, only to dump him in the very next episode.

But while Elaine was happily indulging in the child-free, career woman lifestyle, Julia Louis-Dreyfus was busy “having it all” in the Liz Lemon sense, as she and her husband Brad Hall started their family while Seinfeld was still going. On an episode of Be My Guest with Ina Garden, Dreyfus discussed the difficulties of balancing motherhood with the demands of starring in the world’s most important sitcom, saying that juggling the two responsibilities was one of the biggest challenges of her career.

During the conversation, Louis-Dreyfus said that show business hasn’t been the most amenable industry for family-rearing, saying, “While I was making Seinfeld, for example, I gave birth to both of my children. Super challenging, but also fabulous, because I was becoming very famous at this time and it really kept all of that in perspective.”

For instance, Louis-Dreyfus recalled, Seinfeld had to shoot around her pregnancy during the making of Season Three, as she explained, “I stood behind things, I carried boxes, etc.,” a strategy that can be seen in the episode “The Keys,” the final one to be filmed before the birth of her first son Henry and one in which furniture and laundry baskets conspicuously conceal Elaine’s torso every time she’s on screen.

However, and as many parents have found to be true across industries, people cared a lot less the second time Louis-Dreyfus was pregnant on the job. “By the time I was pregnant the second time, nobody cared,” the actress recalled. “It was like it wasn’t happening. We just sort of — I walked in, I was out to here, and no one said anything.”

With all due respect to Louis-Dreyfus’ first born, maybe they saw the older son and didn’t think the next one would be all that “breathtaking.”