EARTH MOTHER
SHE’S AN ACCLAIMED ACTOR, ENTREPRENEUR AND NOW AUTHOR, BUT TERESA PALMER IS AS GROUNDED AS THEY COME
Teresa Palmer on family, fame and fighting for what’s important.
To the set, Palmer brings with her the happy chaos of children and travel, work and domesticity she shares with her one million followers. Although she arrived in Australia at midnight the night before with her husband, film director Mark Webber, three of the four children they raise together and none of their luggage, which was lost in transit, she shows up on time with no entourage – just six-year-old Bodhi in tow. She is bright-eyed and clear-skinned, her blonde hair unkempt but somehow perfect. Both of them are wearing thongs. Webber arrives later with Forest, three, and baby Poet, who needs to be fed between shots. The day is long and hot, but Palmer stays to chat for a while afterwards, even though the family are getting back on a plane that night to fly home to their farm in Adelaide.
All day, Palmer is exactly the person her followers would perceive her to be: warm, funny and kind – the sort of person who would write, on the last day of 2019, beside a picture of herself on a Bahamian beach with a bristly, pink-nosed pig: “What a beautiful day to spend with my favourite people in the world; laughing, connecting and feeling as happy as I can remember feeling... PS. That pig is legit smiling, I think he knows I don’t eat [meat].”
But what her posts don’t show – what Instagram can’t show – is the work. How relentlessly she has toiled and for how long to create the life she has as an internationally soughtafter actor, a wife, a mother. The effort it must take to live the way she does – not just logistically, but with joy and gratitude. Of course, she is beautiful and talented, but nothing has come easily to Palmer.
She is not the one to say so during our conversation, which takes place a week or so after the shoot and begins with a cascade of apologies because Palmer has miscalculated the time difference between Sydney and Adelaide and calls an hour late. But she is open about the challenges: she is trying to get Poet to sleep while she is on the phone. It is a Wednesday – the day she tries to take off to spend with Webber, based on their joint philosophy that “we are the trunk of the tree and the branches are the children. If the trunk isn’t functioning, the tree won’t stand.”
In practical terms, she says, “That means carving out time to connect and show up for each other.”
Her approach to motherhood is similarly mindful, describing her parenting philosophy as: “Being as gentle with our kids, giving them boundaries, being compassionate and having adventures – keeping it light and loving.” She adds: “I’m the best mum I can be when I’m open and not rigid in my ideas.”
As an individual, Palmer tries to be like her own mother, who she is intensely close to and brings with her when they travel to help with the children. “I always try to meet people with love and compassion first and foremost, and to treat everyone in a kind and gracious way, no matter who they are or where they come from. My mother is the most gentle, loving, soft, kind-hearted and selfless person I’ve ever met – I’m always striving to be like her in that sense and follow her example.”
Palmer grew up in Adelaide, for much of her childhood in public housing. She was an only child and her mother, who was divorced from Palmer’s father, struggled with mental illness. It made her independent then, and now as an adult, vigilant about her own mental health. “I have been really conscious of my own thoughts [because] of the environment I grew up in. I just knew a lot about it from a really young age. Mark calls me a perpetual optimist but it’s just that I’m hyper aware of how I’m doing. The moment I feel a dip, I tend to myself so I can keep giving the way I need to, both to my family and to myself… I remind myself to listen to my cues, check in and ask, ‘What do I need right now?’ If I’m feeling low or my energy is waning because of broken sleep, I take a moment to meditate, have a bath or go for a quiet walk to recharge.” All of it was on her way to saying, “What a gift that is, to have the kind of mum I had growing up.”
Palmer always wanted to act and started contacting agents in the US when she was a high-schooler whose only work experience was in a fast-food restaurant. “I had ambitions when I was a teenage girl. I wanted to be a professional actress but I didn’t think it could ever be a possibility, I figured it might be a side passion. I just felt like I had to act.”
At 19, she bought a one-way ticket to LA and moved there alone. “I really didn’t have a specific goal. I just kept plugging away and, at some point, I realised it was getting easier... I had a body of work behind me and was not having to fight as hard for roles.” She went on to star in productions such as Warm Bodies,
Point Break, Hacksaw Ridge, the TV series A Discovery Of Witches, which has just shot its second season, and last year’s Ride Like
A Girl, directed by Rachel Griffiths. “On almost every project, there’s a female I connect with, the one who will inspire me as hardworking and true to what they believe in, gracious and happy to be there,” Palmer says. “Rachel is one of those people.”
While notching up acting credits, Palmer met Webber, tweeting about a film he made and tagging him. They exchanged a few more, eventually started emailing, then met in real life. “We both just knew,” says Palmer, who was 26 at the time. “This is it. Home. Eight months later, I was pregnant.”
Instagram is a curated version of a celebrity’s life. The highlight reel. That is what everyone says; life can’t possibly look like that. And it’s true. Except, Teresa Palmer’s life looks exactly like that.
Motherhood was Palmer’s other ambition, one that pre-dated acting. “Before she died, my nanna – who was someone I was incredibly close to – said she was happy for my career but ‘The thing I know you want the most in life is to be a mother and that will be your greatest joy’. She knew me better than anyone and she was right. She knew that was the ultimate dream.” Motherhood and, specifically, a large family.
Palmer’s first pregnancy came easily but adjusting to the role didn’t: “I had been preparing for motherhood, wanting it my whole life, but it was still a shake-up – all-encompassing, overwhelming, life-changing and at times isolating.” Loneliness, she says, doesn’t discriminate. “It can hit anyone, no matter how shiny their life appears from the outside. I’ve never met a mother who hasn’t experienced it.”
When Bodhi was18 months old, Palmer conceived again but the pregnancy ended in miscarriage: “I thought I was broken for life and would never have another baby,” she says. And if mothering a newborn is isolating, miscarriage is another level of alone. “It has been a taboo subject. Women aren’t encouraged to speak about how confusing, heart-wrenching and devastating it can be.” It was, in large part, finding other women who’d been through the same thing and hearing their stories that helped Palmer grieve. So when she and fellow actress and friend Sarah Wright Olsen were asked to write Zen Mamas, a book based on the Your Zen Mama parenting site they co-founded, she was keen to include a chapter on pregnancy loss. “The more we talk with one another, the more we realise that this is a very normal part of the journey to conceive and it is important to grieve it,” she says.
The book, out this month, is beautiful – the images of Palmer and Wright Olsen and their collective tribe is beyond Insta – but it is also funny and very real, and Palmer says the idea of writing it was utterly terrifying. “Only because I thought, ‘Who am I to write a book? I don’t have any expertise. I’m just a mum.’ But then I realised maybe that’s what will make it accessible. It felt really overwhelming [and] at times I felt like I was stretched very thin.”
Stretched thin is an understatement – on top of acting, Palmer co-founded Lovewell, a plantbased nutrition company. So Palmer co-wrote
Zen Mamas while waiting for the children to come out of school, in the bath and while in early labour with Poet. She wrote “on a road trip, me on my laptop, kids in the back while Mark drove an RV each day for eight hours up the coast of America”. It sounds exhausting, yet Palmer says, “It was therapeutic and amazing. The words flowed out very freely because I was so passionate about it becoming the kind of book I wished I had read before having my children.”
The intention with both the book and the website was to create a community “that draws together women who are like-minded and willing to go deeper, without judgement or negativity,” Palmer says. It would sound lofty coming from anyone who hasn’t been subjected to judgement by so many strangers. Palmer has been criticised for breastfeeding her children for too long and when she and her family became vegans – a decision they made at their older children’s encouragement. She’s also been criticised for advocating for the environment while doing so much flying.
On that point, Palmer says, “We are always going to be a travelling family.” Webber’s son Isaac and their work are in the US; home is here. “That’s just the way it is. But I love our planet and am becoming more committed to its wellbeing and aware of my footprint.” Now, every time the family flies they contribute to an organisation that plants a tree – one for each person. “It’s been really beautiful,” Palmer says, readily admitting that being able to live consciously is a privilege. There is no Goopy assumption that everyone could do the same. “Mark grew up as a homeless boy on the most violent streets of Philadelphia, so how to make these choices accessible is very much a part of our conversation,” she says. “I have far to go still and there is always more we can be doing, but it doesn’t need to be overwhelming.”
She’s also concerned about how to message climate issues to her children, especially as they get older. “There are aspects of the discussion that [Bodhi] has heard about at school that can be confronting. That is always the question: how much do we share with our kids?” But her guide is a quote from children’s TV host Mr Rogers. “He said, ‘When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’ We take solace in knowing we’ll always find people who are helping – fighting for change, campaigning for justice – so I feel hopeful,” Palmer says.
For the rest of it – the criticism of her work, her parenting, whichever – she has a quote for that, too: “When they go low, we go high.” Palmer says, “I definitely use the Michelle Obama philosophy. I say it to my friends all the time.” She even owns the T-shirt. “As a public person, I had to learn a long time ago that the only thing that matters is that I feel good about the decisions I’m making. I think you just have to do you. What works for you doesn’t work for someone else and that’s okay. Can we not just exist in this life without criticising each other?”
At some point, the topic returns to Instagram – the judgement it encourages, the way people can make their life look perfect by ensuring nothing ordinary or unbeautiful is caught in the frame. “It’s important to show all sides of our lives – the peaks and valleys,” Palmer says. “The more we can show vulnerability on social media, the less alone women will feel. I feel a sense of responsibility to use my platform to help create change and my area of passion is stripping down the barriers that are in place between people, highlighting the common threads that bind us.”
Yes, it would take work but then, Palmer has never been afraid of that.
“I’M THE BEST
mum I CAN BE WHEN I’M OPEN AND
not rigid IN MY IDEAS”
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