On the latest episode of Kelly Ripa’s Let’s Talk Off Camera podcast, celebrity guests Christina Applegate and Jamie-Lynn Sigler had an honest conversation about the reality of raising kids as parents with MS.
Christina, 53, revealed that she’d been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2021, and she’s since been incredibly open about how she’s navigating living with the autoimmune disease.
And while The Sopranos star Jamie-Lynn, 44, has lived with MS for over two decades, she didn’t publicly speak about it until fairly recently out of fear that it would take the “joy out of” her job.
While discussing their experiences with MS on Kelly’s podcast this week, both Christina and Jamie-Lynn opened up about how it impacts their kids. For context, Jamie-Lynn has two sons, 11-year-old Beau and 7-year-old Jack, with her husband, Cutter Dykstra, while Christina shares a 14-year-old daughter named Sadie with her husband, Martyn LeNoble.
After noting that she only gets up in the morning because of Sadie, Christina said, “She’s the reason I’m still here and trying.”
Christina then revealed a comment that Sadie recently made during a fight that had left her devastated. “We got in a big thing the other day. Sorry, Sadie, but it has to be said. She says, ‘I miss who you were before you got sick,’” she recalled as Jamie-Lynn and Kelly sighed empathetically.
“That’s just like, knife to the heart. ‘Cause I miss who I was before I got sick, too. Very much so. Every day of my life, it’s such a loss,” she said before getting emotional. “See, now I’m gonna cry,” she added.
Jamie-Lynn then revealed that her two kids respond to her MS in “very different ways.” “My older son, he looks at me like, ‘You’re gonna beat this thing one day, mom,’” she detailed. “He congratulates me all the time for how hard I work, he tells me I’m doing amazing, he’s my cheerleader.”
“My little one hates it. He’s mad that I can’t run like all the other moms, he points out all the time that I walk like an old lady,” she said, before noting that she finds this response “healthy” and completely welcomes it.
“I want him to be able to express himself with me; I don’t want him to feel bad because of how he feels about this, because it affects our entire family,” she explained.