Brooklyn Decker Has Also Hidden From Her Kids To Drink Wine In Peace

As a mom of two young kids, Brooklyn Decker is all too familiar with feeling absolutely desperate for a little alone time in a year of stay-at-home orders and school closures. And like so many other parents, Decker has also hidden from her kids at least once during the pandemic. The mom of two, who currently stars in Netflix's Grace & Frankie, tells Romper in a recent phone interview she once escaped to her pantry to drink wine in peace.

"I'm not gonna lie, I've hidden in my pantry drinking a bottle of wine just to hide from my family," Decker admits. "I've had those moments. And in talking to my friends, while they might be placating me, I feel like they have too."

Decker and her friends aren't alone. In fact, it's anecdotes like this and Decker's honest and candid depiction of motherhood that's endeared her to mothers everywhere. In a year that has been wildly chaotic for parents at best, parents across the country have confessed to locking themselves in bathrooms, laundry rooms, garages, basements, even their cars in search of a few precious moments of solitude.

"It's been incredibly challenging," Decker says of her experience parenting son Hank, 5, and daughter Stevie, 3, during the ongoing pandemic. "It's chaos. I mean, I have no control over my household. I'm trying to be a teacher, which I'm terrible at. Yeah, it's a wild period of time."

The endless amount of time Decker has spent cooped up inside with her kids this year is why the actress has teamed up with Febreze to promote their new Fade Defy Plugin. "We're inside all the time right now and we're doing a lot of at-home workouts, we're doing a lot of cooking, laundry is piling up the messes are mounting and the house gets a little funky," Decker says. "As a mom of toddlers, this is one thing that makes me feel like my house is fresh, even if it's absolutely not."

But challenges, chaos, and laundry piles aside, Decker and husband Andy Roddick are, like many parents, trying to focus on positives amid the pandemic. "We're really trying to reframe it in our minds as an opportunity to slow down and spend time with family," Decker says. "We're lucky to have a roof over our heads and have our health, so we feel really lucky to have this time."

Of course, that doesn't mean Decker doesn't have off days. Days where she'd maybe like to escape to the pantry with a glass of Chardonnay. But lucky for Decker, Roddick has come up with a sweet way to take the edge off. "I was just having one of those self-pitying days where it felt like we were never going to get out of this thing and my husband was like, 'let's have a dance party,'" Decker says. "It felt so good to move my body and for the kids to see us all happy and dancing and they were moving [too] and it just really turned the whole day around."

The actress says living room dance parties have since become a way her family resets whenever they need a burst of energy or start to feel bogged down by life. "I think it's great for anyone to sort of like let go of whatever it is that they're freaking out about understandably, and then put on music and dance," she says. "It's been a really good problem solver for us."