Rationalizing that most pilots don't tend to get picked up, and if they do, they usually run for just a couple of episodes, she auditioned for and got the part, and then put it out of her mind. The next month, she was stunned to hear that the show was picked up, her husband's show was picked up, and she was pregnant with their son, George, now five months old. "And I thought, 'Oh my gosh, this kind of chaotic life I was trying to avoid is now really rearing its head,'" she says.
"If this kind of success had happened in my thirties or my twenties, when I was really hoping to have a big success, it would have been a much different thing," says Kaczmarek. "Because now my life is so focused on my kids and my husband and my family life, the show is like this wonderful ... hobby. It's not the be-all and end-all for me. It's this lovely little blessing that has happened in my life, as opposed to everything I've been living for."
Kaczmarek loves the character of Lois, and no, she didn't grow up with a mother like that - at least not entirely. "My mother is highly educated and a very classy, eloquent woman," she says. "But there is an element of Lois that reminds me of my mom, which is that she didn't have time to mess around. My mother raised four children with no help, as most of our mothers did. There's something about Lois that hearkens back to the fifties or sixties when women just raised kids, and nobody helped them, and they were always in a hurry. So this character comes very easily to me, because she's kind of a combination of a lot of those mothers that I remember in Milwaukee."