Mila Kunis Gets Super Honest About The Parenting Mistakes That Terrify Us

Mila Kunis opens up about parenting mistakes

Parenthood is terrifying. This is a small detail most people leave out when they’re talking about their kids and life as a mom or dad. At the end of the day, we’re all just amazed that we’re keeping these beings alive. Mila Kunis recently opened up to Babble about a parenting “mistake” that left her terrified.

She was preparing for a small road trip to visit husband Ashton Kutcher at work. She dilegently prepared for her first solo-road trip with baby as any mom would. “You have to pack all this stuff up in anticipation of everything going horribly wrong with the first baby,” Kunis told Babble. “And I was like, ‘I did it.’ I put her in the car. Like, I high-five myself. [As] I’m driving down the 101, I was like ‘Oh my God, I’m doing really good today.’”

“She was being really quiet, and I was like, ‘Oh, let me look in the rearview mirror to make sure everything’s okay,’” Kunis explained. “And I look, and she’s happy as can be, but just not nearly strapped in.”

She prepped everything and loaded up the car but forgot one small detail: to actually buckle in her baby. “I was like, oh, f*ck me,” Kunis remembers. “And I’m on the 101, and she’s just like blah, like fine in her car seat, nothing, no strap whatsoever. And I think I just turned white.”

We’ve all been there, haven’t we? Maybe not with the carseat, but there’s always something that makes you feel like how the hell am I going to keep this baby alive?

When my first child was two days old, the hospital pediatrician made a special visit to my bedside, as I’m sure is the practice to do for all new mothers, to let me know if I brought my son in bed with us, I would roll over on top of him and smother him to death in his sleep. “Just don’t do it. Awful things that I won’t even mention could happen,” she said. More awful than smothering him to death in his sleep? Jesus. I was introduced to the sheer terror of motherhood that day, when that doctor casually mentioned that something I could do would actually put my child in danger. It may sound ridiculous, but that simply hadn’t occurred to me before.

There are little details every day that we can possibly miss. It’s why parents are so high strung, and it’s a panic you don’t understand until you, too, have a human to keep alive.

I once had my front airbag replaced due to a recall. For some reason, even though no work was being done in the backseat, the mechanics unbuckled my then two-year-old’s carseat. I didn’t even think to check that, because why would anyone do that, leave the seat in the same position, and move on? They weren’t even working in the backseat! About four days after I got the airbag replaced, I was strapping my daughter in and thought the seat felt a little wiggly. It was the first time I’d noticed in four days. That’s right, for four days I was driving around with my toddler strapped into a seat that wasn’t actually secured to the backseat of the car.

Awesome. And there are a several dozen more anecdotes where that came from. Parenthood is a shit-show.

“Lo and behold,” Kunis told Babble, “A year later, like two, three weeks ago, a month ago, I came to get Wyatt out of the backseat of the car, and my husband [had] put her in. And so, I went in to get her out … I opened the car door, and she’s not strapped in whatsoever. And I was like thank God … I wasn’t alone.”

Yup. It happens to the best of us.