But despite her attempts to keep their marriage out of the public eye, not mentioning one’s spouse over the course of a two-hour interview is not a realistic goal, at least for Garner. Affleck, to her mild annoyance, seems to find it easier. “Ben asks me, ‘How come when I do an interview I manage to keep you out of it completely?’” she says. “And I’m like, ‘Either because you don’t think about me or because boy magazines don’t care about what I make you for dinner. But they should!’”
And then there’s the matter of the paparazzi. Photos of the Garner-Affleck clan—cheering at a Red Sox game, leaving the pediatrician’s office, hanging on the playground—are going to end up on the Web whether they like it or not. The situation is somewhat better in Boston, where “there are fewer of them, and they hide behind things, so my kids aren’t aware of them, which makes all the difference in the world,” Garner says. But in L.A., “if I try to go to the supermarket, the police come. We talked forever about leaving Los Angeles, but anywhere you go some dodo is going to buy a camera and start following you.”
If being married to a fellow celeb has taken some getting used to, motherhood seems to have come naturally to Garner. She calls breast-feeding “the coziest feeling in the whole world” and has bonded with the other moms at Violet’s school. “You feel so close to them so quickly because you’re going through the same thing,” she says. And then there’s the homemade baby food. “It’s a little over the top,” she admits. “And I tell myself, Just give her a jar of food and forget about it! Don’t be so precious! But it’s so easy—I just puree and freeze.”
According to Bradley Cooper, who played Garner’s best friend on Alias and also appears in Valentine’s Day, Garner was the mothering type long before Violet and Seraphina entered the picture. “She was one of the first people I met when I stepped onto Los Angeles soil,” he recalls. “And she was very maternal, even then. She wanted to take care of me, make sure I was okay all the time. The first time I saw her, I was in the production office when we were shooting the pilot, and this girl comes in, glowing. She had just baked cookies, which she was offering to me, and I was like, That is who’s playing Sydney Bristow?”
The most challenging part of parenthood, says Garner, has been balancing kids with career. It’s not a unique challenge, of course, and Garner is the first to point out that she has help—though she follows the admission with “Does that sound snotty, to say I have help?” But most working mothers aren’t required to relocate for months at a time whenever they land a job. That’s getting harder, now that Violet is in school. As they prepare to head home to Los Angeles in November, her elder daughter is “a little nervous about whether the girls at school will already have friends,” Garner says. “We thought we could take them anywhere until they were six, but I don’t know if that’s going to work out that way.”
