It doesn’t matter if you have one baby or a dozen: being a parent is hard, full stop. With that being said, having more kids does make it more challenging. With each new baby, you have twice as many meltdowns, twice as many mouths to feed, and, somehow, 14 times as many messes to clean up. Even if you have help around the house like Alec Baldwin and Hilaria Baldwin, it can be challenging. The 30 Rock alum opened up about this in an episode of The Baldwins, premiering Feb. 23, where he shared that he’s at his “breaking point” with seven kids at home (plus one moved out!).
In a clip from the first episode, per PEOPLE, Hilaria and Alec talk about the 66-year-old’s obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).
“Alec has OCD. People throw the term OCD around, very casually,” she said. “‘Oh my God, I love to have my closets so organized. I’m so OCD.’ OCD is a real thing that’s really hard.”
And for Alec, his OCD manifests when things get really messy. “Five or more kids is like the breaking point,” he quipped in the episode. “It’s like constant attacks on the tidiest problem.”
OCD “is often a long-lasting disorder in which a person has uncontrollable, reoccurring thoughts (obsessions), and behaviors (compulsions) that he or she feels the urge to repeat over and over,” per the National Institute of Mental Health. It’s a condition that affects 2.5 million adults, and commonly centers around cleanliness, contact with germs, and other themes. Celebrities like David Beckham and Leonardo DiCaprio have also opened up about living with OCD.
It would be hard enough to parent seven children at home, but to do it with OCD? We don’t blame hit at all for hitting his breaking point. In the clip, a producer sympathized with Alec living with seven kids (and eight animals) and Hilaria responded, “Yes, it was a curious choice that he made.”
The Saturday Night Live alum has opened up about OCD in the past, linking it to growing up with five siblings. “I walked out of that house with almost crippling OCD,” he told NPR in 2017. “Like I’d be standing in the hallway of my apartment in New York and the driver was downstairs and I needed to get into the car now, like right now, or I was going to miss my flight, and I’d be making sure that all the books were stacked neatly on the table in the entry hall of my apartment. I’d be sitting there literally with my thumbs squeezing the books so all the seams were right and the books were stacked just so, and whoever was primary in my life would be looking at me like, ‘You’re kidding, right? You realize we’re going to miss the flight.’ I’d be like, ‘Excuse me?’”
Alec added, “I didn’t realize it was all coming out of this house of mine, which was just a hurricane and a mess all the time, because my mother just didn’t have the energy to clean up after six kids all the time.”
Alec and Hilaria share daughters Carmen Gabriela, 11, María Lucía Victoria, 4, and Ilaria Catalina Irena, 2, and sons Rafael Thomas, 9, Leonardo Ángel Charles, 8, Romeo Alejandro David, 6, and Eduardo “Edu” Pao Lucas, 4. Alec also shares daughter Ireland Baldwin, 29, with ex-wife Kim Basinger. Despite dealing with the stress and triggers to his OCD from so many kids, Alec apparently wants even more.
“He’s always asking me for more kids,” Hilaria told PEOPLE earlier this month. Alec confirmed it when he told the reporter, “Don’t judge me.”
“I don’t really want one,” he added. But still, “every now and then, when the baby gets older and grows up to be about 2, I look at [Hilaria] and I go, ‘Time to have another.'”
“They’re so cute,” Hilaria said. “But my body’s really tired.”
Before you go, check out these hot, famous dads.
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