Amy Adams Opens Up About 'Closet Crying' and Struggles as a New Mom: 'Wanting So Badly to Be Good at Everything' (Exclusive)

Amy Adams is not shy about the realities of being a new mom.

The sunny actress is matter-of-fact about those often fraught early years as a mom, a topic she faces head-on in her new horror-comedy, Nightbitch.

“One of the things I really deeply identified with was not wanting to share with people that you were struggling, wanting to be like, 'No, I've got it under control. I can do it.’ Wanting so badly to be good at everything,” she recalls In this week’s issue of PEOPLE,

As for when Adams started to feel like herself again after giving birth to her daughter Aviana, now 14? “Last year?” laughs the actress, 50, who is married to artist Darren Le Gallo, 50.

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Related: Amy Adams' Daughter Aviana, 14, Makes Red Carpet Debut as Actress Talks Sharing New Movie with Her (Exclusive)

She’s joking, but that often destabilizing period is the inspiration for Nightbitch, in which her character, simply named Mother, is battling an imploded sense of self after welcoming her son. Unmoored and succumbing to animalistic instincts driven by the isolation of childcare—and an absent husband (Scoot McNairy) who blithely imparts to his wife that “happiness is a choice”—Mother seemingly starts morphing into an actual dog.

In her own life, going back to work a few months after having Aviana “was really surreal,” the six-time Oscar nominee recalls. While filming 2011’s The Muppets and promoting The Fighter, “I wasn’t sleeping because I was up with her at night,” she says. “I was tired, but also I felt so different. I know the world didn’t see me differently. But I felt it very internally that something had shifted.”

Over time the cracks began to surface. Adams recalls “watching it all sort of fall apart because I wasn’t communicating what I really needed…Just burning the candle at both ends until you can only do that for so long, and doing what I call closet crying. You never want anybody to see you cry, so I would cry in the closet, which just paints such a sad picture, but I don’t think I’m alone in that.” 

She found her footing again when Aviana was “about 3 or 4,” she says. She sat down with Le Gallo, whom she met in 2001 and married in 2015, to map out a better way forward.

“He stepped up a lot too,” she notes. “Once I got over my own shame at not being perfect at all of this, I really think I was able to have more open communication about not just what I needed but what I felt would benefit our family as a whole.”

Even today, “before I take a job, we sit down [as a family] and have a meeting: ‘Here’s what it will look like. Here’s the traveling. How do we feel about that?’ 

Adams has “always” involved her daughter in her work decisions, she adds. “We've been talking about it since she was quite young: 'How do you feel about spending a summer in Boston?' Or, 'How do you feel about coming to England with me when I do the play?' And I'm really lucky she's got a lot of wanderlust and she loves traveling."

In September, the family traveled to the Toronto International Film Festival together for the debut of Nightbitch, marking Aviana’s first time on the red carpet. “It was really great to share that with her,” says the proud mom.

“I get really nervous about public speaking, and she’s never been around me [in those moments]. She was like, ‘Mom, you do this all the time. You got this!’ She was supporting me, it was so sweet.”

For more of Amy Adams’s interview, pick up this week's issue of PEOPLE on newsstands Friday.

Read the original article on People