What the Flicka: Felicity Huffman's Digital Wisteria Lane




She discovered, after having kids, that it was a tough job and there wasn't a lot of opportunity to talk about it. "There's no conversation for parenting, no one to say 'it's hard' to." When she finally met someone who could relate, she felt a strong sense of community — so she created that community for other moms online.

As the mom on Desperate Housewives, Huffman found a lot of fans connected with her character, Lynette. "Motherhood is a heroic profession and I wanted to keep that group going when Desperate Housewives ended."

Huffman herself writes some of the content on the site, injecting personal stories along with advice and resources. She also has mom bloggers and others contributing posts on everything from parenting to health and lifestyle, baby items and kids issues. Huffman calls it a "hanging room" for moms.

You'll see a mix of posts like "Humpday Cocktails" to articles like "Mom and Dad Calendars" where Huffman describes the "cocktail mix of guilt and self-recrimination" at leaving her kids behind when traveling. She offers tips she learned along the way for dealing with those issues.

When Huffman began the site, she wasn't on Twitter or Facebook and knew very little about social media. Now, she's learned to tweet so she can reach out to her community. "I love the people who follow me, I like to tweet. It's fun, I don't find it an imposition or invasive."

Huffman has also since learned how to use technology to multitask and organize her family. When we met with her, she was in New York as a spokesperson for Microsoft's Office 365 software. She explains as a busy mom she works constantly, and loves being able to grab 10 minutes while waiting on the carpool line, or picking up her daughter from dance class, and when she gets home, her documents and emails are updated on her desktop.

If you're wondering where the website's name came from, it's the childhood name her mother gave her — it means 'little girl' in Swedish.

Huffman's own kids are 10 and 12 and though they want them very badly, they don't have cellphones yet. "You lose them, the head goes down and they text all the time," Huffman laments, so she's holding out as long as possible.

Even though she has time to devote to the site and new projects, Huffman says it was sad saying goodbye to Desperate Housewives. She recounts how she recently saw on TV the scene where her character Lynette and Doug get back together, and "Doug (Savant) just acted the sh*t out of that. I thought, that's sweet, i just love them, even though I'm one of them."

Apparently, her husband William H. Macy loved them too. When she and her TV character were split up, Macy told her "I don't like this story line, why are they splitting up, why is this happening?"

Huffman says she was so lucky to be a part of it all.

Image by Mashable, Christina Warren; Screenshot courtesy of

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