Natalie Portman shares tender moment with her kids in sweet throwback photo
Natalie Portman's Mother's Day celebration is still going strong!
On Monday, the 38-year-old star shared on Instagram a sweet and, for her, unusual photo of herself with her two kids, daughter Amalia, 3, and son Aleph, 8. Normally, her social media is filled with snapshots from her acting career and vegan lifestyle.
In the intimate throwback, she holds her daughter, a baby at the time, and kisses her son's cheek as he wraps his arms around his mom. In the caption of the post, she revealed that the photo was taken by her husband, Benjamin Millepied, whom she married in 2012.
On Mother's Day itself, the Oscar winner honored her own mother, Shelley Stevens, on Instagram with a candid red carpet shot in which the pair are smiling from ear to ear.
"My first blessing in life was to be born to my mom," Portman wrote. "She is the most loving, caring, generous, cuddly, funny, smart, talented, creative person I could ever imagine getting to spend my childhood with."
Then she gushed about how her mother has influenced her own parenting: "Now I’m blessed by my kids who turned me into a mom and make me smile and laugh every single day — and who make me appreciate my mom even more for all the invisible things she did for me that I realize now as I try to live up to her mothering."
Seeing such a private glimpse into the mother of two's life might surprise fans, but Portman loves challenging expectations, she revealed to TODAY's Willie Geist in a 2019 interview.
"There's this packaging of the female, young pop star, and I had a similar thing as an actress where I felt like ... 'Oh, she's the smart, serious one,'" she said. "It made people have this image of me that was not necessarily what I felt like."
To subvert this idea, Portman starred in the viral "Natalie Raps" video from "Saturday Night Live" back in 2006.
"You always can find the most humor in breaking expectations, she quipped.