New York City’s first lady, Chirlane McCray, didn’t much care for her new role as a mother after daughter Chiara was born — and looked for any excuse to keep away from her little girl.
In a startlingly frank confession, Mayor Bill de Blasio’s wife says she was unable to embrace motherhood and initially neglected Chiara, who last year dropped the bombshell that she was in treatment for abusing booze and pot.
“I was 40 years old. I had a life. Especially with Chiara — will we feel guilt forevermore? Of course, yes,” McCray told New York magazine for its cover story this week.
“But the truth is, I could not spend every day with her. I didn’t want to do that. I looked for all kinds of reasons not to do it.”
The disclosure — bound to horrify most moms — shatters the carefully crafted image of de Blasio’s close-knit family, which helped vault him into office.
McCray — who was pregnant with Chiara when she married de Blasio in 1994 — insisted: “I love her. I have thousands of photos of her — every 1-month birthday, 2-month birthday.
“But I’ve been working since I was 14, and that part of me is me. It took a long time for me to get into ‘I’m taking care of kids,’ and what that means,” she said.
The report doesn’t explain what turned McCray, 59, around, although it notes that she had “mostly assumed the role of default parent” when son Dante was born three years later.
That year, she temporarily stopped working full time as de Blasio began working for HUD and got into politics.
McCray also said that caring for her and de Blasio’s late moms, who moved into a house down the street from their Park Slope home in 2005, sharpened her commitment to her family.
In Chiara’s surprise Christmas Eve video confession, she let her parents off the hook for her alcohol and drug problems, which she blamed on “clinical depression” that she’s suffered since adolescence.
“My mom was trying really hard to help me, just like, you know, any little thing she could,” Chiara, 19, said in the video produced by her father’s campaign adman.
“I mean, my dad was doing the same, but obviously, he was really busy. But, you know, they were both very emotionally committed to trying to figure out some way to get me better.”
In the interview, McCray — an outspoken lesbian activist before marrying de Blasio — also took a shot at Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s best-selling “Lean In” advice for female leaders.
“I don’t think it’s about ‘leaning in.’ In this day and age, it comes down to improving life, for girls, especially young girls — improving the numbers of opportunities, the kind of opportunities,” McCray said. “But it’s not just about opportunities anymore. Violence against women is a huge issue. A good feminist should be working on that.’’
Sandberg and her Lean In foundation didn’t return requests for comment.