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SALT LAKE CITY — “Everybody Loves Raymond” star Patricia Heaton says she wasn’t really a “kid person” growing up.
She had a large, Catholic family, but she was more of a "performer.” Heaton liked keeping the attention on herself and didn’t care for anything that drew it away.
“And that’s all that kids do is take your attention to them!” she said Thursday when she spoke in Salt Lake City during the ninth-annual RootsTech conference — the world’s largest family history event.
“So when we started having kids, I was so surprised at how much I liked my kids,” Heaton added, to laughs from the audience. “I had my first one and I thought, you are a very interesting person. I wonder what another one would be like.”
She eventually went on to give birth to four boys and proudly showed conference-goers a picture of them as children.
Though Heaton has won three Emmys and is oft-recognized for her roles as Ray Romano’s wife on the hit sitcom “Everybody Loves Raymond” or as the matriarch of the Heck family on “The Middle,” she says her acting career is not even close to what’s most important to her.
“In Hollywood, your fortunes come and go, and you’re only as good as your last award or your last picture, and when that's over, there’s 10,000 people trying to take your place,” she said to the over 22,000 attendees at the conference. “There’s the new flavor that comes along and you’re not it. I mean, it’s hard, and there’s a lot of rejection. But when you know you have these four little guys at home, they become the most important thing, and they become the reason why you do a lot of what you do.”
Given a choice between her career and her family, Heaton knows she'd choose her family "every time." She was grateful, she said, for the chance to do both. In fact, most of Heaton's time on “Everybody Loves Raymond” was spent birthing, nursing or running around after her kids.
“I remember nothing from ‘Everybody Loves Raymond,’” she joked. “When I watch (past) episodes now, I watch them to see how they’re going to end.”
Heaton wouldn't change any of it, though.
"I really thought my life was all about acting, but when I had children, I realized that was my purpose in life," she said.
Patricia talks about hosting a family reunion for anyone in Cleveland that may be related to her. She thinks a lot of people who weren’t actually related showed up but, “in Cleveland we’re all together in our suffering”
— Liesl Nielsen (@liesl_nielsen) February 28, 2019
Now, Heaton spends a lot of her time doing charity work, and she said she's noticed that no matter where you go, humanity's problems are often so similar.
She was recently in Rwanda with World Vision and was on a long car ride with a Rwandan cattle farmer that also worked for the nonprofit. Soon, they got to talking about family.
"A cattle farmer in Rwanda and an actress in Los Angeles have the exact same complaint about their spouses," she laughed.
Her trip to Rwanda also provided her with a moment of clarity and understanding of God's role in her life, she said.
It took Heaton 13 years to start making a living as an actress, and after a move to Los Angeles, she went on a mission trip with a Presbyterian church to do some work at an orphanage in Mexico. When she returned, Heaton said she felt an incredible peace that she had never felt while acting.
Literally no guest at rootstech has ever been so excited to learn about her family history as Patricia Heaton. It’s honestly impressive
— Liesl Nielsen (@liesl_nielsen) February 28, 2019
"I sort of had this prayer to say, 'OK, God. If you want me to go back to Mexico, I'll go work in that orphanage, but I'm starting to get auditions, and so I'll keep auditioning, and if that's the direction you want me to go, then that's what I'll do," she said.
As Heaton continued getting acting work, she followed what she believed was a sign from God to go that direction.
"But what was interesting to me, on this last trip to Rwanda, ... I realized, with God, it wasn't an either-or situation," she said. "He gave me the charity work. He gave me the orphanage. It just was his own timing. So he allowed me to have this acting platform in order that I could do what I started to do, but on a much bigger scale.
"God is a very generous, loving father, but his timing is his timing, so you just have to wait for it."
