If you ask Hilarie Burton Morgan's kids, she's not like a cool mom, she's a regular mom.
While 13-year-old son Gus and 5-year-old daughter George understand that dad Jeffrey Dean Morgan embodied legendary Walking Dead villain Negan "because there's a lot of memorabilia that's been sent to the house," Hilarie explained in an exclusive interview with E! News' Francesca Amiker, "they don't understand what I do."
And so they can't fathom why anyone who lives near their farm in Rhinebeck, N.Y. would fawn all over the local middle school representative for the parent-teacher-student organization.
"They are so irritated when people come up to us in the supermarket and act like I'm somebody because they're like, she's nobody, we're the somebodys," the actress-slash-producer-slash-host continued. "Like they're the stars of the show."
But with each interaction, the 41-year-old said it's begun to sink in: "They're slowly getting an understanding of what Mom used to do."
And while you might imagine the actress might get points for her six-year run on One Tree Hill, a subsequent turn on White Collar or the Sundance TV true crime series It Couldn't Happen Here that she recently turned into a podcast, it was actually her very first gig as a VJ on TRL that finally earned her some respect.
"My daughter is obsessed with Britney Spears, like, obsessed," Hilarie explained. So some two decades after she helmed MTV's afternoon appointment viewing, chatting up the likes of Angelina Jolie and Gwen Stefani, "I showed her a video of me interviewing Britney, like, 20 years ago," Hilarie shared, "and that gave me street cred. Now I'm cool."
And should her kids need some reminding, she plans to hit them with it one more time. "I've got it bookmarked on my phone now," said Hilarie. "Anytime she's being spicy, I'm like, 'You want to see Mommy with Britney?'"
Though, when it comes to her youngest, Hilarie wanted to give her more than just a fun anecdote to share with friends.
"I think becoming a girl mom was a transformative thing for me," she shared of the inspiration behind her latest book, Grimoire Girl. "There's a birthright that boys get that is kind of normalized in our culture. But for my daughter, we'd gone through the Me Too movement, we've gone through lots of changes in our culture, we've gone through national dialogues about what it means to be a woman in the workplace. And I wanted her to have a really sound sense of self, so that I could send her off into the world."
The result was The Rural Diaries author's second release. Part memoir, part spell book, she sees it as a guide for George to fully understand where she came from. As Hilarie said, "I wanted to collect traditions and ways of thinking and made up holidays and all the things that I wanted my daughter to have as her birthright."
As for Gus, he has his own stories to share with friends.
These days Hilarie is a fixture at his school as part of the parent-teacher-student organization. "I think by investing my energy in my kids' school and me coming into their world, and making them the central figures, they see how much energy that myself and the other mothers are putting into it and a kid needs that," she explained of what motivated her to sign on. "A kid needs to know that they're the hero of the story."
But she's definitely a starring character. And not because other parents are star-struck to be putting together a haunted house with Peyton Sawyer.
"When Gus was in preschool, he was scared of a monster in his closet and I told him that I was a witch and that I was 108 years old," Hilarie explained. "He told all the other children, he told all their parents, he told the pediatrician, he told the postman, like everyone knew Mom was a witch."
Fast-forward 10 years, she continued, "I guess I'm 118 now and I'm in the middle school hanging out and these children never ask questions. They're like, 'Yeah, your mom's a witch. She's 118. What do you want?'"
Wait until they hear the one about her and Britney Spears.