Hugh Jackman Recalls the Painful Day His Mother Left Him

Hugh Jackman has opened up about the painful day his mother walked out on him without saying goodbye.

During an interview with Australian Women’s Weekly, the 44-year-old actor spilled about when his mother, Grace Watson, decided to move back to the U.K. without telling him.

At the time, the Les Miserables star was only eight-years-old — and Jackman now admits it took him until the age of “12 or 13″ to realize that she wasn’t returning to the family home in Sydney, Australia.

“One of the main things I remember is that horrible feeling that people were talking about you and looking at you, because it was odd for the mother to leave,” Jackman recalled.

After Jackman’s parents divorced, his sisters, Zoe and Sonia, went to live with his mother while he and his brothers stayed Down Under with their father, Chris.

Though his mother’s abandonment has scarred him, Jackman says he has no ill will towards her.

“The thing I never felt, and I know this might sound strange, I never felt that my mum didn’t love me,” he said. “I’ve spoken about it at length with her since and I know she was struggling. She was in hospital after I was born suffering from post-natal depression.

“There wasn’t a support network for her here,” he added.

Jackman — who is now the proud parent of two children with wife Deborra-Lee Furness — says that becoming a father has helped him understand the pressures his mother was under.

“There comes a certain point in life when you have to stop blaming other people for how you feel or the misfortunes in your life,” Jackman told the publication. “You can’t go through life obsessing about what might have been.”