Angie Harmon covers the July issue of Good Housekeeping to promote her upcoming TNT series “Rizzoli & Isles,” which looks like a huge helping of cheesecake female detective work masquerading as empowerment. For most of this interview, Harmon complains about how much she misses her husband, former NFL defensive Jason Sehorn, and their three daughters (aged 2-7) because she works 90 hours per week in Los Angeles. Meanwhile, her family has remained in North Carolina (they moved there last August when Harmon’s work dried up) while Mom plays yet another tough, crime-fighting babe just like she did in “Baywatch Nights” and “Law & Order.”

Still, Harmon herself isn’t as much of a woman of principle as she’d have us all believe in this interview because she can’t stop rattling on about how wonderful a mother she is because she moved her family away from Hollywood; and yet she evidently doesn’t care about them enough because, just as soon as the opportunity popped up for her to start a new television show, she decided “the role was too good to lose.” Get ready for some sanctimonious justification of Harmon’s way of life:

On Being 2000 Miles Away: “I’m a mess. I’ve lost 10 pounds since I got here,” she says in her signature smoky voice, made famous on Law & Order back in the late nineties. “This is the hardest time in my life, for sure. But Harmon says she will get through it, and that her precious girls and well-tended marriage will thrive. She made a heart-wrenching choice, but for the right reason: her kids’ welfare.

“It breaks my heart that I don’t see my daughters every day, don’t get to hug them and brush their hair,” Harmon admits. Still, she set her sights on North Carolina for her girls’ sake, and has never looked back. She sums up the state’s special allure: “There’s a church on every corner as opposed to just a Starbucks…. The people are just a little nicer — more real.”

Harmon didn’t like what the kids were picking up in the fast-moving, flashy Hollywood world. She was horrified to learn that daughter Avery had been hearing friends talk about “sexual things,” like making out with a boy. “Things were just going too fast for her.”

Still, no matter how much they Skype and share by phone, Harmon is bound to be absent for some milestones. Yesterday, for instance, a phone call with the girls nearly unraveled her: “The baby is a great talker, and she’s improving every day. So she got on the phone and said, ‘Mommy, I mith you so muth.’ She has a lisp now! I just lost it.”

Missing the little everyday mom moments is hard — and Harmon is hard on herself. “When I feel like I’m not doing what I am supposed to as a mother, I will torture myself,” she says. “I don’t know how to deal with it. I find some consolation in the fact that all mommies feel it. If there was a way to cure mommy guilt, I would bottle it and be a bazillionaire.”

On Why She Returned To Acting: When her career hit a wall a couple of years ago, she figured it was time to shelve her acting aspirations. However, before she embraced full-time motherhood, she prayed for guidance about which path to pursue. “I said to God, ‘If the plan is to raise these girls, I will wholeheartedly do that, because they are so important to me,'” she recalls. “Once I made that transition in my heart, the [Rizzoli & Isles] script was literally on my doorstep the next day.” She took that as a sign that her acting days were not yet behind her.

On Giving: “I was yanking on the girls to give up their old toys and telling them to think about the little ones who don’t have anything, but they just didn’t understand at all,” she says. “So I decided to show them pictures of poor children in other countries, and now they get it. We all take big bags of toys to Goodwill.”

On Being Accepted In North Carolina: Harmon turned for reassurance to dear friend and NASCAR champ Jimmie Johnson and his wife, Chandra, who live in Charlotte and had encouraged her to move the family there. “They told me, ‘Don’t calm down; we love you for who you are,'” she recalls. As it turned out, Harmon need not have worried about her exuberant personality; it certainly didn’t scare anyone off. “Jason and I have a group of about 10 couples who opened their homes and hearts and welcomed us like nothing I have ever seen before,” she says, visibly moved. “I wasn’t expecting to be embraced like that.”

When Harmon is away, Sehorn and the girls often make the rounds to different families on the weekends, having breakfast at one house and later barbecuing elsewhere in the neighborhood. It’s that sense of community that continues to impress Harmon, who adds that she tends to be gun-shy about trusting people after having been burned in relationships in the past. (She’s too polite to name names or dish any details.) “All of these women back in North Carolina know that I am gone, and they’re all taking care of my children and helping my husband,” she says. “I love them so much.”

[From Good Housekeeping]

Yes, and I’m sure all of those women love Harmon’s husband too. Of course, it sounds awful for me to imply that sort of thing, but I also believe it’s rather naive for Harmon to believe that her marriage will stay “rock solid” while she’s away indulging in the self-actualizing process, and her husband’s at home doing all of the real work for the family. It’s also rather bizarre that Harmon desires a cure for mommy guilt because that guilt is there for a reason, and if mothers could collectively do away with those pangs, none of us would bother raising our children at all. It’s a classic recipe for disaster, and even though Harmon may have been joking about bottling a cure, it’s quite telling in light of her decision to virtually abandon her children during their most formative years. Skype is not the same as a warm hug from one’s mother, but hey, Harmon gives toys to Goodwill, which means she’s just like us!

Also, I certainly don’t want to offend any North Carolinians, but doesn’t the way that Harmon speaks about being so “embraced” by the community sound a lot like Gwyneth Paltrow praising London for being so gloriously wonderful with better citizens and amenities than anywhere else in the world? To push that similarity even further, it sounds like Harmon is still trying to convince herself (by convincing us) that her decision to leave the family behind and jet off to Los Angeles for months at a time is actually something that will ultimately be good for her family. In reality, the family would be better off staying together (virtually) anywhere than to be separated in such a traumatic way. Good values can be instilled and reinforced anywhere too; granted, in Los Angeles it’s slightly more difficult to do so, but if Harmon thinks that kids and teenagers aren’t exposed to sexual matters in North Carolina, well, she’s got a big surprise coming for her one day. Further, her poor daughters will someday reflect upon their childhood and think, “Mom was gone most of the time.” And Harmon’s carefully constructed dual house of cards will crumble. The really sad thing is that it’s not like Harmon needs to separate her family by necessity; she’s not a member of the Armed Forces or anything of that caliber but merely an actress.

Photos courtesy of WENN