<p>The actress made her name in hit television dramas but it&rsquo;s her real-life offspring who own her heart.</p>

- Kate Halfpenny

Asher Keddie pushes open the door of the Hummingbird cafe in Melbourne’s Elwood. In long slouchy brown Gucci boots, AG jeans and an oversized black jumper, she shrugs off her leather jacket and slides into a seat. It’s 12.30pm, but “I feel like, well, toast,” says Keddie, running her eye over the menu. She settles for a decidedly unstarry ham and cheese croissant instead, and apologises for being late. She’s not, not by so much as a minute. “What’s happened to me is [my] children are just in my mind the whole time,” admits the actress, “so although my nature is to be diligent about organisation, things slip my mind far more than they used to.” These days, she taps commitments into a calendar on both her phone and her computer, “then I find, ‘Oh my God, I completely forgot we were doing it that day.’”

The Gold Logie winner has been, by her own admission, “scratchy” about revealing too much of herself publicly. But two years after the seismic shift of welcoming her son Valentino with her artist husband Vincent Fantauzzo, “my priorities [and] my sensitivities have changed. For some reason I feel more flexible now about how things should or shouldn’t be,” says the star, who is mastering the exhausting, exhilarating art of running both a family and high-profile career. “I was more black and white before I had kids.” Motherhood, says Keddie, 42 – barefaced, her hair tossed into a messy topknot – is “so good. I can’t be