Mom & the City

02/19/2004 at 10:54 AM EST

Plus, the most important part of her own story was no longer a script but a nightly Goodnight Moon session. "If I get to a page, James Wilkie can finish the line for me," she says proudly. Her 80-hour work weeks were unfair to him – and her, she says. "I want to be there to read books over and over to him," she says, adding, "I think James Wilkie is really deserving of having a parent at home." At times, says Broderick, "she'd come home and he would be more into the nanny. Fifteen minutes later, it reversed. But she'd get very hurt." Still, bidding farewell to the costars and crew members who have been another sort of "family," she says, "was like being taken off life support."

Which would explain the sight of SJ, as pals call her, on a street in lower Manhattan in early February sobbing uncontrollably after Nixon, 37, became the first of the four co-stars to finish filming. "When our assistant director announced on the street, 'I'm very sad to tell you, we have to say goodbye right now to Cynthia Nixon,' it was just like somebody kicking me in the stomach," says Parker. "I had been in denial. I took it very badly." Fortunately, by the time she completed her final wrap a few days later and the City gang headed to the Whitehorse Tavern for beers, Parker's mood began to lift. "There were no tears," she says. "It was joyous."

And by the time she awoke the next day, an oddly easy feel had set in. Says Broderick: "We slept till noon. Then it was coffee, toast, boiled eggs. James came home [from an outing with his nanny], and Sarah played with him. That's all that happened." He did not, he adds with a laugh, have to "pry the cyanide capsules from her fingers."

Perhaps because, after all the turmoil and tears, what his newly unemployed wife was feeling was relief. "She spent so much time carrying the weight of our entire show on her back," says Nixon. "It's like every moment, if she wasn't shooting, then she was auditioning actors or in a fitting or doing narration or looping. She's very responsible. She understands what it means to be the person around whom everything orbits."