Meredith Baxter, best known for playing the mother Elyse Keaton on the iconic 1980s sitcom “Family Ties,” has shocked her fans this week by revealing why she always “hated” her “enormous breasts,” going so far as to call them “the plague of my life.”

Baxter told Page Six that her large breasts made life as a working actress more difficult because television executives were constantly making lewd comments about her chest.

“People go, ’Oh to have someone wanting you, lusting after you …’ That’s not lust, that’s aggression. ‘Let me take your power away by turning you into a sexual object.’ You can’t even open your mouth then,” explained Baxter, 73.

She went on to say that the one positive of having breast cancer in 1999 was that she was able to get a breast reduction.

These days, Baxter is happily married to her wife Nancy, but it was a long and hard road getting here for her.

“I had to go through a lot of other s–t first,” Baxter said. “I got sober in 1990 and met Nancy 15 years later and I had to learn a lot about myself first. That couldn’t have happened at that time because I was married to someone else and I had some drama and trauma to go through first.”

Though Baxter said she never thought she had an issue with alcohol, that changed when a producer “told me she thought I had a problem with alcohol because my eyes weren’t focused and they couldn’t understand me, which is a good indication you’ve got some issues going on.”

“So I went to a 12-step program to get people off my back and it took me about 10 years to get the gift of desperation and throw myself into it and do the work I needed to do, which opened up a lot of doors for me,” she explained.

Though the mother of five is preparing to star in Lifetime holiday movie “Christmas on the Vine,” she freely admits that Christmas is not her favorite holiday.

“I have a lot of children and I think I always experienced Christmas, ‘Oh, I’m going to be judged, it’s an obligation,’” said Baxter, who has children with ex-husbands David Birney and Robert Lewis Bush. “’Did I give the twins the right thing?’ I always felt agitation and expectation that I was going to disappoint.”

“That’s why Thanksgiving, I think, is a much more beloved holiday because it’s just about food,” she added.

This piece originally appeared in UpliftingToday.com and is used by permission.

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