Melissa McCarthy's daughters have an interesting name for their mom's good moods

Melissa McCarthy sure is a cool mom who knows when to be nice to her children and when to be strict. Recently, she opened up in an interview with PEOPLE about the term that her kids use for her when she is fun and agrees to whatever they want. 

"There's a version of myself that we call 'Midway Mom.' We were coming back from visiting my parents and we went through the Midway airport in Chicago. And for some reason, everything they asked for, I was like, 'Sure, get it. Two of them. You want a Coke?' And they were just like, 'What's going on?' 'Can we have Doritos?' 'Yep.' Anything they said. 'Can we get sweatshirts?' 'You sure can.' Like everything. I was like, 'You want a beer cozy?' And they were like, 'Midway Mom's awesome,'" the actor shared, reports Scary Mommy.

Moreover, McCarthy shared that whenever she is feeling permissive or laid back, 'Midway Mom' appears and makes everyone's day. She spoke of an instance that happened recently. "For no reason, I lost my mind this week and met someone's dog who's like a little wiener dog. We have two dogs and they all want a third one," she said. "And I said, 'Absolutely not. We're not doing this. This is crazy. We already have two dogs.' And suddenly I called the girls and I was like, 'Guess who's getting a wiener dog?' And they're like, 'Midway Mom!'"

McCarthy and her husband, Ben Falcone, have two children together, Vivian, 15, and Georgette, 13. The two have been married to each other since 2004 and have been taking parenting in stride. The actor mentioned that she's not usually in Midway Mom mode.

"I'm really like, 'What are you doing? Do you want to go over your homework?' Ben is much more, 'Let them figure it out,'“ she revealed. “I'm like, 'Or I could empty their schoolbag and line up all their pencils.' I call it helping. Other people would probably say, 'You're meddling.' They're not babies anymore, so if I could put them in a BabyBjörn and still carry my teenagers around, I would.”

One of the things that the mom is really strict about is social media. "We keep track of it. I think it is still something to be really, really watched," she said. "I'm sure I don't do half as good a job as I should because I'm so bad with it... we're always kind of reminding them, 'Keep this in perspective. This is not real.' I keep saying this is smoke and mirrors and entertainment, which is fine. I've said, 'It's as if somebody takes a character I've played and assumes that's the real me.' But that's an ongoing fistfight that concerns me all the time."

The actor does not post many pictures of her children, but her oldest daughter, Vivian, appeared twice on the big screen acting as a younger version of her mother, once in "The Boss" in 2016 and "Thunder Force" in 2021.

McCarthy said that she is hopeful for the younger generation and the PEOPLE's beauty issue was about talking to her younger self. "I thought the younger version of myself or everybody out there who isn't the youngest or whatever... I felt like it was saying something really lovely to my younger self, to my 20-year-old self," she shared. "And maybe to other people, too."