No matter what extra work Katy Mixon has to deal with as she takes on a second season of the ABC comedy “American Housewife,” it will be a breeze compared to what she dealt with during the first season. Along the natural anxieties of launching a new network TV show, Mixon was dealing with being pregnant with her first child. Since there were no plans to add another child to the series, Mixon’s motherly look had to be hidden. 

The Florida native laughs and says that was not an easy task.

“I was soooooo pregnant,” Mixon says during an ABC party. “They hid me with those extra, extra large clothes.”

This wasn’t a planned pregnancy with her fiance, Breaux Greer. Mixon says it just happened, and she was seven months pregnant when they finished filming the last episode of the first season. She gave birth to a baby boy in May, and in between, Mixon got the news that the show would be returning for a second season.

The one thing Mixon never expected was how being a new mom would change her. She’s dealt with big events in her life and has always been able to make adjustments with ease. That was not the case with motherhood.

“It has changed me in every angle and direction. Normally, I am just this great adapter. But I couldn’t adapt. It humbled me immediately. My mother had seven children, and so I thought ‘I can do this.’ But, I was humbled, It is a whole new world,” Mixon says.

The task for this season will be juggling being a new mom and working on the show. Mixon not only plays a strong-willed mother raising her flawed family in a wealthy town filled with perfect wives and their perfect offspring, she also narrates the series. Mixon doesn’t want to pull back on what she did the first year because the series was nominated for a People’s Choice Award for “Favorite New TV Comedy.” It will help that she will be able to bring her son to work so she can check in during breaks in the filming.

All of this comes as Mixon had just made the leap from being a supporting player on the CBS comedy “Mike & Molly,” opposite Melissa McCarthy, which ran for six seasons. Before that she had made appearances on ‘“Psych,” “Wilfred,” “My Name Is Earl,” “Two and a Half Men” and starred as April Buchanan, opposite Danny McBride, in the HBO series “Eastbound and Down.”

On the big screen, Mixon appeared in David Mackenzie’s “Hell or High Water,” opposite of Jeff Bridges and Chris Pine. Other feature film credits include “Take Shelter,” “Four Christmases,” “All About Steve,” “Drive Angry,” “State of Play” and “Soul Ties.”

But with all those credits, the graduate of Carnegie Mellon University’s Conservatory of Drama had not been the central star of a project until “American Housewife.” Despite being the primary focus and pregnant, Mixon enjoyed every moment of the first season.

“I had the time of my life,” Mixon says. “It’s the hardest thing I have every done because I have to shoot 27 scenes in five days. But it is incredible. I am getting to creatively do everything I ever dreamed of.”

That work attracted enough viewers to get the show a second season. What Mixon has been told is that there are a lot of people who can relate to the central theme of the series: that what some people see as perfection is not what the world knows to be perfect. The theme of marching to the beat of your own drum is what attracted Mixon to the project.

This is her first child, but Mixon has been playing a mom on the series for a year. When it comes to parenting styles, Mixon only shares one quality with her TV character. When it comes to her child (or children in the case of the show), she’s a mother who is going to give everything she has to “go for the gold.”

And now, Mixon is ready to give her all to make the second season better than the first.

“The first season, you are busy just trying to introduce things. Now we are able to settle in and play. There’s nothing like being able to do a second season of a show because this is the golden age of television,” Mixon says.