‘Malcolm’ mom rushing home to be real mom

? It’s Jane Kaczmarek’s lunch hour and she’s cramming as much conversation as she can between bites of her salami and provolone sandwich.

Her talk ranges from her fondness for lunch meat to her admiration for Meryl Streep. But her main topic is time.

“I’m so acutely aware of how little time I’ve got … I just don’t want to waste it … I’m kind of a nut about that,” says Kaczmarek, who turns 49 on Dec. 21.

It’s her sixth season as Lois, the opinionated tough-love mom of an often chaotic bunch of boys in the Fox sitcom “Malcolm in the Middle” (Sundays at 6:30 p.m.).

Kaczmarek and actor-husband Bradley Whitford (“The West Wing”) have three young children, and she wants each day’s shooting on “Malcolm” to pass swiftly so she can get home in time to read to her kids before they go to bed.

“As a young actress I would have killed to have more face time. Now the first thing I do is pick up the script and go, ‘Damn another scene,”‘ laughs Kaczmarek as she sits in her dressing room.

“But in a funny way, I think it’s why I have probably got so much acclaim for this part. I just want to go home. I deliver lines with great dispatch because I want to get going … so I think that probably created Lois more than anything.”

She’s been nominated for an Emmy five seasons in a row and walking the red carpet gave her the idea for clothesoffourback.org, which raises money for charity by auctioning the clothes stars wear at award shows.

“I feel like I have my 15 minutes of fame, and I know the amount of money you can raise and the amount of awareness you can bring to certain things you care about,” she says. “I want to die knowing that I really did as much as I could with the time I had.”

Actress Jane Kaczmarek, as Lois in a scene from a 'Malcolm in the Middle' episode which airs Sunday on Fox, hurries through her workday so she can get home to spend time with her family.

Inevitably the show has evolved from its first season when the main buzz was around Frankie Muniz as Malcolm, the second of Lois and Hal’s four sons.

Kaczmarek admits it has taken awhile to feel comfortable with story lines about a teenage Malcolm because “‘naughty children’ is funny, ‘naughty teenagers’ is a little more menacing.”

Born in Milwaukee, Kaczmarek grew up in the Midwest where “a climate of celebrity didn’t exist” and she was expected to become either a hairdresser or a nun.

Yet she does recall playing a peach blossom in a school pageant, leaving the stage in the wrong direction and convincing the other peach blossoms to follow her.

“That was probably the first time I remember having a certain power or authority to convince people of something, even though it was wrong,” Kaczmarek says, laughing.