You’ve got your life in pretty good shape if the biggest wrinkle in a given week, as was the case for Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington on Thursday, is that you’ve got the clear the furniture out of your newly-redecorated apartment to convene a group of women to discuss what Huffington calls the “Third Metric,” a definition of success that goes “beyond money and power.” A wide-ranging series of panels and interviews, the conversations suggested an interesting tack. Given that many of the women leading and participating in conversations about work-life balance, including Huffington and Lean In author Sheryl Sandberg are women who already have quite a lot, we might all be better off shifting the conversation from the mechanisms of how women strive to have it all — we’re not all going to be able to afford the same nannies and personal assistants, and we won’t all be soothed by the same morning meditations or supported by sharing a facialist with Candace Bergen — to the question of what actually constitutes “it all,” and who has access to different visions of it.
Over and over again, the panelists talked at least as much about what they’d decided they could do without, let go, and leave behind, as what they incorporated or added to their lives. For Sen. Claire McCaskill, (D-MO), it was housework. “I found myself divorced with three young children as the elected prosecutor in Kansas City,” she explained. “My oldest child was only six. Not only was I handling 8,000 to 10,000 felonies a year, I also had these three children, and I also had to appear absolutely invincible day in and day in….I didn’t give a shit if there were dust bunnies under the bed…All the things I’d been taught as a young girl about everything being straight and neat, I said screw that.”
Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to President Obama, said she’d learned a valuable lesson when she was working for then-Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, and he asked her one day what she was worried about. “I said, in just this moment of honesty, the Halloween Parade starts in 20 minutes and it’s 25 minutes away. And he said, ‘Then what are you doing here? Go,’” Jarrett explained, saying that because the parade was a particular priority for her daughter, it gained significance for Jarrett. “If I had not been there when my little darling came out with her little costume looking for me, I would not have forgiven myself. I did not make a lot of open houses, but the Halloween Parade was important to her.”
And actress Ali Wentworth and director Tanya Wexler offered contrasting explanations for their decisions about work and family. Wentworth said she had been offered a second lead role in a show that was picked up by a network this fall, and the network had said they could concentrate her filming in Los Angeles for 13 weeks to make it easier for her to accommodate her family in New York. “And I was very excited and I called George [Stephanopoulos] and said it’s 13 weeks, we can totally do it. He said, ‘You’ll cry all the time. I know you’re all pumped up.’ And [I realized] I’m going to be at LAX crying because my daughters are crying because I’m not there for the ballet recital…I think you redefine what having it all at any point in your life is.” And Wexler, who most recently directed the period romantic comedy Hysteria, said that for her, continuing to work and letting her wife be the primary caregiver for their four children had been the right choice. “I love my children, but it is a pain in the ass a lot of the time, because it’s a maintenance job. It’s a lot of work for ultimately your child to become their own person and their accomplishments,” she explained. “And going out and making stuff is awesome. I love being busy. I was talking with my assistant, who is one of the two people I mentor, and I was saying, I love making stuff. And my brain is on 24 hours day. I can’t unplug because I don’t want to.”
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This post discusses plot points from the February 27 episode of The Americans.
The breaking news in the Hollywood Reporter’s profile of Lucasfilm chief Kathleen Kennedy is how she talked J.J. Abrams, who was reluctant to take on the work, into directing Star Wars Episode VII. But to me, the really fascinating part of Kim Masters’ reporting is the portrait it paints of the ways Kennedy’s balanced her work and her family—and the work Kennedy’s done over the years to make sure Steven Spielberg has everything he’s needed to make his movies. As much as there are structural barriers to women getting opportunities in Hollywood, I also think a major challenge is that it’s not easy for a lot of women to pick up and leave their families for three months at a time:
When 30 Rock premiered on October 11, 2006, I wasn’t a television critic. I barely had the credential that Tracy Jordan would later use to try to sell his Thomas Jefferson biopic, “television watcher.” I was newishly single, living in a newish city, and had recently become the first person in my family to acquire a subscription to cable. As I settled into the rhythms of adult life, one of the things I learned was how to watch television*, whether I was marathoning Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (a useful source of valuable tips for how to avoid being murdered in the big city), scarfing down Sex and the City, which I got on disc from the Blockbuster that once stood on a corner two blocks away, and discovering the wonders of my first broadcast television season.
This post discusses plot points through the January 27 episode of Downton Abbey.
