The New In Having It All

We live in a unique moment in history when women, for the first time, can decide how they wish to be in the world. Women can choose whether to have children; whether to have a life partner; whether to work inside or outside the home; and where to place their time and energies. We now have role models for nearly any life composite we wish to create. We feel less compelled to conform our lifestyle choices to societal expectations. Having it all is a reality for women today. And having it all does not mean doing it all. Rather, it is a new version of having it all, one where you carefully and consciously devise choices and strategies that reflect and enhance your own personal vision of an optimum life.

Our Mission. The mission of The New Having It All is to help women make and maximize these choices. We focus on what it means for women to be successful, with a focus on role models, systems for success, milestones, and potential mishaps. Our discussions include issues surrounding work-life and work-family balance and integration because, in our experience, they represent the primary stumbling blocks that most frequently cause women to feel unsuccessful in their lives.

What Makes Us Unique. There are three things that make The New Having It All unique among the various firms that address work-life balance issues:

1. We work with women in all walks of life, in all stages along the sequencing spectrum. This gives us a vantage point from which to understand the needs and concerns of each stage along the trajectory of women's lives.

2. We have no preconceived agenda for the women with whom we work. The New Having It All is based upon the premise that every woman must discover for herself what her all will be. Our role is to raise the right questions; develop and demonstrate the best tools; propose alternative courses of action; provide research and analysis; and offer the benefits of our own experiences and the knowledge we have garnered in working with scores of women in similar situations.

3. Our sessions offer a unique blend of motivation, inspiration and personal development on one hand, and hard data, research and analysis, and tangible tools on the other. We are experienced speakers and teachers and connect with our audiences in a way that sends each participant from our sessions with a greater sense of optimism about her ability to define her all--and a practical road map for achievement.

IN & Out of FOCUS tackles head-on the question of whether a woman can have it all, both career and family, in the film industry. The idiosyncratic arena of the L.A. film industry may be particularly unforgiving of motherhood, but it is not alone as an industry with sub-par support for women juggling families and careers. Project-driven and episodic, with an ebb and flow to work and projects that yields alternating periods of intense 14-hour shoot and production days (sometimes on location far away from home), and countervailing periods of hiatus, the film industry’s extreme working conditions trigger the same questions that all women attempting to balance career and family confront on some level: What will become of my career if or when I have my child? Can I be successful in my career and as a mother? Will my partner be truly egalitarian in our parental partnering? And, who will take care of our child when I work?

Filmed over the course of five years, from pregnancy test to contemplation of a second child, the film grapples hard, and gets gritty. It sometimes makes you squirm with discomfort, and sometimes makes you nod with affirmation of the truths it reveals. In & Out of FOCUS begins with Liebman’s pregnancy, and lingers there, somewhat uncomfortably, in her anxiety over whether the pending child will be an impediment to her sexuality, her burgeoning career and her future success. This segment reminds the jaded among us of the life-altering and potentially identity-erasing experience that pregnancy can be for a professional woman  facing an unplanned pregnancy. Though, the film is initially naturally self-involved, Liebman's anxiety and naïveté about motherhood mirror the very real experience of women who work in anyfield which is not openly supportive of motherhood and who unexpectedly find themselves pregnant for the first time with no clear career roadmap for the journey ahead.

Liebman chronicles the swell of her motherhood anxiety and resentment. We hear her underlying envy that her partner can enjoy fatherhood without a parallel interruption to his career. Liebman’s grief over her growing belly’s eclipse of her professional identity as a filmmaker is best captured in her reaction to her husband’s Emmy-winning acceptance speech, when he thanks her for “keeping the wheels on the cart.” She rails against the congratulations she receives on her husband’s behalf from Steven Spielberg, because Spielberg knows nothing of her as a filmmaker in her own right and, she fears, congratulates her, as a mere appendage, as wife and mother, “for keeping the wheels on” her husband’s cart.

Liebman documents the decidedly frosty climate of the film industry toward motherhood through interviews with accomplished female writers, directors, and producers. The interviewed women, with the exception of one, all opted to have children and continue careers. When asked, these women define “housewife” pejoratively, and with some measure of derision. They use descriptors like “vapid, with nothing better to do,” and describe the choice to stay at home as “just doing that,” and “lazy, spending someone else’s money.” Only one professional acknowledges that “the reality is that it [full-time at-home motherhood] is an enormously hard job.” The professionals' comments vividly illustrate historical divide between careerists and at-home mothers. In this long-standing tension, each camp is so heavily invested in its selected path that it cannot lend support to the alternate choice.

While they may disassociate themselves from those who make a choice in favor of full time motherhood, the featured film professionals don’t sugar coat their industry experiences as smooth roads to professional success. Producer Gail Katz describes her life straddling the dual worlds of motherhood and filmmaking as one of constant and unsatisfactory compromise, “The greatest problem I have in not so much the guilt, but it’s feeling like I’m not doing any of this well enough….that I’m not as good a mother as I can be if I were with them all the time…or someone that can do this job 24 hours a day which is what it really requires to do it as well as can be….so I feel a little bit handicapped in all areas of my life.” It is, ultimately, the sense of professional identity, fulfillment and an innate drive to both express themselves creatively and achieve, that draws these professionals back and onward, despite the pull and the guilt they feel about not devoting full-time to child-rearing and despite industry obstacles and hurdles for working mothers.

In & Out of FOCUS does not package and deliver neat solutions to the struggle of the juggle in the film industry. It does pay tribute to the dark side of motherhood for women with careers in a field that fails to fully accommodate or wholly celebrate motherhood. It gives voice and image to the reality that men with film careers enjoy fatherhood without the same level of career sacrifice experienced by their female child-bearing partners. It is, by and large, the mothers, not the fathers who deviate from or alter their original career paths to accommodate children. Despite the darkness, the film’s characters ultimately endorse motherhood, and recognize that the human and personal connection of the parent-child bond is sufficiently meaningful, powerful, and weighty to make the messy, frustrating and imperfect act of balancing work and career worthwhile.

Search your local listings or your satellite provider for a showing of In & Out of FOCUS which originally aired on Lifetime.

In the spirit of summer at the movies, check out another film on this theme, Who Does She Think She Is? (2009), directed by Pamela Tanner Boll. Who Does She Think She Is? documents the work-family struggle for several working, female fine artists and is currently in limited release. Read a review and watch for it in your area.