On Work and Motherhood

Sometime in December, my friend, editor extraordinaire, and head of the Boston Avid Users Group, Kenton Van Natten, asked me to participate in a panel on Women in Post Production at the upcoming January BAVUG meeting. I thought it sounded fun, and agreed to it without giving it any more thought. However, as the date of the panel neared, I wondered if I had made a mistake. I researched the other participants, and realized that they were quite, well… qualified. Much older and more experienced than me. Gulp! What did I know about being a “woman in post,” and what did I have to say that the BAVUG attendees would be interested to hear? In short: what had I gotten myself into?
 
A few days before the panel, I joined the other participants on a conference call to prepare our talking points. There were five panelists in total, but other than myself, there was only one other working mom. She unfortunately had to leave the call early, so we never got to talk about the topic of motherhood or how it may come up on our panel. I didn’t speak up much the rest of the call, preferring mostly to listen to the other women’s ideas. I decided that if, during the panel, I found I didn’t have much to say, I’d just sit back and let my compatriots do most of the talking. It seemed like a safe plan.
 
Well, that’s not how the evening unfolded… at all. In fact – surprise, surprise! – I found I had a lot to say.

Although we covered a lot of ground in our discussion, the talking point that resonated the most with me was the struggle of balancing work and family. I may be a relatively new mom, but this balancing act has really consumed the past year of my life… and, really, much longer if you count my pregnancy and the many years in which I contemplated how the hell I would figure out a way to have kids and maintain my career. When this discussion point came up, I found myself making some strong assertions. “This is something that men just don’t contemplate in the same way,” I said at some point. I went on to point to an example of that, explaining that my husband, Chris, had decided to quit his job and start his own business when our son was just six months old. “I am proud of him, and his business is doing great,” I explained, “but that’s something I would never have considered in the first year of our son’s life. I wouldn’t have given myself the luxury of that possibility because I just assumed I would have to sacrifice part of my career in order to be a mom… especially in the beginning.” I was worried that voicing an opinion like that would alienate and perhaps even offend some of the people in the room… particularly the men. But I learned throughout the evening that this wasn’t the case at all; in fact, most of the men there seemed genuinely interested in hearing our thoughts, particularly on matters that they might not think about the same way (like work-life balance). We went on to talk about a lot of other things, but it was in the discussion about work and parenthood that I found myself really hitting my stride and finding confidence that I didn’t know I had.

Women in Post Production Panel at the January 2017 BAVUG meeting.

​I learned a lot from the other panelists that night – who really were older and more experienced than me :)  – but more importantly, I learned a lot about myself. Some of the comments I made were thoughts I had never articulated before, and had never really known to be true until the words left my mouth. I learned that much of my experience and background – including my time as a Women’s Studies major in college – has helped to shape me into the editor and person I am today. I learned that 10 years into my career, I do have valuable insights to share… lots of them, actually. And I learned that parenthood is such an eye-opening and transformative experience, that being even just one year into it, I now have completely different thoughts, fears, values, goals and perspective than I did just one year ago.

Perhaps it was a long time coming, but being on that panel helped me uncover something I hadn’t realized before: I had spent so much time worrying about the ways that parenthood would inhibit my career, I never considered the ways it could enhance it. Now I look forward to finding them out.