Many moons ago, I was having lunch with a friend whose three children at the time ranged in age from 8 years to 8 months. She worked full-time as a lawyer in a firm that was, with L.A. traffic, a 45-minute drive from her home on a good day. A few years before that, she had wanted to either quit her outside job or cut back her hours substantially so that she could spend more time with her children, but her husband had his eye on a big house with a pool, and to be able to afford it, she would have to stay with the firm.
It was as she was telling me about staying up half the night to sew on her older boy's Cub Scout patches and her younger boy's costume for the school play that I finally asked her how she manages to do it all. She looked at me, and in her eyes I saw acceptance, determination, and maybe a little anger (though that last could have been projection on my part). She sighed and said, "The thing is, I don't do any of it well."
Many more moons ago than that ~ 1879, to be exact ~ playwright Henrik Ibsen wrote A Doll's House, a play that many see as a comment on women's sacrificial role in marriage and society but that can just as easily be a comment on all of society as well. This nine-minute film envisions a modern-day Doll House (video): http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/video/2012/oct/18/nora-ibsen-dolls-house-video
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