Monday, June 8, 2009

I watched a documentary, today, called Searching for Debra Winger, and I was entranced by it, to say the least. In the western world, there seems to be one place left in society where women still struggle at unprecedented levels for equality: the Church. Included in that is the struggle to have a career and a family, by choice, and not be looked down upon as wrong, a sinner, or one of *those* feminists. Outside the church the struggle for equality exists, but no one questions the right for a woman to be a manager, a professor, a researcher, a CEO, or even president. Some, chauvinistically, may question a woman’s capability to do so, but it is even in the laws that one can not judge her right. I have heard more than one woman who, after coming into the church for the first time in adulthood, was stunned to discover the equality chasm. It had never occurred to them to even think that a woman could not perform the same roles as men. Tradition is hard to break everywhere, but it is hardest to break in the church. And tradition declares that men work and women stay home. When necessity arises, exceptions are made for a woman to work, but for a woman to choose to work and have children is for some, unthinkable.

Searching for Debra Winger is a documentary, originally made for Shotime, about the struggle for actresses to have a career and a family and what it is for them to age in Hollywood. Produced by actress Rosanna Arquette, she interviews multiple well-known actresses such as Laura Dern, Holly Hunter, Jane Fonda, and Sharon Stone about their journeys and choices and struggles in the film industry. I was intrigued to watch this movie for no other reason than that I think Debra Winger is amazing, and I think she’s even more beautiful now than she was when she did such movies as An Officer and a Gentleman and Terms of Endearment (a personal favorite). The movie is so titled because Debra Winger made the decision to retire, or at least take a long break for an undeterminable amount of time, from the acting business and pretty much fell off the radar. It is probably a good half way through this documentary before Arquette finally pulls up for a face to face interview with Debra Winger. All the conversations were very interesting to listen to, but it was words from Laura Dern and then later from Whoopi Goldberg that really struck me and stayed with me. As Dern spoke about growing up with a mother in the movie business, she recalled the conversation with her as a child about wishing she’d be around more and feeling somewhat abandoned, and her mother attempted to explain to her that she did not know how to be a mother without also living out her passion. Yes, I could stay home and spend more time with you, she remembered her mother’s reply, but if I did that at the expense of my passion, I would be a really bad mom. And these words really hit me in the heart.

Today, I am young. I am family-less, and I can dream all I want. I can tell people I never want to be a stay-at-home mom, that I want to have children someday, but that I also have the passion to follow my career, and they smile and some probably think, because I can see it in their faces, that really in the end I will want to stay home. But someday, this will not be the future, it will not be a dream. It will be reality, and those looks that tell me now—without ever having to hear the words—that I’m simply silly and young and inexperienced, will instead tell me they disapprove, because I know myself, and I know that I will, in fact, never be a stay-at-home mom, or at least not a happy one. In the world, people may smile and say, to each his (or her) own, but in the church, this is be very different. It is in these words which Laura Dern recounted, where I felt as if God reminded me of who I am, and God taught me a lesson. I felt God say, I made you as you are, not as people want you to be.

I am a passionate person. I have things I’m passionate about and I have a call that may include (I hope include) having children but that is not centered around that. This is not faulty wiring on God’s part, or a defect. It is the way God wired me, with her own hands. As I heard those words, I remembered a conversation with my friend Sarah. It was a conversation wherein multiple women were present, mostly college women, and I asked her about being a working mom, and she said to me, “I have come to realize that I have about five good ‘mom’ hours in me a day. Beyond that, I lose my attention span. I get impatient. That is just something I know about myself,” and these words calmed my spirit and made me realize that my lack of desire (my horror, really) at the idea of being a stay-at-home mom is not because something is wrong with me, but because that is not what I’m called to and not what I’m made for.

Marriage and motherhood is a long way off for me. Probably further away than my career, though I can not see into my future, so I can’t really know. I am very content with my life right now. I have my difficult moments but those are not moments that a husband or child would fix—they are moments that happen at those times, too—but I am happy, over all, with the way things are. I greatly value the freedom I have to live at my leisure, to move without directly affecting another’s life and decisions, to act on a call without having to acutely consider the call of someone else.

These things will come when they come, and with them will come an entirely different way of living and an entirely different set of choices to make. In those moments when people pressure to me to fit into their mold, to be the wife, the mother, the woman I’m expected to be, I hope I remember Sarah’s words; I hope I will recall the conversations and recountings from this film. I hope I remember what God has spoken to me today, what she has spoken to me before, though I seem to often forget it—that I am who God created me to be. I am not anybody else.

So for those of you who love being a career mom, for those of you who can’t understand the idea behind being a career mom, and for those of you not there yet (or are men), I would recommend viewing this film. Some of the language is not PG rated, so be warned, but it is a documentary worth watching.