I don’t know anything about the movie Gravity, but I liked a lot of the things Sandra Bullock had to say about motherhood and work, in this interview for NPR Of course she is rich enough to be able to decide whether or not to work; but it was very, very good to hear a woman saying,
[M]y baby before was my work. That’s what I had. And then I was given the blessing of this extraordinary creature and human being, who’s turning into a good little man.
And you just, you just realize that, you know, unless it’s a great experience for myself and for him, or unless this experience that I’m being offered will benefit him down the road, I’m not leaving the house. Or I’m leaving the house, but I’m not going to go work.
And once he’s in school, you know, permanently in school, those moments for me to work will be very few and far between. And I’m so happy to embrace that. So yeah, I think it’s changed me a thousand percent. And I think it’s made me better. And I think it’s made me, you know, less worried about if this film doesn’t work, you know, “What do I have?” You know, I go, “I already have everything. And if this film doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. Nothing you can do.”
She describes how hard it is to be away from her baby when she’s working on a movie — and, what you hear less often, how hard it is on him. He didn’t like seeing her in the weird isolation suspension rig they had built to make it look like she was trapped in space. The question of whether women can balance work and mothering is often put in terms of what is best for the woman — which is significant, but not the whole story!
Transcript and audio here.
