For any other generation before the 60s, this would have been common sense, but I am glad it is being spoken out loud. There are only 24 hours in a day, and everyone has to choose what is important.
I feel that many of our problems today can be traced to having two parents outside the home. Previous to 2008, we were in a bubble, one which we haven't acknowledged yet. Compared to previous eras, we were in an employment bubble. First it was novelty to have a woman working outside the home, then it was liberating, even for the men. But it eventually became necessary, as both parents were now required to work to be able to afford the McMansion and keep up the payments on the lifestyle.
After the 2008 crash, we all have had time to think about what is important, and having the greatest McMansion is no longer on top of the list. We have so many problems that can be fixed or lessened by having parents at home, from education, childhood obesity, attention deficit disorders, gangs, drugs, teen mothers, that we can start to see how important being at home really is.
After the housing bubble crashed, we have so many unemployed, probably permanently, that the best thing they can do is become a stay at home parent and homeschool their kids. They will have as much positive impact on society than going back to work.
She seems surprisingly smart considering the disaster of a childhood she had.
Failure to understand this leads you to a mountain of debt and a frantic life full of failure.
The most tragic failure is family. Marriages broken, kids neglected and not growing up to be dysfunctional people who do not understand the value of relationships, only things.
I'm not impressed with her latter-day "conversion." Once a skank, always a skank ... especially in Hollywood. Remember folks, she's an ACTRESS. She gets paid to pretend she's someone she's not.
Obviously nobody can have it all.
Wow, someone from Hollywood that has a brain in their head and uses it. How refreshingly rare.
I don’t have a link, but I recall several years back she was filming a documentary of some sort and talked with members of the DC Chapter who were out protesting. Those posting about that meeting were impressed that she was nice, polite and bright.
I'm a pretty good judge of genuine people and phony-balonies. Drew has a million-dollar last name...and she could be arrogant and affected if she had let the heritage go to her head.
However, I'm delighted to say she is genuinely unaffected, humble, fun, personable, bubbly, appreciative of her lot in life....and she appears to have a well-balanced and undramatic personal life. Now she's a proud new mother.
Drew has an almost child-like love of the acting profession and the art of film-making....a love that's probably in her Barrymore genes. I enjoy viewing her and listening to her informative comments on the movie industry when she and Osborne discuss the evening's feature film. She's got a lot of cinema history from the silents forward in her pretty little head.
Many folks seemed to think she'd tread the same sorry, disasterous paths as a couple of her illustrious late relatives, but she evidently has turned out to be a conservative, happy housewife, mother, businesswoman, director and actress....and she seems to be handling all her balls in the air very well indeed. I wish her all the best.
Leni
An excerpt from Disillusionment by Thomas Mann
“Do you know, my dear sir, what disillusionment is?” he asked in low, urgent tones, both hands leaning on his stick. “Not a miscarriage in small, unimportant matters, but the great and general disappointment which everything, all of life, has in store? No, of course, you do not know. But from my youth up I have carried it about with me; it has made me lonely, unhappy, and a bit queer, I do not deny that.
“You could not, of course, understand what I mean, all at once. But you might; I beg of you to listen to me for a few minutes. For if it can be told at all it can be told without many words.
“I may begin by saying that I grew up in a clergyman’s family, in quite a small town. There reigned in our home a punctilious cleanliness and the pathetic optimism of the scholarly atmosphere. We breathed a strange atmosphere, compact of pulpit rhetoric, of large words for good and evil, beautiful and base, which I bitterly hate, since perhaps they are to blame for all my sufferings.
“For me life consisted utterly of those large words; for I knew no more of it than the infinite, insubstantial emotions which they called up in me. From man I expected divine virtue or hair-raising wickedness; from life either ravishing loveliness or else consummate horror; and I was full of avidity for all that and of a profound, tormented yearning for a larger reality, for experience of no matter what kind, let it be glorious and intoxicating bliss or unspeakable, undreamed-of anguish.
“I remember, sir, with painful clearness the first disappointment of my life; and I would beg you to observe that it had not at all to do with the miscarriage of some cherished hope, but with an unfortunate occurrence. There was a fire at night in my parents’ house, when I was hardly more than a child. It had spread insidiously until the whole small storey was in flames up to my chamber door, and the stairs would soon have been on fire as well. I discovered it first, and I remember that I went rushing through the house shouting over and over: ‘Fire, fire!’ I know exactly what I said and what feeling underlay the words, though at the time it could scarcely have come to the surface of my consciousness. ‘So this,’ I thought, ‘is a fire. This is what it is like to have the house on fire. Is this all there is to it?’
“Goodness knows it was serious enough. The whole house burned down, the family was only saved with difficulty, and I got some burns. And it would be wrong to say that my fancy could have painted anything much worse than the actual burning of my parents’ house. Yet some vague, formless idea of an event even more frightful must have existed somewhere within me, by comparison with which the reality seemed flat. This fire was the first great event in my life. It left me defrauded of my hope of fearfulness.
“Do not fear lest I go on to recount my disappointments in detail. Enough to tell you that I zealously fed my magnificent expectations of life with the matter of a thousand books and the works of all the poets. Ah, how I have learned to hate them, those poets who chalked up their large words on all the walls of life — because they had no power to write them on the very sky with pencils dipped in Vesuvius! I came to think of every large word as a lie or a mockery.
“Ecstatic poets have said that speech is poor: ‘Ah, how poor are words,’ so they sing. But no, sir. Speech, it seems to me, is rich, is extravagantly rich compared with the poverty and limitations of life. Pain has its limits: physical pain in unconsciousness and mental in torpor; it is not different with joy. Our human need for communication has found itself a way to create sounds which lie beyond those limits.
“Is the fault mine? Is it down my spine alone that certain words can run so as to awaken in me intuitions of sensations which do not exist?
Suggested listening: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01qgr4h
Women can have it all but not all at once.
Drew Barrymore gets emotional over Barack Obama