A Guest Blog for Moms Rising by Pamela Tanner Boll

How do women continue to do work they feel called to do while not turning their backs on their families? How do they sustain their efforts? What do those efforts mean for their children, their families, and their communities? Why are women still whipsawed between giving to others and developing their own skills?

These are just some of the many questions I set out to explore while making my new film, WHO DOES SHE THINK SHE IS? It follows the lives of five women who are both artists and mothers. We say we value care giving and art in our culture, yet neither pay. I wanted to understand how women make it all work.

WHO DOES SHE THINK SHE IS? came about partly through my own experience. I
had studied art and poetry in college, in the late seventies and fully intended to pursue some kind of work in this field on graduating. At the same time, I always wanted children and wanted to be the kind of mother who was present for those children. After graduating, I decided that to pursue a career as a poet was far too risky. I could not imagine trying to construct a life in the arts, especially as a woman. I saw so few “successful” women artist, so few women writers who also had children.

So, I followed my college sweetheart–again, with the idea of love and children–to New York City and found a paying job on Wall Street. I worked at a large commodity trading company and was, for a time, the only woman in the trading room. While I enjoyed the pay and the prestige, I truly was not meant to be a soybean meal trader and happily left the company to accompany my new husband across the country to his business school.

I am now the mother of three beautiful boys- -ages 17, 19, and 21–and still married. I went back to art on the birth of my first child. I had no other way of making sense of the powerful and unexpected waves of emotion that hit me on becoming a mother–a tsunami of adoration, and love for my little one linked with panic at the responsibility for his well being, an endless not-knowing that just grew as I had my second and third babies.

These feelings pushed me back to my writing and to painting–my only hope of ordering the chaos that becoming a mother had plunged me into. I have been a working artist since.

Yet, always, this “work” has been in the cracks of my care giving. So, I wanted to explore how other women coped with this tightrope act. And I wanted to explore why this vital role of nurturing the next generation gets so little respect and certainly garners no direct financial gain in our culture. Hence the film!

The film is playing at The Angelika Theater beginning tonight, October 17, for a week-long run. If you cannot see it in NYC, than the film will be available soon on our website and people can also go to the site to find other screenings and to organize house party screenings. Our web site: www.whodoesshethinksheis.net is creating a community for mothers who work and want to weave these two aspects of their lives into a more beautiful pattern.

I hope you’ll come and join the conversation.