If you need some real talk today about parenting, keep reading.
This week, producer and screenwriter Shonda Rhimes said some refreshing truths about parenting as a working mom — and while some of it might be hard to hear, the Grey’s Anatomy creator said that she found comfort in realizing that it’s impossible to do it all or have it all.
Rhimes sat down with Alex Cooper on the “Call Her Daddy” podcast and shared her experience of having a epic career while also raising three kids.
“I think the relief was realizing that you can only do so much at once,” Rhimes said. “I mean, I think that the struggle and the way we’re told like, lean in, or you can have it all, or all these things — it’s such bullsh*t.”
She believes you can have it all, but not all at once.
“My job is amazing, but there are times when I’m going to have to say, OK, I let that slide because my kids needed me. And that is OK,” she continued.
We make ourselves miserable by trying to have something that’s impossible. Instead, we should get used to imperfection.
“It’s never going to happen. You’re never going to feel amazing at both. It’s always going to be a little bit, you know, shaky. So let it be shaky,” she said. “It’s not that you can’t do it all. It’s that you can’t do it all at once.”
You can’t do it all at once. That’s something to let sink in.
“People used to be like, ‘How can you say that?’ I’m like, it made me feel so much better to think like, ‘OK, I’m failing at work right now. That’s OK.’ To give myself that permission made it so much easier,” Rhimes said.
This isn’t the first time that Rhimes has opened up about how tough it is to juggle work and parenting.
“If you are a working mother you are often not there as much as you’d like to be,” she told Business Insider when her daughters were younger. “I said this once somewhere, that if I’m standing on set watching some amazing thing being shot, then I am missing my daughter’s science fair. Or if I’m at my daughter’s dance recital, then I miss Sandra Oh’s very last day … That’s what happens. Those are the trade-offs.”
Rhimes has three children, 22-year-old Harper Lee (love that name!), 12-year-old Emerson Pearl, and 11-year-old Beckett. She’s made the personal decision not to have a partner and welcomed her first two children through adoption and the third via surrogacy.
You can watch the full interview below.
