I’m continuing down this road of writing about all of the major inflection points in my career, in hopes that it will shed some light on the path necessary to help others with their own career transitions or for you to help others to help others with theirs. We talked about my college experiences, the boost I was given by caring family members and then the seasoned actor who spoke up for me. But today I want to talk about how some inflection points aren’t realized for a really long time and how to identify those tradeoffs.
The Setup
I entered the film industry at a really rough time in the town I was in. Work was drying up, and as a contractor, I would go weeks at a time with no work. It was rough. The frustrations associated with it being a long-tail career (where the fewest amount of people make the most money and everyone else works for peanuts) were mounting.
During the five years I was casting, I went back to school part-time to get a theater minor and teaching degree in order to teach high school theater. I also did marketing for a food distributor for about six months. I ruled out both of those careers for my life because of the lens I was seeing them through at the time. I decided to continue on with casting until I wanted to start a family at which time I would stay at home with kids.
After several projects that were just commercials, or films of just extras casting, or independent films that didn’t pay much (or at all), I finally got one that had a big name director and principal cast. The script came by FedEx, not emailed so as not to easily leak. I read it, and I knew that this script was different and special. It was chilling. My casting partner and I would be doing the local casting, meaning all of the smaller parts that were not cast with big names.
The film was There Will Be Blood, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson and starring Daniel Day Lewis. I would proceed to do a multi-state search for the young boy who co-starred in the film alongside Lewis, and I would get to work directly with Paul Thomas Anderson, a directorial genius. It was a dream come true; I had my big break. I was also eight months pregnant with my first child.
Being 5′2″, my pregnant belly was comically large (later to find out my baby was comically large at 10 lbs 13oz). I was driving Paul Thomas Anderson and the lead casting director Cassandra Kulukundis to the airport one day ( pre-Uber), and Anderson joked about how he was going to create a character for a future film after me while I sped him through Dallas traffic to get to the airport in my 2000 Honda Civic, looking like I could give birth at any moment. I loved every minute of it, but I knew it was goodbye.
The Problem
Certain things started spoiling the experience for me, making the decision to be a stay at home mom much easier to make. For instance, in my multi-state search for said little boy co-star, I drove eight hours out to Marfa, Texas to do a local open casting call since the film would be shot there. I got to the production office and found that the principal casting director had already done an open call there without informing me. Even though I was tasked with finding the child star, she took the opportunity from me, most likely unknowingly, as film production companies run at full tilt. She found him there in Marfa, and he was brilliant. I drove the eight hours back home in my Honda Civic with my husband who very sweetly accompanied me on the trip, and I felt defeated. I was letting it sink in that my career choice was quite hard-driving and go-getting, and it seemed at odds with raising a family.
18 months later we sat in the movie theater watching the credits of There Will Be Blood, and everyone in my casting group, even people that did not work on the film, was credited except for me. My decision to leave casting behind was cemented. I didn’t want motherhood to be complicated by the drama of trying to make it in film, so I simplified by staying home for the long haul.
The Inflection Point—Casting to Stay-at-Home Parenting
Leaving casting and starting a family was a huge inflection point, but it’s not one that can be put on an
XY coordinate defining an upward or downward trajectory thereafter. It was a winding road through motherhood as a stay-at-home parent, full of emotions and new adventures.
Having kids young was a purposeful decision we made, noting the tradeoffs, of which there are many. The major tradeoff we made was if we wanted to be focused on our careers while we were young or in our forties. We chose the latter, but there was no definitely correct answer. It was just a bunch of really hard choices to make that were laid before us, but we recognize that it is an extremely lucky position to be in when you have the luxury of many options. We weren’t certain that we were making the right choices as we couldn’t see the future. We could only hope to be so lucky as to be afforded the gift of moving forward, hoping for new and beautiful inflection points ahead.
Conclusion / Call to Action
If you or someone you love is in this stage of life wondering what to do, my advice is to breathe. You may not know the perfect thing to do, but just breathe and make decisions out of a place of peace and confidence. Fear can sometimes be a good barometer, but when it’s paired with insecurity it can be noisier than is useful.
This is the last post that I will write about the pre-engineering inflection points. My goal in these last three posts was to show you that, as you know, life is complicated. People show up to decisions to switch careers with so much baggage and emotional debt that they’re usually willing to do whatever they can to make something work. That’s certainly where I was at, and I hope that you will be able to recognize the gravity of the situation when you see it in others.