This is the last episode in my mini-series (for now!). Thank you so much for listening, for your messages and comments. It has been extremely meaningful to be able to share these conversations with the world and have women respond in such moving ways. It’s also been a real personal achievement. After much deliberation, I did the thing I said I was going to do. I’m sure that shouldn’t feel so triumphant but it does, somehow.
If you’ve listened and enjoyed and would like another mini-series, please consider hitting the pledge button, buying me a coffee (or two! god knows I need them), or sharing the podcast with any women you know navtiagting the headfuckery of managing motherhood alongside career or creative aspirations. This podcast is for them, and all the women who feel, one way or another, interrupted.
On with the show
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If my conversations with Lucy Jones and Alice Vincent have been (mostly) about the internal transformations and revelations of motherhood, today’s conversation with actor and writer Naomi Sheldon is perhaps about the opposite: how does the external world transform around you when you become a parent?
For Naomi, the struggle of motherhood hasn’t been holding on to herself - it’s been holding on to her place in the world; on stage, on set, in the writer’s room. It’s been about having to close the bedroom door to her family while she gave herself over to her work and the endless demands of rewrites from a famously relentless industry. It’s been fighting for parts that she thought she’d already secured, working on sets that have been hostile to her because she needs to feed her babies. And, as all women know, it's so incredibly easy for the external battles to slip into our bloodstream, infect us from within: Is this my fault? Am I doing something wrong? Am I not good enough? What more can I sacrifice to make this work for someone else's batshit and sexist expectations?
Naomi is fiercely ambitious with an wildly impressive resume of TV, theatre and film credits. Emma Thompson called her one-woman stage show, Good Girl, “cutting edge truth and hilarity from one of the freshest voices of this century”. She’s clearly in demand and obviously quite busy. She has adapted The Girlfriend for Amazon Prime, staring and directed by Robin Wright, out later this year and her next original show (a thriller about a new mother) is being developed by Media Res Studio. She’s working on The Spot, a new HULU show showrun by Ed Solomon, developing a series starring Suranne Jones, and, playing Dolly in Anna Karenina at Chichester Festival Theatre which runs until the end of June.
Naomi’s determination to work also came out of necessity when she discovered she was pregnant with twins during the first lockdown of the pandemic and her husband, a theatre director, lost all his work. Naomi became the family breadwinner, back at her laptop when the babies were weeks old, pumping milk, fighting off tiredness. To say Naomi is impressive would be a gross understatement, but she also demonstrates something I’ve long believed: women can do pretty much anything when they have to.
The pandemic obviously wasn’t an ideal situation, but pursuing her dreams while paying the bills was an ambition in itself. Naomi wanted to be “the hero” of her story. She wanted to provide for her family, have a career and be out in the world, not succumbing to the traditional narrative of women’s lives getting more domestic and less exciting with the arrival of children. As with any good story arc, our hero faced challenges and setbacks along the way, self-doubt reared its ugly head, and a few wicked witches tried to block her, but she’s also had some fairy tale moments, too, like performing with the Royal Shakespeare Company as a mother to one-year-old twins.
Now, four years into motherhood, she looks back with a hint of sadness at those first demanding years. Perhaps she didn’t have to do it all, perhaps she could have pushed back on deadlines, asked for more help. In our conversation, Naomi is very honest about the pressure we can put on ourselves to prove we are capable. Naomi has high expectations for herself, sure, but the pressure didn’t come from her alone. It also came from the very real shit women face in the workplace, in the world, when they become mothers - the doubt, the side-lining and writing-off. The fear wasn’t imagined, it was very real.
At times, I was almost quite overwhelmed by what I was hearing. Naomi has done so much; carried the weight of twins while carrying the weight of keeping the family afloat and keeping her career on track. But mostly, listening to her, I felt a fire lit in me. I was in awe of a woman who’d fought so hard to be a working mother (the stories of maternity discrimination are wild), I was giddy to hear her writing career had flourished since having kids, and I was extremely motivated by her unwavering ambition. I felt galvanised. But there are important caveats, most notably her ‘secret weapon’: a husband who was the primary carer, one who she’s had to accept at times knew how to care for her children better than she did.
It’s been the greatest economics lesson of her life, she says, a constant calculation of worth and cost. What is worth time away from her kids? What can she spend her time on when bills need to be paid? What is the value of her time invested in her career? This week, Naomi emailed me from Chichester, where she’s performing in Anna Karenina. She tells me how she misses her children, but how excited they are to see her work. Yet another calculation, and, ultimately, one that burrows into all our bones and chests late at night: Will it all be worth it?
Thanks for being here
Marisa
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