You get to decide what your life looks like!

If you missed it or are new here, hi! I am VERY pregnant atm. As I write this I’m 38 weeks + 1 day to be exact, which for those of you who know nothing about pregnancy (besides what to do to NOT get yourself/others pregnant – that was me for years), it means baby boy could come any time now. eeeee!!! 

In the meantime, I thought I’d share some quick advice about becoming a parent in this industry. 

Except I’m not sure I’m qualified yet… 

But my advice is if you want to become a parent, do it. Do what you need to do for YOU. For your life. 

There is never a good time to start a family. There is never a good time to book out cause you will inevitably get auditions. (ok, ok, the last two weeks in Dec and first week of Jan are pretty great times to book out as well as May-July, but you CANNOT plan your life, or a birth for that matter, around those dates). 

***And in case I’m being unclear, starting a family // going on maternity or paternity leave is NOT a vacation. From what I hear, it is a ton of freaking work – very rewarding yes, but also super challenging, which is again why I will not be writing a weekly note for the foreseeable future.***

Ya know even after booking out and telling people I was pregnant, I still got non pregnant auditions…and I declined and guess what? That was OK. People understood. They were happy for me!  

All that being said, it can still be super tricky to decide when to tell your team, casting, producers, etc that you’re pregnant.

I wish I had a clear answer for you about how and when to go about sharing your good news. I don’t.

I think there’s a lot to take into consideration about your personal situation. Generally speaking, I’d hope that you have a strong relationship with your team where you can communicate openly with them and strategize, but I would say at the end of the day, you should decide for you when you want to stop working and auditioning. 

There are of course some things you might have to keep in mind if say you’re a series regular and the writing needs to change to address your bump, maybe you tell them a little earlier..but maybe you don’t want to get killed off…so, again, I’d hope you could talk to your TEAM about it and come up with a plan. Or maybe you’re shooting in 3 months and you can’t do the stunts anymore or perhaps you’re shooting in 8 weeks and wardrobe is going to have to make alterations… it can be tricky and not always clear when to share with others. I would say don’t rush yourself in sharing the news, but also don’t feel like your entire world will crumble if you do. Most of the time, things are going to be OK.

For the record though, I am not a series regular and am not recurring on a show so these were NOT things I had to worry about. For me, it’s been pretty easy. I’ve been open and honest about actively choosing not to focus on my acting career this past year and focus more on coaching and my family and people have been super supportive and yes, I still got auditions. 

I just want to remind you that whether you are pregnant or not, you get to decide what your life looks like.

You get to choose if you want to pause for a month, a week, a year or 5 years. And if you do, you can always come back to acting. This industry is not going anywhere. I was having a conversation with my agent recently about the fact that I wasn’t sure how soon I was really going to be “back” after maternity leave. I shared with her that I want to start a podcast, eventually write a book and work on some other passion projects and guess what? She was totally encouraging and even shared, “I’ve had clients go away for a few years and come back in a new age category and casting was so excited to see them again and they just crushed it cause they were happier too!” You never know… 

Now while I am actively choosing to step away from acting and am unsure when I want to get back to it, I have friends who worked just about until birth and started auditioning quite soon after too (hello those real parent / kid commercials can pay BANK!). Again, you gotta do what’s right for you and if having kids matters to you, you’ll make it work. And if you don’t wanna have kids, that’s super cool too. Do you. 

OK, that’s all, friend. Thank you again for your love and support as I embark upon this new bananas journey of becoming a mom.