{"id":34634,"date":"2025-10-09T06:11:27","date_gmt":"2025-10-09T06:11:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/shonda-rhimes-says-you-cant-have-it-all-as-a-working-mom-it-does-not-work-that-way\/"},"modified":"2025-10-09T06:11:27","modified_gmt":"2025-10-09T06:11:27","slug":"shonda-rhimes-says-you-cant-have-it-all-as-a-working-mom-it-does-not-work-that-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/shonda-rhimes-says-you-cant-have-it-all-as-a-working-mom-it-does-not-work-that-way\/","title":{"rendered":"Shonda Rhimes says you can&#8217;t have it all as a working mom: &#8216;It does not work that way&#8217;"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.insider.com\/68e72026cc993f9955cfd7ea?format=jpeg\" alt=\"Shonda Rhimes\"\/><figcaption>Shonda Rhimes says there was a &quot;relief&quot; in knowing she couldn&#039;t be perfect at work and as a mom at the same time.<\/p>\n<p>Nathan Congleton\/NBC via Getty Images<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<ul>\n<li>Shonda Rhimes says it was a relief to accept she can&#039;t excel at work and motherhood at once.<\/li>\n<li>&quot;It&#039;s always going to be a little bit, you know, shaky. So let it be shaky,&quot; the &quot;Grey&#039;s Anatomy&quot; showrunner said.<\/li>\n<li>In a 2014 speech, Rhimes said success in one part of her life often meant she was falling short in another.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Between raising kids and creating hit TV shows, Shonda Rhimes says she&#039;s found comfort in accepting that something will always have to give.<\/p>\n<p>During an appearance on Wednesday&#039;s episode of &quot;Call Her Daddy,&quot; hosted by Alex Cooper, Rhimes spoke about the realities of balancing motherhood and her career.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;I think the relief was realizing that you can only do so much at once,&quot; Rhimes told Cooper. &quot;I mean, I think that the struggle and the way we&#039;re told like, lean in or you can have it all or all these things \u2014 it&#039;s such bullshit.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Rhimes said that working mothers are often &quot;conditioned&quot; to believe they need to give their all at work and still be perfect at home, when in reality, &quot;it does not work that way.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>&quot;My job is amazing, but there are times when I&#039;m going to have to say, OK, I let that slide because my kids needed me. And that is OK,&quot; the &quot;Grey&#039;s Anatomy&quot; creator said.<\/p>\n<p>The pressure to be &quot;perfect&quot; in every part of life sets women up to fail, since no one can give their all to everything at once, she added.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;It&#039;s never going to happen. You&#039;re never going to feel amazing at both. It&#039;s always going to be a little bit, you know, shaky. So let it be shaky,&quot; she said.<\/p>\n<p>She added that she&#039;s accepted that she&#039;ll always have to prioritize some things over others: &quot;It&#039;s not that you can&#039;t do it all. It&#039;s that you can&#039;t do it all at once.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>&quot;People used to be like, &#039;How can you say that?&#039; I&#039;m like, it made me feel so much better to think like, &#039;OK, I&#039;m failing at work right now. That&#039;s OK.&#039; To give myself that permission made it so much easier,&quot; Rhimes said.<\/p>\n<p>This isn&#039;t the first time Rhimes has spoken about finding balance as a working mother. In a 2014 Dartmouth commencement speech, she shared that she, too, has to make trade-offs between her personal and professional lives.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;Whenever you see me somewhere succeeding in one area of my life, that almost certainly means I am failing in another area of my life,&quot; Rhimes said.<\/p>\n<p>A representative for Rhimes did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent by Business Insider outside regular hours.<\/p>\n<p>The concept of how women should &quot;lean in&quot; to their careers and ambitions was popularized by Sheryl Sandberg, then Facebook&#039;s Chief Operating Officer, in her 2013 book of the same title.<\/p>\n<p>In a 2025 memoir, former Meta executive Sarah Wynn-Williams revealed how the workplace&#039;s &quot;lean in&quot; culture often left working mothers feeling unsupported and exhausted.<\/p>\n<p>Rhimes is far from being the only Hollywood star who has spoken about the challenges they faced trying to balance work and motherhood.<\/p>\n<p>In 2024, Keira Knightley said she had to step back from her career because she chose to start a family.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;I couldn&#039;t go job to job [abroad] now. It wouldn&#039;t be in any way fair on them, and I wouldn&#039;t want to,&quot; Knightley told The Times. &quot;I&#039;ve chosen to have children, I want to bring them up, so I&#039;ve had to take a major step back.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>During a May appearance on the &quot;Armchair Expert&quot; podcast, Michelle Williams said that balancing her career and motherhood is like figuring out &quot;which master you&#039;re going to serve.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>&quot;Because the truth is, if work is going well, somebody else is taking care of the kids. And if you&#039;re in a high point with your kids, the work is shoved to the side,&quot; Williams told podcast host Dax Shepard.<\/p>\n<p>Read the original article on Business Insider<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Shonda Rhimes says there was a &quot;relief&quot; in knowing she couldn&#039;t be perfect at work and as a mom at the same time. Nathan Congleton\/NBC via Getty Images Shonda Rhimes says it was a relief to accept she can&#039;t excel at work and motherhood at once. &quot;It&#039;s always going to be a little bit, you [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":34635,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-34634","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34634","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34634"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34634\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34635"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34634"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34634"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34634"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}