A Teaching Scene from This Is My Life, directed by Nora Ephron
In This Is My Life, Dottie's agent tells her, "Kids are happy when their mother is happy." She disagrees: "No, they're not. Everybody says that, but it's not true. Kids are happy if you're there. You give kids a choice — your mother in the next room on the verge of suicide versus your mother in Hawaii in ecstasy, they'd choose suicide in the next room." Dottie, like many single parents, has to find a balance between her need for fulfillment in a career and her children's need for her time.
Dottie gives her two daughters gifts just before she leaves for a trip to the West Coast. "These are journals, sweethearts. Take notes while I'm gone. Don't write letters. This is a life lesson. Letter writing is ridiculous. Nothing ever arrives within a week and someone else ends up with what you should have — a record of your life." Journal keeping is a way of paying attention to what is going on in your own life. It's a record both for the present and the future.
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