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Don and I both made concessions in order to be present in our baby's first years. Don redesigned his work schedule to accommodate our new family, becoming a free-lance writer and working out of our home. We never needed a baby sitter; Don took over on those afternoons I was in the recording studio. We laughed and called Gabe our football as we passed him back and forth throughout the day. When Kit was born, we followed the same scenario.

My goddaughter's parents are both educators and devoted to their children. They live frugally, yet a dual income is essential to supporting their four-member household. Life in the Pasadena cottage is a whirlwind of daily activity and the never-ending challenge of creatively seeking compromises that will adequately satisfy the family's needs until the children reach school age. Dad kept summer school in his busy teaching schedule so that Mom could be home in the summer months. Then Mom traded in a position at the middle school for first grade, freeing up her afternoons and evenings to devote to their toddlers, not to after school conferences, make-up exams and the obligatory paper correcting of the upper grades.

In elementary school, Kit had a good friend whose household was unique among most. Mom loved to work, had a stimulating career and wasn't crazy about being home all day. Dad loved to parent, had a perfect disposition for it and became a "house husband." Everyone flourished.

I have read numerous interviews with very successful women in the field of entertainment, taking particular interest in those individuals who looked deeply and honestly at their lives and accomplishments. Inevitably, the women whose children were grown and whose careers took precedence over family shared commonality: wealth, fame -- and regret at having missed out on something irretrievable: their children's young lives. A career can be revitalized after a few absent or abbreviated seasons. Early childhood is gone.

Big and powerful does not necessarily equate to heartfelt and visionary. In today's marketplace, huge corporations run two of our most precious creative industries -- music and film -- making decisions based all too often on trends and the bottom line. The most inspired, the most ingenious, the most unconventional endeavors may never reach our eyes and ears.

Often, it is the independent feature that elicits my deepest appreciation, a movie not overly produced or targeted for a mass audience. Don and I attend the Sundance Film Festival most every year with friends and are collectively awed at the fresh, innovative spirit of the films we view. The atmosphere surrounding the festival celebrates and empowers the creative heart and soul.

Professor Dean Simonton of the University of California, Davis suggests in his research that man's creativity flourishes within small, competitive communities. Ancient Greece produced some of the world's most creative thinkers while divided into rival city-states like Athens, Sparta, and Corinth. The genius of Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and Michaelangelo was borne out of the politically competitive atmosphere between Florence and Venice. And the German Golden Age that produced Goethe, Mozart, Schiller and Beethoven subsided when Bismarck unified the country, eliminating the smaller principalities.