The debate about balancing career and family sparks up regularly. It’s good. Change takes time and repeated sparks. In 1989, I was one of nine female graduate students to be awarded a Congressional Fellowship on Women & Public Policy. I had decided to apply for the Fellowship in my last year at the UCLA Film School, when it dawned on me that: 1) I had hoped American work-family policies to have improved by the time I was ready to think about parenthood; and 2) I had unfairly expected others to do the hard work of enacting the change. Not coincidentally, my disappointment and dismay coincided with a life change. In…