Hilary Swank’s Raw Reasoning Behind Getting Pregnant at 47 Shows a New Way to Think About Work-Life Balance

Making time for yourself, your career, and your kids can feel impossible. It’s the age-old work-life balance question everyone is trying to get right. For Hilary Swank, though, it’s simple. Just spend part of your life focused on your own career, dreams, and goals, and the other years pouring into your children! The Million Dollar Baby star explained her reasoning for getting pregnant with her twins, now one and a half, at 47 years old, and it’s such a unique way to focus on the whole balance question.

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The actress, who shares twins Aya and Ohm with husband Philip Schneider, explained that she was too focused on her career to consider motherhood any sooner. “I knew I wanted to be an actor since I was 8 years old, and I have loved my career,” she told PEOPLE , adding that she hopes she is “always going to be an actor.”

Because of this drive, motherhood was put on the backburner. “So I was really career-focused and I wasn’t ready to have children in my 20s, or really even in my 30s, and then I hit my 40s and I didn’t have a partner,” Swank continued. “That doesn’t mean I had to have a partner. A lot of people get donors, and that’s a wonderful option, a lot of people adopt, there’s a lot of different ways, and so I was open to anything.”

The Ordinary Angels star has been acting for decades, totally focused on her craft. Then one day, she decided it was time to have a family. Swank got pregnant in her late 40s and is thankful that she can now focus on raising her kids. “I was 47 when I got pregnant, and I feel like I have a lot more patience, and I’ve done a lot of my own personal work to be the type of mother I want to be, whereas it would’ve just been different in my twenties and thirties,” Swank said.

She added, “I don’t think I would’ve had the patience and the grace that I hopefully can bestow a little bit more [of] now, and a self-awareness in a different way that I don’t need to focus on myself anymore in the way that I did at that point. I can give differently.”

Spending years solely focused on building your career, followed by years focused on raising kids is an interesting approach to work-life balance. You don’t have to balance everything every day , just as long as you have a balance across your life that is fulfilling for you. Of course, many women are mothers earlier in life, and then when their kids fly the nest they can dive into their careers then. It doesn’t matter how you do it, as long as it works for your family.

Back in March, Swank opened up about her competing desires to be an actor and to be a mom. “Even when I was a little girl, I was like, ‘Yeah, I want to be a mom someday.’ But I also had this career that was like a baby to me that I wanted to give my all to,” she said in an appearance on TODAY With Hoda & Jenna .

“I don’t know, because we didn’t have them younger, so I don’t know what that would have been like then, but I think there is something — for me anyway — right now that I’m able to give my focus to them in a way that I wouldn’t have been able to at that point,” Swank added. “I can give my all to them because I’m in a blessed position that I can say, ‘Oh, I’m going to go back to work now.’ Or ‘I’m going to take this time off now.’”

Swank recognizes that she is privileged enough to balance things this way, which definitely wouldn’t work for everyone. But it is a nice reminder that even if our weeks or our months don’t seem completely balanced, there’s a season for everything. And in the end, a balance can be achieved — even if it doesn’t look exactly like what you might have pictured.

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