Lihi Lapid

Women Across Frontiers: What made you start doing what you are doing today?

Lihi: After fourteen years of being a professional news photographer, I became a mom. To my surprise, motherhood caused me to become unemployed. I realized that newspapers are not interested in photographers who need to breastfeed every four hours, or spend time with their children in the afternoon. I had to choose between being a mom and my career. So, I chose to change careers instead and started to write. I write about the lives of women in the new age; about our desire to fulfill our dreams and, at the same time, to be moms; about our attempts to evolve and grow in the public sphere and, at the same time, be present in the house. I write about it with the understanding that we have to find our balance from within, because no external source will provide it for us. So, for the past ten years I’ve been writing on how we can combine the two women who live inside us—the career women and the mom—and if it’s even possible not to give up one of them.

WAF: What motivates you to do what you do on a daily basis?

Lihi: One of the things that are most important to me, aside from my journalistic writing and my books, is meeting with women. I meet with different groups, I speak and listen to them, I try to give them energy, to inspire them to dream and achieve, but also to know that it’s o.k. to succeed less, or to fail. We don’t live in a perfect world, and it’s only natural that we won’t always be perfect. Many women don’t hear this often. This motivates me to travel around Israel and to meet women from different backgrounds and to pass along this message. My last book is called “I Can’t Always Be Wonderful.” I think that if every woman remembered that she can’t always be wonderful and perfect she’d feel much better about life and herself.

WAF: What do you consider your biggest struggle or your biggest challenge?

Lihi: My biggest challenge is to make women love themselves. Sadly, women are their own worst critics. They are aware of each and every fault and weakness they have, they remember each and every one of their failures. I want them to look at themselves with the same love with which they look at their best friend. I want them to take good care of themselves, as much as they take good care of their children, friends and husbands. I want them to learn to put their ‘wants’ at the beginning and not at the bottom of the list. I want them to give themselves the luxury of resting sometimes, and the momentum to run and don’t look back if they feel like it.

WAF: What is your biggest achievement or your most transformative moment?

Lihi: The most transformative moment for me was when I realized that my daughter has autism. That moment, I started a war. I was determined to do everything I possibly could to enable her to live a full life. And she is doing her best. She is progressing. She is beautiful and autistic and she will always be. It took me some time to accept it, to learn to live with the fact that she is special. So, my next step was not a war but a journey of accepting it, with love. For that to happen I had to accept something that doesn’t always go with the traditional view of love: I accepted the fact that nothing and no one is perfect, not even love.

WAF: What is your ultimate goal or your biggest dream?

Lihi: My biggest dream is to see women be happy with themselves, love themselves. I truly believe that the only way you get to a place of true love is to accept that perfection doesn’t exist, that there is no perfect body, perfect child, or perfect husband. There is love and acceptance and a wonderful life we can choose to enjoy, if only we know to accept the good with the bad, and learn to accept that we can’t control everything, but we can love. But first of all, we need to love ourselves.

WAF: What is your favorite quote?

Lihi: “What happens to you now is not the preview – this is the real film.”