À la carte (December 15, 2024)

Non-stressful television and another motherhood book

A show

So far we have only identified one item that got lost somewhere between our old house in Oakland and our new house—our television remote. Not only did our quest for the remote push us to unpack the miscellaneous living and dining room boxes more quickly than we might have otherwise, but it meant we spent our evenings doing things other than watch TV for the first couple of weeks in our house—things like unpacking boxes, assembling flatpack furniture, and online shopping for closet systems. Actually being productive after putting your toddler to bed is too much. Two weeks ago, I threw in the towel and bought a universal replacement remote for our LG TV, and so Ben and I are back to being couch potatoes a few nights a week.

Like many husbands and wives, we have very different notions of what kind of TV is relaxing to watch after a long day. Our Venn diagram overlap encompasses Somebody, Somewhere, a delightfully uneventful three-season show on Max starring comedian Bridget Everett as Sam, a woman who moves back to her hometown of Manhattan, Kansas in her 40s after her sister dies of cancer. This show is the perfect antidote to 2024—to Trump, to the 24/7 news cycle, and the kind of bitterness that caused a man to GET OUT OF HIS CAR yesterday and scold me for giving money to a Venezuelan mother and daughter panhandling in the median as I left Wayfair.

Maybe what is so lovely about Somebody, Somewhere is that, despite being set in these times, the show doesn’t let these times define them. Somebody, Somewhere challenges our assumptions about small town life on the prairie—Sam finds community in a queer, racially diverse little posse of former musical theatre kids. They may live in the middle of nowhere, but there are still stories to tell, universal stories involving cancer, alcohol addiction, adultery, and aging parents.

For most of the show’s three seasons, Sam stays rather stagnant, mired in grief and insecurity and defense mechanisms. She is what my friend Valentina would call a “closed pistachio.” Meanwhile, her sister Tricia transforms into an angry, #girlboss divorcee (perhaps my favorite character arc), her father leaves the family farm to travel for the first time in his life, and her best friend Joel finds love. The third season opens with Sam feeling left behind, and centers the question of whether she will allow herself to move forward. Somebody, Somewhere’s finale aired last weekend, and I’m mourning the end of this beautiful show which treats its ordinary American characters with so much grace and dignity.

Another show

The one good thing to come out of my body’s 48 hour skirmish with the COVID vaccine this week was that I finally had time to start Later Daters, a new reality dating show on Netflix focused on singles in their fifties and sixties. Produced by Michelle Obama (!!), Later Daters is riding on the coattails of the success of the Golden Bachelor franchise and I am here for it! The debut seasons of the Golden Bachelor and Golden Bachelorette must have debunked networks’ operating assumption that no one would want to watch older people fall in love, and so here is Netflix trying to capture some of the commercial success of the tired ABC franchise. I’m so bored of the overplayed drama of Love Is Blind and The Ultimatum, the obvious casting for toxicity on reality TV these days, and contestants’ transparent thirst for fame. The Golden franchise made me, and apparently everyone else, realize that it is actually quite refreshing to follow normal people on their earnest quests for love. Singles in their sixties and seventies don’t want to be influencers. They want to find companionship and spend time with their grandchildren.

It is simply a lot of fun to watch people who know themselves date. With the benefit of the wisdom and self-knowledge that comes with losing a spouse, whether to death or divorce, the Boomers have a sharper sense of who they are and what they want than their younger counterparts on other dating shows. The primary conceit of the Golden franchise, however, is ultimately also its primary shortcoming—the lead can pick only one person to propose to at the end of the show. We have to endure seeing the rest of the beautiful, deserving Golden singles, to whom we have formed parasocial attachments, sent home to continue their quest for love out of our view. Later Daters satisfies my desire for a non-competitive, polyphonic dating show where there is enough love to go around. And while the Golden franchise, like the Bachelor, tends to cast from a fairly homogenous slice of middle-class America, the cast of Later Daters is not only fun and attractive and entertaining, but diverse. There are a number of Black leads (thanks, Michelle Obama), and so this show does the important work of telling the sorts of stories we usually don’t get to see, showcasing older Black women in all their humanity and vulnerability on their quest for love. Perhaps the only person looking for fame on Later Daters is the Harvard-educated dating coach, Logan Ury, a behavioral scientist who has worked for dating apps and has written a book on dating. I find her irksome in the way that people who lead with the fact that they went to Harvard are irksome. I would have liked to see an older dating coach. But she doesn’t spoil the show for me. This is the best kind of TV for folding laundry.

A must-read on motherhood

Lucy Jones’s Matrescence made waves this year by naming and explaining the seismic biological, emotional, and psychological shift undergone by mothers through pregnancy, birth, and postpartum. For anyone whose brain was cracked open by Matrescence (either the book or the experience),

Sarah Menkedick

‘s Ordinary Insanity: Fear and the Silent Crisis of Motherhood is a mandatory follow-up read. Using her own experiences of postpartum anxiety and OCD as an entry point, Menkedick explores how fear is so endemic to motherhood (particularly modern American motherhood) that anxiety is too often overlooked by clinicians as a possible pathology. How much anxiety is normal is a question every new mother asks herself as she checks to make sure her sleeping newborn is still breathing. I frequently wondered in my first few months of motherhood as I walked my baby around the neighborhood in the stroller, is it normal to have visions of a bus careening onto the sidewalk and killing us? Is this just evolution reminding me to be extra careful?

For many women, postpartum mood disorders do not present as classic postpartum “depression,” and without adequate screening and access to care in the postpartum period, it is difficult for many new mothers to know what level of worry is normal and what is not. For example, the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale, which most women will encounter at an early pediatric visit, doesn’t consider a mother who is happy and bonded with her baby, yet frequently anxious, worried, scared, or panicky “for no good reason,” to have a postpartum mood disorder. Even if she scores three points on the scale for questions 4 & 5, she needs a total score of 11 or more to be considered for a diagnosis of postnatal depression or anxiety. In my case, it was my love for my baby—and my utter bliss—that was so terrifying. Everything was so good. I felt something had to go horribly, horribly wrong. No one in my daughter’s pediatrician’s office ever talked to me about my responses to the questionnaire, let alone how I was doing.

Between strands of her own personal narrative, Menkedick offers a fascinating history of motherhood and birth in America, including a closer look at the unique experiences faces by Black mothers. Menkedick also weaves in the stories of a diverse group of mothers, including some who ended up indefinitely trapped in psychiatric wards against their will when they sought help for ordinary postpartum anxiety. (I’m not sure I’ll ever advise a friend to just talk to her doctor ever again…)

Ordinary Insanity is not just a research tome, but a work of great literary beauty and a meditation of motherhood. I have an insatiable appetite for this kind of book. As Menkedick notes, “[t]here are no equivalencies to the mother-child relationship. The particular intimacy of that closed unit, the immensity of obligation it demands and the surprising difficulty and beauty of that obligation, which for many women is a wholly new form of love—this relationship could lead to fascinating explorations of the human condition via studies of what psychoanalysts have dryly called ‘maternal states,’ but mostly it has not.” I am so grateful to be coming of age as a mother in an era where there are finally deep, beautiful, and critically-acclaimed examinations of matrescence.