If there’s one thing you can count on me for, it’s jumping all the way in on something I’m obsessed with and only coming up for air to tell my friends about it. Usually it’s a film, or a show, or a book, or an album I’ve recently discovered. My friend Samira gets me (hi, Samira, if you’re reading) and we’ve jokingly coined the term art slut for each other. She swoons as easily as I do, falling hard and fast for anything that speaks to us, going all the way right away. Then we squeeze every last thing out of that one before we move on to the next and end up with a trail of past obsessions behind us. It’s probably a coping mechanism, but I don’t want to give it up.
I sent her a text a couple of weeks ago gushing about Fleishman is in Trouble (trailer here if you want to see it) and soon enough, she was on board, and then it became hurried messages back and forth at odd times with no context and incomplete sentences and exclamation points as we recapped together. This show has me completely consumed. It enters my brain uninvited when I’m at school, eating my lunch, and answering emails. When I’m making dinner at the stove on our hurried weeknight schedule. When I’m falling asleep. When I’m walking the dog. When I’m driving. You get the point. I’ve even re-watched certain episodes because it feels so much like a mirror to me that it scratches an itch I forgot I had.
You may end up watching it and hating it, but I’ll profess how much I loved it anyway. Warning: there are some explicit scenes, especially in the first couple of episodes, but they serve a purpose when you see that even mindless sex with strangers can’t distract someone from processing the years behind him. The first few episodes felt like a train wreck I couldn’t look away from, and then the last few pierced me right in the heart. There are so many moments in this show that swallowed me whole, and I found myself relating closely to all of the characters at one time or another. Libby, who so often felt like my mirror, the writer-mom who loses her way consumed by suburban motherhood, her monologues that made me turn on my subtitles so I didn’t miss them. Rachel, a character I hated when the show began but felt a kinship with by the end. Toby, parenting through heartbreak and enduring a loneliness that pulses like a presence rather than an absence. The late 90s nostalgia in their flashbacks. The subplot detail of a museum exhibit featuring NASA-developed Vantablack, a color so dark it's hard for us to tolerate without fear. The park bench scene as Libby stares off in the distance while Aimee Mann begins to sing. And of course the scream in episode 7. That scream.
(I’m convinced I could finally fix everything that’s wrong with me if I could scream like that just once.)
As it begins, it appears to be a show about a man, but it shifts midway through to center on the women in his life, and to me it’s actually a show about how time changes all of us. How we can move through our days with a million big and small choices – until we look at that path of choices or at our own reflections and don’t recognize ourselves at all. It’s about what happens when you build a life with the purpose of avoiding your childhood wounds only to find that you just recreated them. It’s about how longterm friendship can be your lifeline and how marriage can amplify internal personal discomfort that has nothing to do with the other person. And how the middle of your life is an intersection of absolutely everything, and family routines don't leave room for you to sort through that mess so you just keep going until you can’t anymore.
I think one of many reasons I’m obsessed with it is that it captures both the twisted fantasy and the reality of a lot of women like me. Libby is perhaps our reality, the cracking that remains imperceptible to everyone but us until it doesn’t. The garden-variety fracturing that rumbles and rearranges you but can ultimately be mended. And then there’s Rachel, the category five hurricane that results when a working mother says I truly can’t do this anymore and completely taps out. Find me a mom who hasn’t had that thought at least once.
I know I’m lucky for a million reasons. My kids are healthy. I am healthy. My paying job ends at 3:45 everyday before the second shift of working mom life begins, and I even have summers off. But two things can be true at once. I love this life; I chose it; I’m lucky to have it. And sometimes it’s really hard. Motherhood is inherently a high stakes job, and then the added pressure of single parenthood leaves you wondering if I don’t do it, who will? It’s enough to make even the strongest ones crack.
Tell me I’m not the only one. I have weeks and months of doing all the things and feeling mostly fine and in control. And then suddenly weeks where I feel held together by frayed yarn and tape, barely making it. It’s not the laundry or the stack of essays waiting for me or packing lunches or driving kids places that gets me. It’s the mental load required to make all of that happen. I once heard it compared to the ticker across the bottom of the screen on a news network which is a perfect analogy. That’s my brain, all day, all the time.
What’s next and next and next and next? Did I get that registration complete for the spring show she wants to audition for? Did I make the appointments yet for the yearly check ups? Should I call someone about that dripping faucet? This is a carpool week, so I need to drop that bag off on the neighbor’s doorstep as I leave at 7am tomorrow. If he has band rehearsal after school tomorrow and then I take her to ballet at 6, what’s my dinner window? They go to their dad’s next weekend, but does he know about the birthday party on Sunday and where to drop her off? Next and next and next and next.
I can remember the early toddler years when I was craving a life where my body felt like my own after years of pregnancy and birth and breastfeeding and all the constant cuddling and carrying. I loved my kids, but I wanted my body to feel like it belonged to me again. It feels like that is what’s happening now again, except this time it’s my brain I want back. Only I can’t do that because the ticker is always there. I can’t turn the ticker off.
I know this is an unoriginal complaint, and I see other moms with the same look on their faces, too. I see my friends with our overflowing calendars and too many miles on the car and interrupted sleep cycles and hair that should have been washed yesterday and wonder if we’re okay. (We aren’t.)
There’s a moment in the show when one character explains the real motivation behind an illicit affair is that it captures some feeling you had when you last felt alive, but now you don’t feel alive anymore and just want to get that feeling back. He tells Libby the same is true for her secret cigarettes, stolen in moments away from her kids and her husband. I’ve always been too much of a rule follower for a forbidden affair or a smoking habit, but that scene keeps looping in my brain and leaving me to wonder - metaphorically speaking, what are my affairs and my cigarettes? Where’s my release valve to find myself again? What can I indulge in that makes me remember I’m alive and redeems myself from the life I’ve built?
When I try to think back to mothers as I remember them when I was growing up, I can hardly recall much about them at all. Which is a really depressing thought actually. They were definitely there, no doubt working themselves to the last frayed nerve to oil the machines of their households, but I hardly remember them in a detailed way because so much of our work as mothers is invisible. Unpaid, unnoticed, forgotten. I remember most of my friends’ moms only in flashes, a voice here, a recipe there, a moment. But the exception is the mother of my closest high school friend. She always seemed a centimeter shy of just driving off to leave everything and everyone behind. She smoked a lot. She had an oil painting above her bathtub that featured a woman without a shirt on. She would vacuum to the soundtrack of Radiohead’s “Creep” turned so loud the neighbors could probably listen and we would hear it above the roar of the vacuum motor in another room. I have a distinct memory of walking out of my friend’s bedroom upstairs and peering down from the catwalk balcony to see Patricia rage cleaning while Thom Yorke screamed What the hell am I doing here? I don’t belong here. At the time, I thought yikes, moms aren’t supposed to be that way, she’s a little unhinged. But now it makes me laugh, and I sort of get it. 28 years later, I nod to her across time to say “Me too, Patricia. I see you.”
In Department of Speculation (another past “art slut” obsession I read years ago and adored) Jenny Offill says, “the truth about getting older is that there are fewer and fewer things to make fun of until finally there is nothing you are sure you will never be.” I’ve spent my whole life working very hard to keep my ducks in a row and vowing to never be a mom who loses her mind, only to find that here I am despite my best intentions, not always keeping it together after all.
It was also in Department of Speculation that I first learned the term “art monster,” a concept echoed in a fabulous Claire Dederer book I’m reading right now. The narrator tells us she never intended to have a family when she was younger because she wanted to be a prolific writer, an art monster, instead. But that “Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn’t even fold his own umbrella. Vera licked his stamps for him.” Unlike her, I desperately wanted a family. I never aimed for only being an art monster, but the cage of modern motherhood brings out that yearning in ways I wasn’t ready for. If not a full art monster, can I at least be an art werewolf or something? Spend my days doing what I’m supposed to do and then shape shifting when I want something else?
Art monster is my secret fantasy; maybe it’s not yours. But it doesn’t take a desire to be an art monster to want to make something more of your life. And I know mothering my kids is making something of me, that it’s actually the biggest something there is. Even if motherhood feels invisible now, it echoes in a way they will carry with them for the rest of their lives. I know this. But also sometimes I get tired of folding umbrellas and licking stamps. Moms are not supposed to feel this way, but just for once, I want to know what it feels like to be a Nabokov and not a Vera. I guess maybe the real reason I’m an art slut who loves to lose myself in other people’s work is because I can’t be an art monster who creates my own. Being an art monster isn’t all it’s cracked up to be either, and this show illustrates that with a subplot storyline, too. But you know how it goes. A couple of decades on a path makes you ask yourself if you should have done more with your life. Or if you could have, if that was even an option. The thing Cheryl Strayed refers to as “the ghost ship that didn’t carry us.” Everyone has a ghost ship. Roads untaken and all that. Every life has choices.
No illicit affairs and cigarettes here, but what are my release valves, my ways of coming back to myself? Turning the music too loud in the car. Wandering around aimlessly in a bookstore. The intense personal nostalgia of this song. Or the hopeful heartache of this one or the way this one feeds some kind of latent melancholic anger in me. Road trips on rural highways. Wearing my favorite sweater. Any combination of strings and harmony. Live dance or theatre performances. Knitting or sewing or creating anything at all. Early mornings alone in my house before my time belongs to anyone else. Conversations with my closest friends when we can look each other in the eyes and say the real thing, or say nothing and still feel understood.
And of course the most reliable release valve of all is writing. Not the kind I work hard on where I labor over sentences and rearrange words and edit it into new shapes and worry about reader reception, but the kind I do here where I dump it all out on the screen in front of me and sort out what I actually feel instead of what I think I should feel and then hold my breath and hit send and don’t worry about the rest. This kind of writing is my secret cigarette, stolen moments in between folding umbrellas and licking stamps. It’s not Nobokov’s art monster prose, but it’s my voice. Not the public-facing me or the teacher me or the mom me, but the me that is under all that. The one I always was. The one that gets lost sometimes if I don’t make space for her to breathe.
If you’ve actually read this far, I’m surprised because I feel like telling myself to get to the point already. And I’m not even really sure what the point is. (A clear point from the very beginning would require a brain without a ticker.) I guess what I’m saying is it feels good to feel. It’s the whole point of being here. But I can go hours and days and weeks feeling nothing at all when I become a human doing instead of a human being.
But that numbness doesn’t last long because it’s always replaced by a craving for something I can’t even name. When I get like that, it’s a restless pacing inside my head. Or my heart. It’s hard to tell which one. I think that familiar craving isn’t a desire for anything outside of me but instead just the desire to meet myself again. Not to turn the years back because I can’t do that anyway, but to somehow inhabit the me I was before I had the ticker in my head. Or at least to look her in the eyes again, to remember she’s here. When I get like that, I need an affair. Or a cigarette. Or someone else’s art to feed me. A song or a film or a show like this one, resonant enough to make me say yes, that’s it. That thing right there. That’s what I’m feeling. Me, too.
I've been following Katie since my divorce in 2018 and love her writings. This post hit home for me, as while I'm remarried now, I see what my wife does for her two kids as compared to their father. I try to gently push back and tell her that their dad needs and should do more and that while it's tough, the girls just have to go to stay with their dad.
While it is tough, I think that single moms need to push back and have the other parent do "more", even if it's tough on the kids. The kids will probably fight it, especially in their teenage years, but they'll be ok in the long run.
My boys actually choose to live with me vs their mother after our divorce (I kept the house), but I also made them go to their moms every other weekend. Both parents need and deserve a break and if that means a kid or two misses something or forgets something, that's OK.
Good luck Katie and looking forward to your next post....