Untitled Mom Essay

Let's just watch TV

Judy 2008

Take Out the Trash Day, the thirteenth episode of the first season of The West Wing, was distilled and grown up like the best gin at the bar. The low-key humor of Toby correcting a congressman for saying Fuzzy Bear instead of Fozzie Bear made me want to reach through the TV and smack Richard for being so brilliant—but add Mrs. Landingham denying the prez a banana and CJ saying we could all be better teachers, please, enough already. The show is just so beautiful and clear, and yes, yes, you tell me this when you see me getting my matcha or walking Ollie, that watching is your solace, your weighted blanket, your stiff and reliable drink, and I understand. Today especially. I am so totally with you.

After finishing the show, I laid on my couch staring at the ceiling, thinking about what to write, what stood out. If I’m honest, as I told my friend Molly at the coffee place yesterday—if I really, really, really wrote what made an impression, what comes up when I watch the show—I would write exclusively about my drop-dead, kick-you-in-the-teeth youth. That’s it. Done. Forget the genius of Aaron and the cast, it’s my ribcage I am dazzled by. But today, stretched out flat as a corpse, eyes tracing a spidery crack in the corner of the ceiling, wondering if it was a cobweb or a leak, I thought only about my mom.

Every Wednesday night, after an episode of The West Wing aired, she would call me to tell me I was great—that my hair looked cute or that she was happy with the amount of screen time I got. Sometimes it would be my dad. He would declare, without saying hello, that I was the BEST one on the show, BLEW everyone out of the water—that kind of thing—but mostly it was her. Moments after the credits rolled, my phone would reliably ring. But I remembered after this episode it didn’t.

You knew, back before streaming, before the tech companies swallowed the world whole, that half the country was in front of the TV at exactly the same moment you were, having a collective experience—yet sometimes no one called. You squinted into the silence, wondering why, eventually working out that maybe, just maybe, not everyone was thinking about you despite your miraculous success. And after a time, you understand that your friends and even your sisters assumed you were at work or some fabulous party, wearing something glamorous and drinking something bubbly—that your life was full of nonstop magic. But not your mom. Your mom knew the truth. That you were alone in your apartment with your chicken Caesar salad and your cat, expecting her call. So where was she?

Day to day, when our mother didn’t answer her phone, my siblings and I would text each other. Unaccustomed to her not picking up immediately, we were sure that she was lying in a pool of blood on the kitchen floor—not that she was perhaps walking to the mailbox or getting her teeth cleaned like any normal person. We were conditioned to her availability. She was simply ours, and to not be there was impossible.

I sat by the phone drumming my fingers, wondering what the hell happened. I waited for five, then ten minutes and dialed her number—the number that, when the day comes and I remember nothing, I will still know by heart. “Yellowwww?” she answered like everything was perfectly normal.

I was stunned. “Umm, did you watch the show?!”

“Yes I did!” she chirped.

Pause. Pause.

“What kind of game are you playing, old lady?!”

“I liked it,” she said. I could hear the grin.

“Ok. Then why didn’t you call me?”

“Oh! Am I supposed to call every single time?” She was genuinely asking.

This was a ridiculous question. “Yes!!” I shouted into the phone. “Yes you are!” She was my mother, and if no one else in the whole world called, she would be enough. Her opinion, for better or worse, was how I measured my life, how I gauged what was right and wrong, what was a good idea from a bad idea, what I should fight for and what should let fall away. How could she not know that?

Just then the phone clattered to the floor and my dad said something inaudible and funny that made her laugh. “Hold on, Janel!” she said, all echoey, obviously wrestling the curly cord from the crocheted throw blanket, pulling the receiver back to her ear. “Oops, here I am. Hello,” she panted. “I’m back.”

“So. Mother. Promise you will call your daughter every time she is on national television.”

“I will,” she said, enjoying the game. “I mean—I promise.”

And she did. Every single time for the next seven years. The episodes I was not in, she reviewed as generally weak, and the ones I had a lot to do were very, very good.

I treasured those nights, my phone getting hot against my ear while we chatted—me putting away dishes, sliding on my nightgown, brushing my teeth as she listened to my rants and worries. I rarely asked her about herself. I would go on and on, not asking her a single question until moments before she hung up, realizing that I was a selfish shit. But she never made me feel like the clueless, boundaryless baby I was, because she accepted me and loved me and knew that what I needed was to talk. I’m not sure that now I would not point out to my adult child that they were being obnoxious and boring, that this was not a conversation, that I was not a receptacle for them to stretch out in, luxuriating in my unconditional love like a grown-up woman fetus. But maybe that’s what being a mom is. Just that—the unfathomable power and comfort offered to your child just by being alive.

Were she here now, she would tell me this was all nonsense. That we are all doing our best, including me—that I’m a great mom and that there is nothing to it but to be there. But as I lay on the couch, knowing I need to write, to start my day, to be productive, to kill 2026, to reinvent, reignite, to shepherd and nourish, to maintain and maximize, to leave no stone in this goddamned life unturned—I am not sure about anything. If I could call her, she would say something simple and reassuring, and I would take the words like medicine, letting them run through my veins, fortifying me, making me ready and strong. But I can’t call her and she won’t be calling me, because she died one year ago today.

My sister Meegan and I have a game we played all last year. It’s called… Or Is It the Grief?! It goes like this: You wonder aloud about your weight gain or insomnia, your cuntiness or lack of motivation. Then, after exploring the most likely possibilities—menopause or The President (usually it’s one or the other)—you say, in a happy fun voice, like a contestant on a game show… Or Is It the Grief??!!

We had collectively decided that we weren’t going to do it, the grief thing. It felt corny and indulgent, like a chapter we could skip—she was just dead after all, nothing to be done. Early in my career, only half joking, I used to say I would never utter the words Hold Me or simulate giving birth, two profoundly vulnerable acts I wasn’t even interested in pretending for money. I don’t think of myself as emotionally stunted or guarded—I am an actress, after all—but tell me I should grieve and I will tell you I don’t know what that means.

So maybe, at least for this day, I won’t try to figure it out. Instead, I will settle back into the couch, rest my head on the green velvet pillow she helped me choose, and wrap myself in the soft blue blanket she knitted and mailed to me in a cardboard box. Then, like you do—because you tell me it really helps—I’ll wait for tomorrow, cocooned in the past, and watch another excellent episode of The West Wing.