via Linda Kallerus/FX
It’s been a long personal break in my life, taking the longest break from blogging since I started blogging professionally well over a decade ago – all for third parties, the whole time. It has been a time of internally analyzing rather than getting thoughts down on ‘paper.’ Mental math, if you will.
Fleischman is in Trouble, recently released on Disney+, has had me reeling since I watched it. I am, after all, a Jewish mother, having married and left a marriage with a gentile, whose child was struggling with it all. Not the same but similar enough. There was SO much to relate to.
This blog is not sponsored. I probably won’t even personally share it. It hit me hard. This show gave me pause. It’s given me grace – I’m not alone. I’m not weird. I’m not broken.
Friends, divorced and married, Jewish and not, nor intermarried, seemed to feel as I did, that this limited release show based on a book by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, spoke to the truths of being middle aged in ways nothing else truly has.
What exactly is “me-time” when you’re a mom? Can you extract yourself from motherhood like a velcro strip? There is no way to temporarily excise the physical and emotional toll of it all
Lior Zaltzman for the @Kveller
That’s the thing about the epiphany years – so much of what you thought things would be turn out not to be. All you are left with is a forced reevaluation of what happiness looks like for you – and what you thought you wanted that limits your ability to achieve that.
There is a serious gap in modern discourse about what it feels like, truly feels like, to experience the traumatic experience that getting to middle age can be. Fleischman exposed a narrative I lived but that hadn’t had played out for me in a manner I could commiserate with. My births, 14 and almost 12 years ago, traumatized me in ways I hadn’t truly appreciated until Fleischman. So did the newborn days. So did my toxic work experiences.
Middle age gaslit me to believe things that weren’t true about my experiences, that I was unknowingly traumatized by. I was fed this fake reality that these events should be blissful (pregnancy/first moments/first days/first weeks/first months etc. etc. etc.). They weren’t for me. They weren’t for a lot of people. Maybe even, they aren’t for most people.
Instead of thinking we should just endure and move on, why not give us all the grace to feel and grieve and acknowledge?
Why are we expected to suppress?
That’s where Fleischman got me. I’ve shared no spoilers. I mean only to recommend taking a birds eye view of what people our age are feeling about their lives and realize we are all, no matter who we are, in good company.
This shit’s hard.
The Epiphany Years 