Workin’ Moms: What They Teach Us
I wasn’t playing when I said I was back.
I love talking about TV shows with friends, particularly when covering shows outside the mainstream — the ones you find to be criminally underrated in the world we live in, where good work sometimes does not get the recognition it rightfully deserves.
One of my favorite shows that falls into this category is Catherine Reitman’s Workin’ Moms, a modern look at the lives of a group of Toronto-based working women, the challenges they face in their day-to-day lives, and how they grow and tackle those challenges in creatively comedic, yet enlightening and cathartic ways.
Without diving too deep into the plot (because there are so many time consuming overlapping threads to cover) two of the main characters are best friends Kate (portrayed by Reitman) and Anne (portrayed by Dani Kind). Kate is the superwoman who wants it all. She leads a PR firm she built from the ground up in downtown Toronto, while juggling being a fulltime mom to her three kids, one of which is a newly adopted teenager who she, quite adorably, has loved so dearly in such a short time. Anne is a psychiatrist who deals with her demanding teenage daughter while navigating the world of having her own practice and the ethical expectations that come with her profession.
Both people with big hearts, Kate and Anne simultaneously struggle with work, life, and a work-life balance, most especially through the most recent season. Kate has issues delegating and asking for help, while Anne struggles with her sometimes volcanic temper — both vices that come to affect the relationships they have with their husbands, children, and colleagues.
The intriguing way the writers work through this is that Kate serves as reinforcement for Anne’s vices, while Anne reciprocates. For instance, when Anne asks if she does have an out of control temper as pointed out by her husband, Kate says “of course not! That’s who you are. You’re a firecracker, and Lionel (Anne’s husband) knew what you were when he married you.” As a result, they continue to spiral downward and they both reach breaking points where the near missed consequences of their actions would have been catastrophic.
Upon reaching these breaking points, both Kate and Anne recognize that though they love each other dearly, they needed time away from their friendship to remedy their vices and hopefully reconvene after they both find themselves in better places. Kate learns to step away from work, trust others, and make more time for her family, and Anne opens up in an anger management support group as she seeks out healthier ways of expressing herself.
Now, the thing that makes this show so appealing to me is how real it feels and how applicable the lessons we get from the resolution are in our daily lives. For instance, one area the show emphasizes in the friendship between Kate and Anne is how some friends (though with good intentions) may tell you what you want to hear, but not what you need to hear. They make Kate and Anne painfully aware of this, so they get to a point of holding themselves accountable, so much so that they even tearfully consider the end of their friendship as a possibility in resolving the problems they need to tackle on their own.
This similar theme of personal accountability applies to other characters like Jenny (portrayed by Jessalyn Wanlim) and Sloan (portrayed by Enuka Vanessa Okuma). Their struggles touch different aspects of motherhood and womanhood like childbearing, workplace sabotage, grief, and trust in ways that are deeply touching, yet never on the nose (a difficult balance I believe is hard to maintain).
And that’s the main reason I love this show so much — they deal with issues that I, as a 26-year-old man, can understand only from empathy, as opposed to experience, in a way that feels like they are guiding me, hand-in-hand, while teaching me lessons that can be applied to my own life from these experiences I can never share.
It is sad that the next season will be their last, but I am eager to see how these characters tell us goodbye. I obviously recommend this show to anyone thinking of starting it. You won’t be disappointed.
Till next time,
Fonon.
