Better Things

24 September 2017: "I don't, actually. Everybody always gets a little bit screwed. Even when I do my best, it ain't never enough." --Sam, on the Season 1 finale of Better Things, in answer to a friend asking how she "does it all."

It's hard for me to explain this show's appeal and what makes it so great. The characters (especially the kids) are so flawed and frustrating and annoying. Even Sam makes what seem like the worst decisions sometimes.

But they are all so real and you sense how much they do love each other, despite the ways they hurt each other. This same episode opens with Sam about to leave with her mom for an out-of-town trip to celebrate the mom's birthday. And, before they even leave the driveway, Sam stops the car and tells her mom that she just can't do it. She is done pretending that she wants to do these kinds of things with her mom; she loves her, but her mom is kind of toxic and bad for Sam. It's sad and empowering at the same time. She is almost certainly right to do what she does, but it hurts her mom and she feels shitty for doing it.

So I am sitting here today, taking a little break from my to-do list, to rewatch this episode, which has been on my DVR for a while. (And Better Things is back for Season 2--which is great.) I find myself so moved by this flawed woman, surrounded by flawed women, trying to do her best and knowing that she is getting some of it wrong and some of it right. And that it can't ever be enough.

And as I watch it, I am thinking both locally and nationally/globally, about the places in my own small life where I am never good enough and I hurt people even when I try to do my best. And about our completely messed up world and how women can make it better and how we can make it worse. And how it's never enough. And I am rambling. But this show--this moment--reminds me, of course, that I am not alone in feeling this way. And that (somehow?) makes things a bit better.

(Serious, slightly melancholy thoughts, I know. But it is Sunday...)