Serious Person
Dear Friends,
After a morning museum-hopping downtown earlier this week, my daughter and I went to Shake Shack in search of lunch. The restaurant was crowded, so I kept our order simple. A chicken sandwich for me, a hot dog and strawberry shake for Nora. We joined the cluster of people by the counter and waited for our order.
And waited.
And waited. The energetic little boys who ordered in front of us (while sparring with invisible swords) got their food. The massive family that swooped in and took the last available table got their food. The woman with the blazer who ordered ten minutes after us got her food.
“Excuse me,” I said to an employee. “Did our order get skipped?”
She rolled her eyes at the ceiling and shooed me back into the waiting crowd.
“It’s coming,” she said.
The woman with the lime green jumpsuit (fifteen minutes after us in line) got her food. The man wearing two stacked baseball caps and yelling into a cell phone got his food.
Though Nora was sitting quietly in her stroller, patient and unconcerned, I felt panic begin to flutter in my chest. I felt like crying. Emotional overreaction, much? I thought. You do not need to cry about Shake Shack. But there was something unnerving about being in the middle of a small restaurant with a giant stroller, taking up so much space, and finding myself invisible.
What would have to be different for me to be taken seriously? Maybe if I wore a blazer or a lime green jumpsuit instead of my black Amazon sack dress? Maybe if I were a man? Maybe if I weren’t so obviously a lone mom? Lose the stroller, lose the sneakers, lose the endless stretch of afternoon with nowhere to be?
The family with the sword fighters began to clean up their trash.
“I’m sorry,” I said to the same employee, “but people who ordered at the same time as us are done with their food now. Can you check…?”
She took my receipt and conferred with someone in the kitchen. Order boards were consulted. Someone was summoned from the grill.
“Ohhhhh,” the employee said. “I think we made a mistake. We are going to rush this, we’ll have it right out.”
She looked me in the eye for the first time in half an hour.
And suddenly, everything was fine. We did have to wait another fifteen minutes for our food, but the employee checked back in with me several more times, confiding that things were a mess and people were going to get fired later that day. We joked about Mondays.
I felt seen. Hungry, but seen.
Last week, Nora was sick with a virus, so I spent the better part of four days holding her while she took feverish naps and watched endless hours of the riveting Disney show “Minnie’s Bow-Toons.” In between coaxing my child to take Tylenol and trying to find “the episode with the baby piggie,” I blew through three novels.
In Emily St. John Mandel’s The Glass Hotel, a passage jumped out. Three characters are on a boat together, and Olivia, an older woman, is surveying her friend’s much younger partner:
“Vincent was lovely but not, Olivia had decided, a serious person. Since her late teens she had been mentally dividing people into categories: either you’re a serious person, she’d long ago decided, or you’re not. A difficulty of her current life was that she was no longer sure which category she fell into.”
I think most of us want to be considered a “serious person.” Not in that we can’t have fun, but that we’re deliberate, contemplative, perhaps ambitious. A person who walks the earth with intention. A person who is seen and understood.
But it is very difficult to be seen as a serious person when you are the mother of a small child.
Shake Shack invisibility aside, I’ve been trying not to overthink the punishment that often seems to appear after I try to do something meaningful for myself. I sent my child to camp for a week so I could commit to attending Music Together training, and she caught a virus that wiped out our next week of plans.
I relate so much to a post I saw on Instagram from writer Madeline Anthes–she writes that she was waking up at 5AM to write, but then her children started waking up at 5:30.
“I shall continue to point out how absolutely beautiful and terribly difficult it is to be a mother who wants to keep anything for themselves,” she wrote.
I would like to be seen as a “serious person,” but sometimes it’s tough to feel like a person at all. Everything I do is countered with the reminder that my identity is first and foremost Mama, and everything else second.
On Saturday, totally touched out, I told my husband I needed a break from parenting. I just wanted to go to Target and wander up and down the aisles and remember what it’s like to not do anything for anyone else for a bit. Let my mind leave my body. Look at shiny things.
There’s nothing that screams “I am not a serious person” like Target self-care. It’s as basic as it gets. To be alone, to experience the dopamine rush of buying a tank top and a new bottle of nail polish. The brief descent into madness walking under the Magnolia Home arch where you ask yourself if you are soothed or repulsed by the neutral-toned, mass-produced ceramics and throw pillows. What if I threw out all my rainbow Fiestaware and got all-white dishes? What if what I really need is an oversized, polyester-blend blanket? What are my feelings on shiplap?
The other self-care option I considered last weekend was going to the movies–the choices being Barbie or Oppenheimer.
The blockbuster weekend, of course, was one giant exercise in who gets to be a serious person.
Serious people see Oppenheimer. They wear their regular clothes. They contemplate history and death. Un-serious people see Barbie, probably while wearing a pink outfit, probably in a group of giggling girlfriends.
Or are you seeing Barbie for feminism, or because you’re a Greta Gerwig fan, which makes you serious?
Or do you think Greta Gerwig is annoying, which makes her unserious, but makes you serious as a critic?
For the record, I love Gerwig, but I prioritized the zombie-walk through Target over fighting for Barbie tickets. I am indifferent to Oppenheimer.
Barbie made $162 million dollars on opening weekend, by the way, beating out not only Oppenheimer, but every other movie that’s been released in 2023. If being serious is being seen, I suppose we have our verdict.
We all have moments when we feel unseen for whatever reason. The trick is remembering that things can change–not getting stuck in the narrative that you’re being punished for trying. Especially in the case of American motherhood, you definitely are being punished, if not by the universe then by society. It’s not in your head. But it’s also enough to take you out if you let it, so I guess we have to self-care our way into having enough energy to keep waking up at 5, keep taking up space in Shake Shack, and keep writing and shouting (and making films that take out the entire global supply of fuchsia paint).
It’s also true that viruses, fast food delays, and Hollywood hype don’t last forever. And neither, I suppose, does being the mother of a small child. That said, you’ll never catch me telling you to savor every moment of Minnie’s Bow-Tunes. Don’t do that. You are, after all, a serious person.
Take good care,
Dot
News & Updates
What is EDPP Supervision? The El Duende process painting technique, originated by Abbe Miller, is a one-canvas painting that uses many layers built up over the supervision experience to enhance clinical learning. We offer supervision for Virginia LPCs and us-based Art therapists in qualifying states.
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Links We Like
Lisa Damour on being your teen’s “emotional garbage collector.”(New Yorker)
Esther Perel’s podcast, Where Should We Begin…?, is back!
What to do with climate emotions. (New Yorker)
On therapy-speak & the Jonah Hill texts: “It says something about where we’re at as a society that we’re tossing around ‘boundaries’ and ‘dysregulated’ and ‘narcissists’ willy-nilly. We are unwell, we are in pain, we are isolated, we are not connecting very well.” (MSNBC)
Here for “treat culture.”
Are you forgetful, or are you shouldering too much of the mental load?
Your weekly animal kingdom therapy metaphor.
Curious about this new app for tracking feelings (free, too!).
And this app that has you take a breath before you open social media.
Good art in Barbenheimer colors, of course. “Rituel” by Magali Cazo:
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