{"id":252060,"date":"2023-09-01T07:15:00","date_gmt":"2023-09-01T11:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/?p=252060"},"modified":"2024-01-16T14:42:40","modified_gmt":"2024-01-16T19:42:40","slug":"shrinking-apple-tv-father-daughter-relationship-grief","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/shrinking-apple-tv-father-daughter-relationship-grief\/","title":{"rendered":"I Was My Mother\u2019s Daughter, and Then I Was Stuck With My Dad"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

After his wife dies in a sudden car crash, Jimmy Laird numbs his pain for a year. He stays up all night, drinking and doing coke and paying for some kind of company with women. He\u2019s not healing, but he is coping. He tries to stifle his grief, which is so much easier than actually feeling it. Understandable, except he is a therapist, and a father. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

He knows better. He should be present for his daughter, not partying in his backyard while his teenager is in the house. Shrinking<\/em>, an Apple TV show created by Bill Lawrence, the same person behind Ted Lasso<\/em>, opens with one of these nights. Jimmy, played by Jason Segel, is drinking and doing drugs on the side of his backyard pool while two young women are swimming in their underwear. His neighbor Liz breaks up the party and asks, \u201cWhere\u2019s Alice?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jimmy answers, \u201cOh, she\u2019s asleep.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He fumbles, and he betrays, and he is selfish, and\u2014he tries.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Except the teenage daughters of single dads know when our dads have lost it. We aren\u2019t asleep in the house while they\u2019re partying in the backyard. They can\u2019t keep anything from us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have watched countless movies and shows that include a dead mother. They are everywhere. Some of them care about the nuances of young grief, and some of them kill off the mother just to add generic trauma for their characters. Shrinking<\/em>, though, is about the single dad that is left when a mom dies. It is about the parent who is still there, not the one who is gone. The trying-but-failing Jimmy is sometimes so recognizable to me I can\u2019t watch. Jimmy wants to be a good dad more than he acts like one. He fumbles, and he betrays, and he is selfish, and\u2014he tries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When my mother died, I was in fourth grade and my brother was in eighth. Before our mom got sick, our parents divided their roles: she was with us, and he went to work. Some days he came home to have dinner with the family and went back to the office afterwards. During the year she spent undergoing cancer treatments that were never meant to save her, she tried to prepare him for what was coming. She taught him how to make some of our favorite dinners, including the roast chicken with the sauce we lapped up using slices of crusty French bread. I was my mother\u2019s daughter, and then I was stuck with my dad, who forced me to play basketball and forgot to pick me up from school. He was his wife\u2019s husband, and then he was stuck with two kids screaming in grief. No one wanted this version of our family. We all wished we weren\u2019t stuck together like this. And he had lost too much to be there for us with the immediacy and fullness we needed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Movie and TV single dads take many forms. Some are valiant in their efforts to be present for their daughters. They fight for them, even when it\u2019s awkward, like when Alice Laird\u2019s godmother Gaby (played by Jessica Williams) encourages Alice to tell Jimmy that she has had sex. Alice isn\u2019t sure, but Gaby tells her she thinks Jimmy can be cool about it. \u201cPlease, let me be Cool Dad,\u201d Jimmy begs Alice, promising that whatever she\u2019s about to tell him, he can handle. He isn\u2019t quite cool, but he gets there.<\/p>\n\n\n