Four Seasons of Hope

How We Are Changing Parenting in Real Time

Hope is a practice. And like all practices, some seasons are easier than others. In a cultural moment where two thirds of Americans are pessimistic about the future of our country, cultivating hope can feel a little bit like pissing in the wind. Or maybe that’s dust in the wind? I forget.

But recently I had dinner with a friend visiting from the midwest to look at local colleges with her son. She confided that she was having trouble figuring out how to navigate a new and unforeseen situation. After her husband recently blew up their family (I’m not being flippant–it’s an insane story) he wanted his children to start hanging out with his new girlfriend and her sons almost immediately. (We’re talking weeks after filing not months.)

Essentially he wanted his sons to jump over their grieving process out of his discomfort with his own behavior.

“I don’t know what to do,” my friend said. “I want to honor my boys’ feelings without saying anything disparaging about their dad.”

This reminded me of the recent series Four Seasons, written and executive produced by Tina Fey and based on the original 1981 film written and directed by Alan Alda. Like many people (judging by the number of weeks the movie was promoted on my home page) I rewatched the original after finishing the series.

Interestingly the new version follows the original fairly closely. But one scene stood out to me.

In the 1981 film, when Nick’s daughter, Lisa, expresses her feelings about her dad leaving her mother for a much younger woman, whom he then has the poor judgement to bring to parents’ weekend, his response is to deflect any responsibility for her emotional state. He tries multiple tactics. First, he informs her that his leaving her mom is not a big deal. He tells Lisa that she’ll be fine. When she refuses to be jollied out of her grief, he accuses her of emotional blackmail. His last ditch effort is to tell her to, “smile.” To a modern viewer, his immaturity and narcissism is nauseating but also captures the parenting mores of the time, when the adults wanted to believe that there would be no lasting consequences to their self-centered behavior.

However, in the update, when Nick, now played by Steve Carell, has a knee-jerk, disciplinarian response to his daughter expressing her anger, his ex-wife steps in. “She’s expressing her pain. Stop thinking about yourself for once. Stop correcting how she said it and try to hear what she’s saying.”

Wow.

In just one generation we have gone from a normed disregard for a child’s lived experience to accountability. It’s still not the character’s first instinct. But now we have a wife saying, “Be better. Do better.” And he does. In the next episode he works to repair the relationship using the tools of our generation. He listens. He takes in his daughter’s experience, he owns his mistakes.

As for my friend, she sat with her son as he cried and told him he did not need to do anything he wasn’t ready to do, that he could set the pace for engagement with his dad’s new girlfriend, that all his feelings were valid and he did not need to rush through them to make anyone else comfortable. She not only centered his grieving process, she somehow did manage not to disparage her ex.

She is changing parenting in real time, inventing the tools to repair her parachute, even as she plummets to earth.

So in this season of heat and chaos, know that at least there are parents who are capable of saying to their kids, “You don’t need to pretend to be ok to make anyone else feel better about their shitty behavior.”

If this doesn’t fill you with hope for the future I don’t know what will!