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No, not that Sam Fox, not the Touch My Body, Brits-presenting eighties Page 3 model. There’s a new Sam Fox in town and she is raging.
Sam Fox is a character played by Pamala Adlon in the series Better Things which Adlon also wrote, produced and directed. And it might just be the best thing I’ve ever seen.
Sam is an actor living in LA. She has a big, ranch style house, full of art, a wildly inappropriate mother (Celia Imrie) who lives across the street, a cluster of solid girlfriends and a grinding, relentless feeling of exhaustion. She is wild, wise, tender and hurting. She is also vital, a brave and bold presence on our screens.
Thanks to her, I feel seen.
Sam has three daughters. There is a lot of fighting and swearing but also a ton of tender unconditional love and mutual respect. Sam also has an ex-husband, the father of the girls, a sporadic figure who seems to excel in let downs and disappointment.
Like all the best dramas, Better Things lurches between pathos and laugh out loud humour. It is very real, very raw and very, very brilliant.
Ever since I was a child and fell in love with Roseanne, I have sought great television as my preferred form of retreat from the world. But Better Things offered more than escapism and a brain-blanket. Better Things touched a raw wound that I knew I had but hadn’t named – the inescapable grief of parenting.
No one tells you this shit. You know, when you're huddled down with a new-born, fighting for snatches of sleep and oscillating between euphoria and blind panic and you wrongly assume that this is going to be the worst of it – the sleep deprivation, feeding round the clock to keep them alive, learning how to live a new family constellation. What no one ever tells you, understandably I’m sure, is that there is worse, (and wildly better things) waiting for you down the line. And its timing will be cruel, its battering brutal. Right when you’ve finally got into the swing of things. When your boundaries are solid and routines running well. When your kids are thriving and can climb a tree and ride a bike and own a cluster of swimming badges. When you’re secretly feeling smug as you fold a clean Brownie uniform, pay for piano lessons, fill their little lives with wilderness and travel and experience. Yeah, don’t be fooled by that shit. Overnight they begin the ‘leaving.’ It begins innocently enough. Small acts of independence. A closed bedroom door from behind which you can hear laughter, another separate world that you are not welcome in. Nobody asks you or checks if you’re ok with this – this abrupt reshaping of your family. Nobody notices that with every step they confidently take away from you without a backward glance, that your soul is collapsing in on itself with a weight that squeezes the breath from the body.
Sam Fox lives and breathes the agony of the ‘leaving’ and most episodes of Better Things left me sobbing in a breathless heap. It’s almost too close to the bone to bear. Yet so beautiful and accurate and funny that it is compelling. Like a car crash.
We may understand that, obviously, releasing our kids into the wild is the correct order of things. It is our purpose as parents, right? To raise capable, kind and passionate people and let them go. The measure of a job well done. To give them wings and roots. But oof, does it hurt?
I remember hearing the term ‘empty nester’ when I was a teenager and scoffing and thinking how pathetic and sad to have literally nothing left in your life when the kids left home. And I do know some women who don’t feel the leaving as painful, who relish the space and freedom and lack of nagging and picking up of socks. But far more often, when I talk to my female friends, the same feeling sits just below the surface.
I’ve been watching it closely. Allowing it to take up some space and feeling it deeply. And I’ve named it. It’s Grief. We’re carrying it around behind our smiles and plate spinning and get-on-with-it attitude and general competence. It’s heavy and it’s relentless. There are so many things that bombard us every day, harsh little reminders that a part of our life which was all consuming at the time has gone forever. Daily I find myself catching my breath at the sheer weight of loss. I think we need to talk about this more. And louder.
A couple of weeks ago I stood patiently waiting to get into the bathroom (yup, that’s real too), looking at a collection of framed photos of my kids on the landing wall. Suddenly I had a realisation so strong it was like a physical jolt – that the small children in those pictures no longer exist. That I will never again in my life spend time with, hold, wipe the tears of, read to and laugh with those versions of my people. Little hands that will never again wrap around my neck, the weight of a small, warm body on my lap. The wave of grief was so powerful that I staggered, clutching the banisters, lowering myself to a seat. In that moment, as I struggled to breathe, wondering how it was possible to carry the weight of this grief inside me for the rest of my life, I would have given anything to be able to go back for just one moment with my small children.
But then the bathroom door opened, and a teen swept out in a wave of fruity smells, and I smiled and carried on my with evening, still getting things wrong, still being rejected trying to help, still yearning, still confused about how to hold so much at once.
So yes, when I met Sam Fox, I kind of fell in love with her. I realised I needed her. Her struggle is my struggle, is all of our struggle. Her barely contained grief is a collective mother’s grief. With her I laughed and cried, often in the same minute. I felt each and every one of her Oofs as I watched her navigate this man’s world as a mid-life woman brimming with ache and grief and exhaustion and with a growing sense of rage and fuck you and disbelief. She’s doing it. I’m doing. You might be doing it too.
So, keep talking. Gather your girlfriends close. Create support systems.
Give yourself time to explore your feelings.
Name them. Hold them close. Whisper tender, kind words to yourself.
And then ROAR
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