Zeitgeist: An ode to the Workin’ Moms Netflix series, the TV show that was like an antenatal group

Catherine Reitman in Workin' Moms. Photo / Netflix

Opinion

I cannot remember the first time I watched an episode of Workin’ Moms, mostly because I really cannot remember much from that period of my life. I was deep in the throes of new motherhood and a new job, trying to give my all to both of them and crying myself to sleep right after trying to put a crying baby to sleep, thinking about how I was failing at it all.

On the other side of the TV screen, a group of Canadian women I’d never met, playing working mums on a comedy show, felt like a lifeline, a reminder that I was not alone.

Six years after it began, the final season of Canadian comedy Workin’ Moms released on Netflix this week and I’ve spent the last few evenings savouring each episode, feeling like I’m hanging out with the same old friends, that antenatal group that has spent the last few years making me feel less alone.

Don’t get me wrong, I do have a supportive group of friends and even a solid antenatal Facebook group that, six years on, is still there for every dumb question or, more recently, just unbelievably cute photos of how much each of our children has grown (shoutout to the Summer Babes Facebook group). But when it comes to becoming a new mum, having to set aside so much of yourself to keep another human being alive, often wondering if you’re doing the right thing, no amount of support ever feels enough, and we’ll take it wherever it is given, even if it’s from Netflix shows we watch when the baby won’t sleep.

I know it’s a pretty niche position to be in, to have had a baby right around the time the first ever episode of the show premiered, and my reviews of it come charged with the bias that stems from feeling like your television has suddenly turned into a mirror, because the lives you see on screen bear so much resemblance to your own. Sitting in the dark with the most amazing baby yet worst ever sleeper, I remember watching the show, the volume really low, and relating to the struggles of these mums, who wanted so much to be mums, fully and wholly, but who were also fighting so fiercely to be everything else they were, not wanting one thing to replace anything else that made them who they were (not sure how Walt Whitman feels about being paraphrased in an Entertainment column but, you guys, we really do contain multitudes).

Workin’ Moms does exactly what it says on the tin. It portrays the lives of a group of women and their new babies, highlighting the immense and often invisible juggle that is being a working mum, trying to be great at everything and often feeling like you’re doing a lousy job of it all. Six years on, I feel it as keenly as I did in those first few months (this column is getting filed a day later than it should be, because I took a day off to accompany my child on a school trip).

As Amy Westervelt wrote in her book Forget Having It All, in today’s society “we expect women to work like they don’t have children, and raise children as if they don’t work”. It was true when the show premiered, it’s true today and, not to get too down about it all, it’ll be true for a quite a while to come.

Catherine Reitman is the creator and star of Workin' Moms. Photo / Netflix

The show does what not many other shows before it had done: it puts the spotlight on mums, often seen as one-dimensional characters in relation only to their offspring, and it does so without ignoring how freaking hard it is to do all that, all day every day. The storylines in each episode often have little to do with the relationship between mother and child, precisely because there is so much more to a mother than that one relationship, no matter how much society tries to reduce them to that.

Some have argued Workin’ Moms does not delve deep enough into the important issues it highlights but, for a new mum, not delving deeper was probably a good thing. Sometimes, we just want/need a bit of respite. We know things are hard and we just want to have a laugh about it, and to be reminded it’s not just us, and that, just because we’re not doing it all perfectly, it does not mean we’re doing it wrong.

That’s what I got out of seven seasons of Workin’ Moms - a whole load of laughs and the realisation that, to hell with mum guilt, we’re all out here doing pretty great, just by doing the best we can.

Season 7, the final season of Workin’ Moms, is currently streaming on Netflix in New Zealand.