"Parenthood", Adoption, and Working Moms

Last fall, I decided to start watching the NBC show "Parenthood." Told by several friends that one of the families was adopting a non-infant child from foster care, I was curious to see how well it depicted what my life has been like for the past three years. I've seen adoption portrayed on a number of shows, from "Glee" (completely unrealistic) to "Modern Family" (fairly realistic, but much funnier than real life).

I've been catching up with old episodes and purging them from what seems to always be our "94% maximum capacity attained" DVR. During the first few episodes of the season, I was pleased to admit that it was pretty spot-on. Like us, the family in the TV show has an adopted son, Victor, who is slowly adjusting to his new life. Things like going to a new school, having a set bedtime, joining the baseball team, and meshing into a nearly all-white family (he's Latino) are just some of Victor's challenges.

Victor's parents, Julia and Joel, work hard to welcome him to their family. They are eager for those precious moments of connection with their new child, waiting, as Julia says "to fall in love with our son." Watching these scenes makes me confident that there must be at least on person on the "Parenthood" writing staff who has adopted a child from foster care and knows the continuous roller coaster that it can be. That push and pull of wanting to give love and have acceptance one minute, and being completely exasperated and ready to throw in the towel the next.

The family also has a young daughter, Sydney, who is starting to question her parents' loyalty to her, in the face of her new older brother. She is also beginning to show signs of resentment that Victor doesn't always have to follow the same rules that she does.

All of these behaviors ring true to me. Nearly three years into our son's adoption through foster care, we are still working through many of these same topics: setting rules, trying to undo the previous foster family's poor parenting, making time for real connections, and questioning what, if anything, we are doing "right". Adding to the challenge is that we're not doing this with an infant or toddler, but a fully expressive six-year-old, who is often torn between wanting to please his new family, wanting to test our commitment to him, and wondering why he's not with his old family, which was clearly a no-rules, no-consequences environment that is radically different from our home life.

But back to the show. One episode focused on Julia and the impact that motherhood has had on her full-time job as an attorney. Again, the writers on the show seemed to handle this deftly. At the start of the episode, Julia has to miss Sydney's dance recital because she is stranded at work. Julia is exasperated, and in need of her daughter's forgiveness, but Sydney is pissed and is in no mood to make it easy for her mother. Later in the episode, Julia needs to leave Victor's first baseball game when her law partners summon her to the office for the kind of conversation that you know is not going to be good.

Interrogated by the partners about her recent lackluster performance, Julia weakly defends herself, and then promptly announces her resignation. Not a "I need time to pull it together" request for some sort of legal sabbatical -- but full-on "See ya! I'm outta here."

What??? Having only watched a handful of episodes of this show, it seems unlikely that the type A, competitive Julia would just roll over and quit. While she may no longer aspire to be on "partner track" at the firm, surely the writers could have come up with a solution that would allow her to keep her job or at least keep the story line in the realm of the real world, where people just don't leave six-figure-salary jobs while crossing their fingers that their stay-at-home spouse can magically reactivate the career he or she left a few years back to raise the children.

Which makes me question where the writers are going with this. Of all the women on the show, Julia is the only female character with any serious career aspirations and education to back it up. How disappointing then, that the one character who has a real opportunity to model the challenges and triumphs of balancing a demanding career and family life made more chaotic by the dynamics of adoption has now seemingly capitulated because it's too hard.

As a full-time working mom, most days I get up tired, plow through work, come home, and work into the wee hours of the morning to make sure that lunches are made, bills are paid, uniforms are ironed, bathrooms are cleaned, school projects are complete, and my facebook status is updated. And I know I am not alone -- most of my working mom friends live that exact same life, day in and day out. But that type of exhaustion is rarely shown on TV (maybe with the exception of Patricia Heaton's "The Middle" or Martha Plimpton's "Raising Hope"). Instead, everyone looks well rested, has time to make it to the gym, kicks ass at the office, has great hair, skin and nails, and a  fancy car with a killer wardrobe to boot.

I'm hoping that as I finish this season of "Parenthood", I will see a return to the competitive Julia who really wants to (or needs to, like most of us in the real world) find a way to balance the challenging life of the real  working mom. Then, I will be satisfied that "Parenthood" has truly gotten it right.