On Raising Teenagers During Blizzards: A Love Letter To Freaks and Geeks on its 20th Birthday
During a week-long blizzard about four years ago, we watched every Freaks and Geeks episode with our kids. It was better than therapy– and we needed therapy. As parents of a 12 year old son and a 14 year old daughter, we were becoming unmoored trying to navigate their new darknesses and sudden privacies– all while contending with our own strategic confusion.
I remember one afternoon just before the blizzard standing in the hallway between the closed doors of my kids’ bedrooms, listening to their suffering noises. I heard my son’s jagged yelling into his pillow; he’d gotten dumped that day by his “squad”– completely and unceremoniously– via text. Just like that. And I heard my daughter’s keening– her response to a spate of endings that must have seemed conspired to hit her all at once: the anniversary of the death of a beloved teacher, the razing of our old house, and the news that two of her friends were leaving school abruptly, one to enter rehab. I vacillated, moving closer to one door, then the other. I looked down at the broad, skirted swaths of twilight coming through the bottoms of their doors and wondered about the triage: Where do I go first?
Our kids were in limbo, and so were we. How do you traverse boundaries that are still under construction, as they are in adolescence? My husband and I had prepared ourselves for the shifting power dynamics between them and us: the push-pull, and the takings of offense. But we weren’t ready for the ferocity and suddenness of it all. Or how powerless we felt to help our kids through their initiatory and subsequent teenage losses: my daughter’s breakup with the life-long friend who’d been like a sibling; my son’s spiraling, dark existential crisis. There was also illness and death, and an ADHD diagnosis. Later, there would be friends with budding substance abuse issues, intimacy dramas, and mental illness.
In the face of all this, my husband and I introduced and stammered through “important conversations.” We’d start talking about smoking pot or sex or bullies. We’d begin with steady voices, but ten minutes in we’d be talking too fast, over-smiling, pontificating, gesticulating. The kids would say something like “all set,” and the four of us would back away as if from roadkill.
Lying in bed after one of these “talks” and knowing we needed another way to usher our kids through all this, I thought back to children’s books, to storytelling. Any parent who’s looked on in relief as their kid plows through the Harry Potter series can tell you that there’s nothing like a well-told story to teach kids about hard stuff: Even in an otherworldly world, good characters like Cedric Diggory can die violently. Some adults don’t wish the best for you. You’ll miss some people forever. And, it has to be a good third-party story. No kid wants to hear about their parents’ boozy, half-dressed mistakes. But our kids had outgrown Harry Potter. We needed a new good story.
My husband and I turned to Freaks and Geeks, a show about suburban teens in the 80s that ran for just a single season from 1999-2000, and remains a cult favorite 20 years later. (We are members of that cult.) The show centers on good-girl turning freak, 16-year-old Lindsey Weir, and her younger brother, 14-year-old Sam, a geek, trying to find their respective ways. Nothing earth-shattering happens. There are no contorted plot twists, and there are no special effects unless you count the feathered hair of the boys. The show’s greatest strength is that it doesn’t regard the in-between spaces of adolescence (psychological, familial, cultural) as unfortunate weigh stations or pesky phases to be gotten through. It recognizes that tension and paradox are the teen’s natural habitat. And though the show doesn’t soft-pedal adolescence like a Nickelodeon show, it doesn’t burn like 13 Reasons Why.
We wondered if our kids might be too young. At their ages–they were changing so much, so fast– it was hard to find the sweet spot, to titrate an exposure to life’s hard realities that landed somewhere between overexposure and sheltering. And we wondered if watching with the intention of opening up conversations with our kids meant we were farming out an important parenting job to a television show. We decided it didn’t matter.
My daughter was grieving. Until recently, she and her forever best friend had moved through their days in blissful partnership– opposites who brought out the best in each other. But the stylistic and social differences that had made them so smitten and complementary as toddlers and young girls became sources of irritation and hurt as high schoolers. The friendship’s ending seemed both gradual and sudden. When I’d ask my daughter why they weren’t hanging out, she’d snap at me: “I’m always initiating!” Or she would tear up and say she didn’t know. It felt like losing a family member.
Meanwhile, my son had been struggling in a way that seemed too intense for a 12-year old. The social minefields of middle school were befuddling, but that was par for the course. More concerning were the painful contours of his inner life. His existential questioning had plunged him into a nihilistic abyss: we’re nothing, behind it all there’s nothing, it’s all empty. We spent about a year responding to his intense and specific nighttime thoughts and fears. Most nights, an hour or two after we thought he’d been asleep, he’d call out, panicked. “Mom! Please come here! Can you come? Come now!” How do you comfort a smart, sensitive boy whose mind has run amok with dark possibilities? What’s the point? Do we even exist? Google didn’t help, nor did cognitive behavioral therapy. In the end, we navigated it as best we could, trying to circumvent his circular thinking, and riding out his terror with him as it ebbed and flowed.
This is how things stood when the blizzard presented the opportunity for hours of family screen time, and we took it. Each morning, the kids would wake up, realize that there was another snow day, and ask to see a few more episodes. We watched them watch.
As my son observed, everything in the show was funny and true, but often sad. When I look back on it now, I realize that the sadnesses in the show all grow out of storylines that grappled with how and when to say goodbye to childhood. And that resonated with all four of us. I remember my daughter watching with peeved fascination the episode(s) where Lindsay dumps her childhood friend, the super-nerd Millie. We’re irritated with Lindsay, but we get it. When Lindsay comes back to her old friend in later episodes under new circumstances, we see that childhood friends can circle back in surprising ways. My daughter’s nerves were frayed from the tension of wanting to grow up and wanting time to stand still. It was nice for her to have some companionship in the liminal spaces of these stories and characters, along with the reassurance that paused childhood friendships can change shape and come around. The show, it turned out, presented all of this better than I ever could.
Meanwhile, my son’s existential crisis had begun to settle somewhat, but only just. Because of this, I had both high hopes and reservations about him watching the most existentially provocative scene in the show. It’s the one where we come to realize why Lindsay decided to swap out her identity, so wholesale and suddenly, in the first place. She and her parents are visiting her grandmother in the hospital. While her parents are in the hospital cafeteria, the grandmother begins to die, and not gently. Lindsay tells her to go toward the light, but her grandma says there is no “the light.” There is nothing, her grandmother says, terrified. She dies crying out to Lindsay to help her. Devastated, Lindsay begins to question every tacit promise of reward for good behavior she’s ever been given. She hangs up her “mathlete” sash, dons an oversized military coat, starts hanging with the Freaks, and rarely looks back.
Our son watched the scene intently, but didn’t seem bothered. In fact, for a while we wondered if he’d even made a connection between his distress and Lindsay’s. But he had. He brought it up weeks later when he and I were discussing Man’s Search for Meaning, a book I was teaching at the time.
“She felt scared and blank like I did,” he told me. “She had to make her own meaning up.” Lindsay’s predicament helped him see that the terror that had made him feel so alone and scared was precocious– but it was normal. As a parent, that realization felt like a gift I had no other way to give my kid. We needed the meeting place of that particular story.
By day four of the blizzard, we’d watched all 18 episodes. We talked about them over pizza or spaghetti dinners, staying up later than usual. They asked me about my high school experience and 80s fashion and music. (I was exactly Lindsay’s age in 1981; my husband is nine years younger.) They asked us about pot and sex and friends who’d dumped us, and parties we’d been to, and fights we’d had with our parents. And for the most part– with a few edits– we told them.
Four years later, Freaks and Geeks remains an important part of our family shorthand. That mom is, like, so Kim Kelly’s mom. (Meaning: brash, chews gum, wears a push up bra, is mean to her kids). I had a total Sam moment at that stupid dance. (Reference: Geek Sam attends dance with popular girl out of his league, asks her to slow dance to “Carry On, My Wayward Son.” On dance floor, song speeds up, he panics, considers fleeing, and then gives in, and dances.)