The 80s Sitcom Lifestyle

From a very young age, my evening babysitter was the television. Left home alone while my mom worked and my older siblings worked or hung out with friends, I adopted Steven Keaton, Jason Seaver, and Clair Huxtable as my foster parents. As the youngest of seven children being raised in Hawaii by a single mother living on a server's tips, I was fascinated by the mostly white, middle class, suburban, two-parent nuclear family life portrayed on the sitcoms of the mid-eighties. My daytimes, meanwhile, were filled with cartoons and by sitcoms from the fifties, populated by families even more stereotypical of white suburban America than those of eighties sitcoms.

Between what I saw on TV and what I learned in church--where the traditional (i.e. Cold War-era suburban white heteronormative) family is held up on a pedestal--I came out of childhood sure of two things:

1. The kind of home and family life I wanted. 
2. That I had been unfairly deprived of said home and family life in my childhood. 

This left me 

1. desperate to find the kind of home and family life I wanted; and
2. super bitter about my childhood home and family life. 

It was this desperation that led me to marry young, have three beautiful children, and work my way through three college degrees in search of a satisfying career with which to support my family. I would do anything to achieve that sitcom family lifestyle I'd been chasing since childhood. If I couldn't be raised by Ward Cleaver, then dang it, I'd become him. 

About nine years in, we achieved the dream: a month before our third child was born, we bought a house in a quaint suburban neighborhood two blocks from the elementary school. We started a garden in the backyard. We even hung a family portrait over the fireplace. 

It worked on Growing Pains. 

I had everything I'd ever wanted, and still I felt empty. I didn't want to be Ward Cleaver; I wanted to be married to Ward Cleaver. As it turns out, those sitcoms--and the church--forgot to tell me the model of home and family life they were idealizing wasn't ideal for everyone. So at great pain to myself and the people I love most, I embarked on a half-decade transition that has now landed me in a life that looks very much like those eighties sitcoms I loved so much, with our brightly-decorated home with a family picture hanging over the stairway in a quaint suburban neighborhood right next to an elementary school. Every day about 5:30 my husband and I greet each other as we get home from work, we make dinner, we watch TV or read or write. It's not ideal in that our children have to split their time between our home and their mothers' homes, but given the circumstances this is the best possible reality available to us.

Maybe a little more Brady Bunch meets My Two Dads than Leave it to Beaver.

My point is not to say, "Boo hoo, look how false ideals created by television and religion ruined my life." On the contrary, I would have to be blind not to recognize how lucky I am. Yes, it took a modest helping of blood, sweat, and tears to get here, but the fact that I was able to achieve this is a function of my privilege. I recently read an article about research showing that statistically, a white man raised in poverty has roughly the equivalent chance of success that a black man raised in a rich family has. And race is only one of the ways I'm privileged.

This is why representation matters. On TV, in movies, in literature, we need to see all kinds of people in all kinds of family, home, and life situations. We need people of all gender and sexual identities, we need people of all colors, we need people in various levels of economic status. In real life, there are many ways to achieve happiness; we need media that reflects this.

Also, Netflix, if you want to produce a sitcom about two gay dads who are non-custodial parents of five children living in the heart of suburban Mormon Utah, give me a call.