Mothers Day is full of forks

or why LAUSD uses spoons

We drive past a mini fortress of concrete LAUSD.

“Isn’t that Cal’s new school?”

“He hates that school,” says N. “The kids bend spoons in the cafeteria and use them to stab each other.”

“Why don’t they use forks?” I ask.

“They got banned.”

This reminds me of the essay which pissed off my mother so much she hasn’t spoken to me in two years and threw me out of the house the night my Dad died.

Ah, family.

On set in March 2025

Life continues. My therapist went to Bhutan to get married but has failed to return. Despite spending many hours and dollars on expensive psychedelic therapy, I remain constitutionally incapable of keeping my mouth shut, and chronically lonely.

I recently had a meniscal tear surgery. I always find surgery invigorating. It’s the only time when, for a few short hours, I have many people trying to keep me alive. I had the surgery. I returned to 90302. I spent a week hobbling around on crutches high on Codeine. I am still here, still trying to get a job which doesn’t involve eating my own soul, this time with one fucked up knee.

I started improv.

It’s an LA tradition. If you are in any way tangentially connected to ‘The Industry’, you have to study at Second City or UCB or Groundlings. I chose Groundlings for the same reason I chose USC: it’s closer. It’s a strange thing to live a life fixed within a twenty mile radius, desperately trying to keep goading the engine onwards, past the knacker’s yard, even when the gas ran out a long, long time ago. I have never had any desire to do improv. Comedians are some of the most unpleasant people I have ever met. Actors should not be let out of their box without a responsible adult in charge. Improv teachers are unkind. They harbor a refusal to tell us anything personal or vulnerable. “This isn’t based on your life!” they bellow in another game of ‘yes, and’. “Use your imagination!” and then, with a sense that we have done something deeply insulting and perhaps even offensive: “Keep it grounded.”

Improv is an all around terrible idea. Dutifully, I put myself through this hell twice a week.

My desire to appease irrational overlords does not abate. Even at USC I will pretend to be grateful when an 18 year old from Pasadena tells me how to write a script. They will inevitably have the ability to Chernobyl my career in just a few short years, so why not let them practice? USC was a terrible idea, but it gave me something to do for three years while I raise the child for his father.

I miss my career.

I’ve been to court so many times begging for my time back in the UK so I can work again. Court does not care. Begging only makes my ex snicker, write something shitty to his awful progressive white male friends who are definitely not incels, and roll his eyes. He enjoys my poverty and desperation. In the UK, no one goes to school past 25. Everyone is settled by thirty, tracks laid for the profession you will follow until you die. People here don’t just have one career: they have about three. Retirement doesn’t exist. Even if you have a supposedly successful professional life, you somehow end up teaching a room full of apathetic billionaire’s children at the age of 65. The lack of relaxation in this country is remarkable. Given that everyone is meant to be addicted to some unpleasant opiate, I expected a little more detachment.

I was going to graduate a semester early, but with the desperate state of the Film & TV industry, I decided I should wait it out a little longer. I don’t really care about ‘walking’ and the ceremony of achieving my degree (I have two already I honestly don’t care about any more). I absolutely don’t want pictures and the dress up situation, but I want N to see so I can lure him into education. He insists he wants to work in the restaurant industry “like Dad”. He also keeps copious notes on his phone of alliterative words, and once said he wanted to go to college to read literature like Mom, which I hold onto desperately. He will never ever be allowed to forget he said this. I took him to my citizenship ceremony and had to beg the ex for a few extra hours. When he and former MIL picked N up outside the ceremony, she exclaimed, “If we’d known you were getting your citizenship, we wouldn’t have rushed you.”

This is from the woman who spent upwards of 60K from her retirement fund on my ex’s three lawyers, and fed into his meth-fueled fantasy that I was stealing his kid. Then they screamed at me that I was responsible for depleting my son’s college fund for my ex’s lawyers.

OK.

Me and N 2014, in the midst of court madness

There is a strange liminality, a shifting, disturbing, porous sense of being when you move between social structures and countries and institutions. My whiteness and education and transatlantic accent fools many Americans into believing I’m from a wealthy background. Back home in the UK, I have the shiny, taut face of an Angeleno, the sinewy body of an Erewhon woman. I do not look like my circumstances. And then I walk into USC and my classmates are the daughters of Presidents and NBA players and Hollywood Directors. No one talks about money. No one frets about paying their rent, buying their groceries, putting gas in their car. The seemingly impossible task of raising 40k to fund a very bad thesis film never seems particularly taxing to anyone. It is at once surreal, offensive and grotesque. Yet the fantasy - that I belong here, amongst these European princes and the offspring of A-list, those who have never once worried about homelessness or hunger - is deeply comforting, because I am shallow. The alternative - that I deserve Calfresh and Calworks and DPSS and Inglewood and the last ten years - is too horrible to contemplate.

The hardest thing about this decade of indentured servitude as the babysitter and vessel of the ex’s progeny, is that it is worthless. It has not made me a better person, or given me valuable insight, led me to the love of my life, or forged deep and meaningful friendships. It has not even resulted in a fucking book or a decent screenplay. And no one accepts ‘single mother’ on DEI applications. We are a repulsive breed.

I have been astonishingly mute throughout this entire situation, smacked into silence by misery. I do not find comfort when people say, “Oh but you have N! Surely he’s worth all of this.”

Perhaps it’s crazy to say, but no. My son is not worth domestic violence and court mandated abuse and losing my career and being forced to live in a country I don’t like. I know that’s an out-there idea, but maybe let’s posit the idea that children should not be a compensation prize for shit men and the destruction they’re allowed to wreak?

OK, that was pretty negative. I guess I need to practice some gratitude. Umm, I got my two close female friends from this hell, Michelle and V. I think it’s made me more compassionate, if a little unhinged, manic and over-emotional. I’m kinder. I learned to surf, play capoeira and pole, which probably wouldn’t have happened if I’d lived at home in London with N. I’ve done some incredible road trips all across Southern California, and even up to Washington State last year to visit Lara, my birthing class Emergency Plan friend. I’ve learned to code, to edit using Avid —

Oh fuck this. Fucking therapy. When are we allowed to be honest about our lives without someone telling us we’re negative?

Happy Mother’s Day freaks and geeks. I might take N to Palm Springs, or I might drive to Leo Carillo. We shall see where the moment takes us.