I was a writer on ‘Workin’ Moms’ — and unsure if I wanted to become one
In the fall of 2015, a friend working at CBC emailed me an eight-minute sizzle video for a show that had just been greenlit called “Workin’ Moms” with the subject line: “You NEED To Get on This !!!! ”
I watched it and was blown away. The sizzle was so singular, smart and, best of all, funny as f---. I chased the show with everything I had, determined to get a job on it.
I had written a “Girls” spec script that made its way into “Workin’ Moms” creator Catherine Reitman’s hands that she thankfully read and, even more thankfully, liked. I was hired and anxiously waited for someone to figure out I wasn’t a mother to anyone except a surly cat.
It turned out that motherhood actually wasn’t a prerequisite. Catherine wanted all kinds of female voices to help shape her creation. At the time I was 30 years old and I had always been ambivalent about having kids. I had a partner (who’s now my husband), but we’d had a hell of a first few years of our relationship (hi babe!). When we started writing Season 1 of “Workin’ Moms” I was leaning toward not wanting to have children. But it was a decision I silently wrestled with, endlessly playing out both scenarios.
I tried to push it out of my mind, but then I went to work and had to talk all things working mothers, at length, every single day.
I tried to express my fears through the show, hoping to write myself into an answer. If I had a child, what kind of mother would I be? Would I long for my previous life as much as some of our characters did, especially in the early years? Would I still be able to dedicate enough time to my writing? Would my relationship survive? My deepest fear was that I would regret becoming a mother.
Sometimes I needed to be reminded we were writing a comedy.
Working on the show became a kind of exposure therapy. That started with the conversations in the writing room but extended to our set, which regularly had multiple sets of twins, sometimes over 10 tiny babies, hanging out for Mommy & Me scenes. We also had a ton of crew members who were working mothers and loved to share the most brutal motherhood stories of all time with me while at the craft table eating hot dogs at 10 a.m.
After filming Season 2, I needed a break from the show and the topic as a whole.
There were other things I needed to do as I continued to struggle with my baby ambivalence. I made a deeply personal short film called “Volcano” that was my first as a director and premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. I helped my husband, Joe Kicak, get his TV series “Detention Adventure” off the ground and made the first season alongside him. And I went to a fertility clinic to find out how much more time I had to make a decision.
They said, “You’re good for 10 more years!” Just kidding, they actually said, “Your eggs are 90 per cent devilled, but maybe you’ll get lucky.” That was the gist, anyway.
I returned to “Workin’ Moms” in Season 5. Shortly after filming that season, I had my IUD removed and miraculously got pregnant within a week. I still wasn’t sure I wanted to become a mother.
A few weeks later, we started the Season 6 writers’ room and I felt like I might be dying. My “morning sickness” was all-day nausea that started bad and got progressively worse throughout the day for months. We were on Zoom, so I could disappear for chunks of time to vomit relatively unnoticed. I waited almost four months to tell them. I was, ironically, afraid to.
I was a writer on “Workin’ Moms.” If that’s not a safe job to say you’re pregnant, what is? But that wasn’t my fear; telling people about the pregnancy meant acknowledging that everything was changing.
Midway through filming Season 6, when I was seven months pregnant, Joe and I decided to get married at city hall. We did it for many reasons, one being to save on a twofor-one wedding-slash-maternity photo shoot; another to make it all feel more real and try to embrace and celebrate the changes that were coming.
After seven seasons (and years) of “Workin’ Moms,” I moved up the ranks to co-showrunner and executive producer, and gave birth to my daughter, Olivia, just 12 weeks before starting to write the final season.
From my self-centred POV, it was as if the show couldn’t end until I became a workin’ mom. It was as bizarre as it was satisfying to spend the final season living out the very scenes I’d written years ago. Pumping in my trailer, contending with my new body, feeling I was coming up short at work and at home — it was all happening.
Now, as I say goodbye to the show that changed my life professionally and personally, the answer to whether I want to be a mother is still not always totally clear. That’s sticky, considering I am one.
In the same day, I can swing from disbelief at how many times I want to kiss my 18-month-old’s sweaty head when she first wakes up (answer: infinite), to pure joy at watching her delicately put her little plastic vegetables in and out of her “purse” (for an amount of time that seems infinite), to relief when I drop her off at daycare and get to return to my private thoughts and wants that have been waiting (for what also feels like infinity) to be heard after being drowned out by the demands of a young child.
On one hand, I’m completely obsessed with her, on the other, I recently went away for seven days and, while I missed her, I’d be lying if I said it was hard.
I made the choice to become a mother without a crystal-clear answer on whether I wanted kids and I’m grateful I took that leap because, overwhelmingly, it’s been a wonderful surprise. Even if my motherhood ambivalence never completely disappears, I think that’s OK. At least, according to “Workin’ Moms” it is … whoever writes that s--t.