I was hardly the best version of myself in my youth. I just wasn’t into being that age, that person. I wanted to skip the awkward growing years and become the me I wanted to be. All I wanted — beyond the insecurities and boyfriends who were always disappointing and friendship drama — was to grow up and become a mom. I thought that with age comes growth and with growth came real life, the Big Stage of family and kids. And while of course that’s true for some people, as it was for me, it certainly isn’t the case for the gang in Netflix’s latest hit, The Four Seasons.
After devouring every episode of this show, I came to the conclusion that we all go back to the beginning after kids. That we can’t escape those awkward growing years because it’s those years that define us.
That was my take after watching empty nesters Kate (Tina Fey) and Jack (Will Forte) hang out with their longtime friends Annie (Kerri Kenney-Silver) and her husband Nick (Steve Carell) as well as Danny (Colman Domingo) and his husband Claude (Marco Calvani). Four of those adults have children. They all have jobs and lives and friends and real estate and cars and good knives to cut expensive food in their beautiful kitchens. They all live big lives after college, where the core group initially met.
Things have changed since college, of course. Kate and Jack have a daughter as do Annie and Nick, both of whom are off at college. The friends are free to do what they choose with the kids gone, and what they choose is to go back. Back and back and back to old dynamics. Like Kate and Danny, for example. Kate is not afraid of mocking Danny’s relationship and making sure everyone remembers that they were friends first. She’s all about staking prior claim, giving me flashbacks to starting at a new high school and being reminded by the alpha girl of the group that I would always be just a little bit outside. A little bit separate.
No one calls Kate the boss of the friend group but she is; you can feel it. She’s the tastemaker, the decider, the cool one. If this was a John Hughes movie, Kate would be Molly Ringwald mixed with James Spader. Danny would be Andrew McCarthy from Pretty in Pink.
Then there’s Annie, who finds herself taking solo vacations and staring off into the blank void of her future after Nick leaves her for a much younger woman. She tries flirting a little once she’s on her own on a beach holiday. Tries to pretend she wants to learn to surf and loves eating alone while her friends are vacationing close by with Nick and his new girlfriend Ginny (Erika Henningson). And to make matters worse, Annie has to watch as Nick’s new girlfriend slowly joins the group. She has to pretend it doesn’t bother her that she’s been moved to the B-list, the weekday lunch instead of weekend brunch list.
Annie is another version of Molly Ringwald. Before she gets the guy. She’s the Sixteen Candles version where everyone has forgotten her birthday and she’s not allowed to be mad about it.
I didn’t think any of us middle-aged people would have to morph into these versions of ourselves again. I thought having kids and real estate and cars and jobs meant we were done. We were new. Otherwise, why the hell did we teach ourselves to eat dark chocolate instead of milk chocolate if we were just going to go back to being these people again? What happened to the different lives we had as parents, the meat in the sandwich of our lives so far?
While the premise is that this group of friends meet up for a weekend away in each of the four seasons, each time they do, something feels a little off. Everyone is out of step and confused. Their daughters are too busy for them but also they are too busy for their daughters. They’re busy with each other. Busy wondering if their friends are cooler than them; if maybe they should end their relationship because their pal Nick did and he seems like he’s more fun now. Everyone’s trying on new personalities and new clothes but sticking to their old patterns. Except now they have dry skin and bad knees and it’s all so much… sadder.
That’s the thing about The Four Seasons. It’s captivating and well-written, and it digs deeper than the cliches. But it’s just so sad. It left me wondering if — like the characters in the series — I’m done raising my kids and yet I’m still the same person I was before they existed. To think that parents go through all of those years of raising humans, of shifting dynamics, of being adults, and we all still go back to who we were. Maybe what got me is that it’s less terrifying to look back instead of forward. Maybe because that new freedom feels a lot like it did when we were younger, and oh god that’s a whole slippery slope of existential manic. Or maybe because we always were these people. Maybe we were just hibernating in the years of child-rearing. Maybe we are all just “a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess, and a criminal,” waiting for our kids to find their own way so we can get back to us.
Maybe it’s okay for us to make this season about us and our dramas. Maybe this season, which I guess is fall if we are counting, is the Big Stage. The meat of our lives. And maybe it’s okay to still be the people we always were.
Jen McGuire is a contributing writer for Romper and Scary Mommy. She lives in Canada with four boys and teaches life writing workshops where someone cries in every class. When she is not traveling as often as possible, she’s trying to organize pie parties and outdoor karaoke with her neighbors. She will sing Cher’s “If I Could Turn Back Time” at least once, but she’s open to requests.
