There’s a scene at the end of Hulu’s Fleishman Is in Trouble where a weary and kind husband yells at his flaky writer wife, Libby, to accept her nice life in suburban New Jersey. Watching alongside my own husband, a proud son of the Garden state, I noticed him taking in the scene with an expression of the purest contentment. That man loves New Jersey. And lately I’ve had to admit that I like it, too.
This is counter to expectation. Writing this week in New York Magazine, Caitlin Moscatello interviewed a number of mothers for whom Libby’s plight triggered feelings about their own suburban New Jersey lives of desperation, shopping in Target amongst “pod people” and longing for the kind of money that pays for private school and luxurious bathroom renovations. I’m not without sympathy for them: I, too, look up people’s house values on Zillow. Much like Libby, I now live in the New Jersey suburbs near New York City and feel disconnected from the creative ambitions of my pre-parent life. But it turns out that I feel OK about this.
