Just a little more real, please?

The first time it’s mentioned on The Killing that Detective Sarah Linden almost lost custody of her son once before was last night, on Mother’s Day. It’s not that easy to lose custody of a child, especially if you’re white and middle class, so whatever she had done “before” to get to that point must have been pretty hazardous. But it was one line, whispered in a hurry, just before the scene changed. Maybe it’s just me, but I wanted more info. Lose custody to whom, exactly? The non-existent father figure, or the state of Washington? Because they’re different. One happens far more privately than the other.

Some of this bears a breakdown: Linden has been so busy with this case that she can’t find the time to get married, and keeps canceling plans to move herself and her thirteen year-old son to California where her fiance waits for them. The son’s not that interested in moving, but goes along with it, mostly, I assume,  because that’s what you do when you have one parent. There’s talk of some other case that Linden became fixated on in the past, talk that she can’t let this one affect her the way the last one did. At one point, she tells her son that if they miss the next flight she will pay him 50 million dollars. In this past episode, they miss their flight again and as they leave the airport he calls back to her, “You owe me fifty million dollars.”

Never mind that her fiance won’t answer the phone when she calls because she’s put him off so many times. Never mind the fact that they’ve given up their apartment in preparation to move and they seem to be camping out on a family friend’s boat. All very convenient. We apparently don’t need some silly lover’s quarrel; nor do we need to get bogged down in the very real problem of where single parents and their children live. Forget all that. What bugs me (and yes, I know it’s fiction), is how careless the writers have made her about her son. Who makes a kid move a thousand miles away from the only place he knows and then delays it over and over again? And then jokes about it? And how does she make up for it? She drops him off at a party (It’s a party he’s been talking about since the show opened, but she still only drops him off.). Then she shows him how to fire a gun so he can play paintball with his friends without being bullied. I just don’t know how I feel about this.

In some ways, Sarah Linden is–as most reviews tell us–one of the most realistic women on television. She’s a harried mom trying to make a half-decent life for both her and her son. Those are very separate goals that need to dovetail for a few more years until he leaves the nest. I was in my late 20′s before I realized that my mom had been a person with a life while she was raising me. One day it just hit me that she must have had things going on in her head that had nothing to do with which paper dolls I picked out at the pharmacy. Worries, daydreams, furies. Burdens. She spent a lot of time taking care of her own mother; eventually, she went back to working as a nurse. At some point, she had to do the parenting bit by herself, and frankly, it proved to be too much for her. Thirty years later, she’s still apologizing to me.

My dad struggled, too, mind you, when he was left alone with me. Like the time he didn’t notice I had been skipping school for three weeks in the fourth grade. He must have figured I ran on auto-pilot and assumed I was walking to the bus every morning until he got a call at work asking how I was feeling. He was lucky once my stepmother came on the scene that there was someone else to keep an eye on me.

The fact is, raising kids is harder than TV can ever portray, and so is life–with or without them. I’m not sure that adding so many variables to Sarah Linden’s life makes sense. Her life might have been just as complicated without a plan to move two states to the south (and to Sonoma, no less) or getting married, but we need a love interest, don’t we? Why can’t the thing that threatens her tenuous hold on her career, her child and her personal life just be…the challenge of having a career, and a child and a personal life? (Note: This whole argument wouldn’t even be possible without the following assumptions in place: that she lives in a safe neighborhood, that her kid goes to a decent school, that she and her son are reasonably healthy both physically and emotionally and that she’s not up to her eyeballs in debt of some kind. These are huge assumptions.). When I was the age her kid is, I was flunking seventh grade English because I refused to read one more damn book about people by themselves (The Old Man and The Sea, The Outsiders, The Red Pony. Great books, wrong topics.). Believe me, my parents had plenty to do without ever leaving the neighborhood the day my English teacher suggested that maybe I couldn’t read.

I think what I’m saying is I’m sick of the steely female detective with intimacy issues. It’s an old story, a guy’s story, plastered on to a woman. It’s a fantasy that she never has to feed this kid, or wonder where he is, or how his grades are. Or that it’s somehow okay that she never calls to tell anyone that she’ll be late because she’s kicking in doors and being held by the FBI. It’s a daydream to think there’s a nice, seemingly stable guy off stage waiting for her, who’s never once been asked to watch her son or pitch in on a less-than-fun task. A real single mom who’s that busy would be calling in every person she could think of to help her out, not just one no-nonsense woman with a boat. Or she wouldn’t, because she didn’t have help, and then a social service agency would get involved.

I guess my question is, why can’t her real problems be considered dramatic enough? Male detectives don’t need pretty women waiting in Sonoma. In fact, half the time they don’t even need private lives. And when they do have private lives, they’re usually managed by a wife (Or an ex-wife. Even easier, but more expensive and more fodder for jokes about women and money.). Also, now that she’s missed yet another flight to her new life, we’re watching Linden grovel to the boyfriend by voicemail. Please. My greatest wish for this show is to see Linden lose it. Really come unglued. Scream, throw something, tell someone off, take off in a furious sprint, or, God forbid, curl up in a ball and cry. Just once. Now that would be real.