Watching TV As A Love Language
It took a long time for me to realize watching television together counted as quality time.
I’ve watched television shows with Mom for as long as I can remember. One of the earliest memories involves sitting in the family room on the same couch at a perpendicular angle toward the big screen TV. We watched the first season of Survivor and when all the girls at schools watched Gilmore Girls, I told Mom that I wanted to watch this TV show everyone was talking about, too. We watched it together. We watched hours and hours of television shows together, from dramas to comedies to news programs to movies to television shows to theatrical performances to musicals.
For a long time, I was bitter that my family wasn’t like other families. Mom wasn’t an athletic person. We didn’t go on frequent nature walks or hikes or any of those things. We didn’t play sports, board games, and card games. While I do remember making graveyard cakes for Halloween and magic bars for a fun indulgent snack (which I’ve been making since university to the adoration of people I’ve given it to), the kitchen wasn’t really an area where we bonded.
For Mom and me, we bonded in front of the television set.
In the times when Mom had her hip-replacement surgery and I lived at home during COVID-19, we watched American Idol. We watched television shows and talked about plots and characters, settings and costumes. When a contestant on American Idol said he wanted to be the next Adam Lambert, Mom asked me whether I’d seen Adam Lambert’s audition. I hadn’t. Mom pulled up his audition video on YouTube and then clips of his performances. Even though Lambert didn’t win American Idol overall, he is touring with Queen. Perhaps he is the real winner of that season after all.
I didn’t realize that watching television shows together was a love language. I knew that spending quality tome together was, but the idea of television didn’t factor into that equation for some reason. used to be so annoyed at Mom’s habit of watching the news and then fast-fowarding through parts she had no interest in watching. She fast-forwarded through everything: news shows, holiday parades, the Super Bowl half time show.
The evolution of our relationship in a way involved the evolution of technology. I remember when shows were on cable television we had to mute the commercials and wait for the show to come back on. When we recorded a show, we had to manually fast-forward through commercials. If we missed part of a scene or dialogue, we’d argue about rewinding to catch that line or two of dialogue or the intro music we had missed. During her hip-replacement surgery and subsequent cancer diagnosis, we watched internet shows on HBO and Netflix, Disney+ and Hulu. We didn’t need to manually fast-forward through commercials. The next things we argued over were whether or not to watch the title sequence or “previously on” snippets.
Through the act of watching television, we spent time together often immersed in another world. My love of fantasy literature and fantasy texts probably began during the hours and hours we spent watching Xena: Warrior Princess, Hercules, Farscape, Andromeda, the Lord of the Rings series and and listening to the characters we called “Australian Aliens.” It seemed whenever I was home over the years, she had watched another half a dozen television shows. She knew the actors and actresses, old theme shows by heart, and had an encyclopedic opinion on various things.
It took me a long time for me to realize it was a joy to sit there and watch television together.
There was a holiday season where we watched probably a dozen different Hallmark movies. She always asked me what I wanted to watch, and sometimes I knew exactly what to watch and sometimes I had no idea what to watch. What I realize now that I may not have fully understood then was that: while it did matter what we watched, it mattered more that we were spending time together.
The moment we spent watching television was a time where we could forget what was happening, just for a little while. We watched grand adventures, real and imagined. We followed along as Rick Steves traveling through Europe. We witnessed the characters of The Big Bang Theory living their lives. We were still living our lives, though we were in a controlled, safe space. We watched television shows and we talked in front of the television screen and we continued to have conversations about life and death and all kinds of things.
There were moments I wanted to talk to Mom but the words weren’t there. How could I ask her for advice about my future, a future where she’d be dead? How many videos of her talking through her life could I capture on my phone?
After she died, I spent the following weeks watching all eight seasons of The Vampire Diaries. I used television to bring me back to life, because it was too painful to continue to focus on my reality. The reality of the fact that she had died, and I was living in a world where she would never return, was too painful for me to bear every day. So, I turned to television. The great story medium, and watched the grief of the characters on the screen. In a way, the characters and the music and the plot and the shows gently pulled me from my reality and nestled me comfortably into the world of fiction. I recovered through the act of watching television.
Watching television is a love language. After she died, I rearranged the furniture back to how it had looked before her death. I then put the polished wooden box of ashes back on her chair, and we watched television together. Mom in her spot on her favorite reclining chair, and me in mine. Together.
Madeline Wahl is a postgraduate student pursuing an MLitt in Fantasy Literature at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. She is a writer, solo traveler, and millennial caregiver to her mom, who recently passed from terminal cancer. Her writing has appeared on Reader's Digest, HuffPost, Red Magazine, and McSweeney's, among others. She is working on her first novel in YA Fantasy and her first nonfiction book proposal on millennial caregiving.
Loss changes the way we see things, doesn't it? I always love reading your pieces Madeline. Thank you for sharing so openly.