In 2013, Karen Pittman was an off-Broadway actor in New York City with two children and not enough food for all three of them. She fed the children and drank coffee through the day. After they were asleep she finished what was left on their plates, and she told nobody.
The part she is naming now is not the going without. It is the praise. Pittman, who plays Mia Jordan on The Morning Show, says mothers are trained to do this and then congratulated for it, and the congratulation is how it keeps happening. “I think we’re conditioned as women to sacrifice ourselves for our families, for our children,” she said.
The hiding is the detail most readers will recognize before anything else. “I remember being a mother who was really troubled by it, but I hid it very well,” she said. She was not describing a crisis anybody could see from outside. She was describing a working mother who kept going to auditions.
Over a decade later she came to the view that she had been doing harm by not taking care of herself, and she puts the reasoning in the form of a question rather than a lesson. “It was my moral responsibility to take care of [my kids],” she said. “And was I really doing that by not taking care of myself?”
She now volunteers at Feeding America food pantries, and she talks about that as something she takes rather than something she gives. “I get so much from volunteering,” she said. “I am a perfect example of how it can make a difference in your life.” To anybody sitting where she sat in 2013, her sentence is four words: “You’re not alone.”
Nothing she describes is rare. Mothers run this arithmetic in kitchens every week, and the ones who run it hardest are usually the ones nobody worries about, because they are good at hiding it. What is rare is a woman on television calling it a cost instead of a virtue, and naming the applause as part of the machinery. The meal she skipped is thirteen years old. The sentence about why she skipped it is not.
