My mom and I often end our text messages to each other with “Love you more.” But the truth is “love” feels like it falls so short of encapsulating my endless adoration for her.
It seems too small a word to bear the weight of my feelings. I don’t think any words could, which is why I’m so grateful for Hulu’s “Tiny Beautiful Things” (now streaming). As I see it, it’s an eight-episode love letter to moms.
The dramedy toggles between two time periods of aspiring writer Clare Pierce’s life. Kathryn Hahn plays present-day Clare, hesitant to take on the role of advice columnist, who’s at odds with her teenage daughter (Tanzyn Crawford). Younger Clare (Sarah Pidgeon) abandons her dreams in her senior year of college, after her mother Frankie (Merritt Wever) dies after being diagnosed with cancer.
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“To prove her life mattered, I became to determined to blow up the life I’d begun to build, the life my mother had wanted for me,” Clare says in a voiceover. Admittedly, it feels wrong to endorse Clare’s misguided thinking, but I find it’s the grief of Clare and her brother Lucas (Owen Painter) that makes the love for their mother palpable and real.
“Do you ever think about why, out of all the people in the world, mom had to die while everyone else just gets to live?” Lucas, a high school student, asks his older sister. “Yeah,” Clare responds. “It makes me hate everyone and everything. You want to get wasted?”
Undoubtedly, the series feels so honest because it’s adapted from a collection of advice columns penned by Cheryl Strayed, also an executive producer. Strayed lost her mom to cancer, like Clare, just seven weeks after being diagnosed. Strayed’s grief and healing hike of the Pacific Crest Trail inspired her 2012 memoir “Wild.” Every day she lives my greatest fear: life without my mom.
Although her death is not guaranteed before my own, there will likely come a day when the smile that lights my mom’s entire face will only be seen in photographs. Whether or not I find a husband, no one else will praise me for the smallest of accomplishments (like doing three loads of laundry in a day), or care to keep a running list of every celebrity I’ve interviewed or feel the need to send me off on a trip by waving until the garage door closes. And in her absence, I’ll be left behind and alone, stripped of the infinite and unconditional love she has for me.
She says her greatest dream in life was to be a mom. I know no one else will love me so wholly and without reason, and sometimes in spite of a few reasons not to. She gives her love freely simply because I am her daughter. Looking back on my childhood, not a meal my mother made stands out. What I remember consuming is her consistent belief in me and reminder that my best was good enough. That nourishment made me the person I am today, someone who is confident most of the time and has an inflated sense of self only some of the time.
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Strayed has also been deeply shaped by her mother’s love. It’s why her mom inspires so many of her projects.
“She just loved me,” Strayed says at a Mexican restaurant in Austin last month. “She loved me and my brother and my sister very well. And she did it even though she had many challenges.”
Her family struggled financially, Strayed says, after her mother left her abusive father and found work as a waitress and in factories. “We often didn’t have really a dollar, but my mom made our life beautiful, and she made it magic.”
Frankie does the same in “Tiny Beautiful Things.” When her children complain about not having air conditioning in their home, she takes them to a breezy field beneath a starry night sky. Soon, they’re surrounded by a group of majestic horses.
“She would always say, ‘We’re not poor. We’re rich in love,’ and I would roll my eyes,” says Strayed. “But now I know she was right. I know a lot of people who grew up with a lot of resources and money, and they don’t have what I got. And what I got is the greatest riches of all: to know that I am loved with wild abandon, with all of that big mother heart. I do think it’s the most powerful force in the universe, love. And the fact that my mom gave it to me is the gift I get to carry forever.”
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“I always miss my mother, and I still grieve my mother,” Strayed says.
“What you’ll come to in your grief is how lucky you are to love her so much and to be so loved,” she later adds, comforting me for a tragedy yet to happen. “And the fact that she loves you that way will never leave you. Because that love she gave you, it’s in every cell of your body. It formed you, and it can’t leave you now. I know this after having spent all of my adult life without my mom.”
Strayed finds consolation in getting to share the magic of her mother with audiences. Watching a trailer for “Tiny Beautiful Things” at a SXSW panel makes her teary-eyed, she told the crowd.
“It’s not about going back with the grief; it’s going forward with the beauty,” Strayed said on stage. “The only time my mother even appeared in the newspaper in her whole life was her obituary, which was one paragraph long. To think that her story has been told now in all these forms, I just will never stop crying about that.”
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