Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!
Hello and welcome to the New Year. Yuletide has come and gone. You have survived holiday family dinners – well done, you – and if you have a certain kind of family, you might be feeling, how do I put it, a little frayed around the edges. A little frazzled. A little freaked, even. A little absolutely and forever done with all that crap.
Last week, Alan gave you spooky Christmas stories. This week, I’m talking about the real holiday horrors, in the shape of one of my favourite series of the year. You won’t find it on Netflix or Amazon. It’s a one-woman-show on social media by @ShawnatheMom (YouTube link). It doesn’t even have a name, I think, and was originally meant to be consumed one short clip a day. And it’s the best portrayal I have ever seen of what it’s like when everyone slowly realises they’re dealing with a narcissistic family member.
Of course, it’s not just about that. Shawna herself describes it as “An online one-woman show exploring relationships, motherhood, and family dynamics – one skit at a time”. You follow Shawna, mother of two, as she’s trying to reconnect with her own life and find a new circle of friends now that her oldest is 5 – with mixed results. Her husband John, as he wakes up to the reality of what his wife is dealing with and confronts some demons of his own. And John’s egocentric younger sister Jen, whose growth skyrockets when she becomes pregnant herself and starts standing up to her mother Barb.
And then there is Barb. A woman who lives in perpetual fear that she does not matter, and will therefore do everything in her power to ensure that the attention never shifts from her.
The skits are about family holidays and birthdays, not about big, momentous occasions. They aren’t polished, though extremely well acted – you tend to forget that all the characters are played by one person. (Shawna is a trained actor.) They’re very real, very insightful. These people could be your own relatives, Zeus forbid. Yet I find myself at the end of every episode wanting to know how it goes on: will John finally cut off his parents? I catch my breath when Jen has a spat with her own mother-in-law, which lets her experience, for the very first time, how emotionally healthy mothers react to criticism. I shake my head as Shawna tries to make somebody a friend who is obviously not into it, and won’t take no for an answer. I smile as John’s absentee father is revealed to have hidden depths.
The character arcs show the touch of a good storyteller, the kind where you lean back and relax because there is obviously a plan there. Barb gets her own flashbacks in “Young Barb” that show how her growth got stunted, and she gets small moments of redemption that let you hope, before becoming once again quintessentially Barb. She is infuriating even when you know where she’s coming from. Her story is spot on.
Shawna-the-creator is adamant that Barb is not based on her own mother-in-law, but put together from observations about different people. For her, the skits started as a creative outlet when her firstborn was still a baby, as a way to continue being an actor througout her mom hiatus.
And her efforts are wildly appreciated: Shawna the Mom is popular, it resonates. Her YouTube channel has 740k subscribers. You can find her fans in the social media comments, having conversations about narcissism in their families and how it affects them. A lot of them say that it’s healing as well as entertaining to watch and see that it’s not all in their own heads.
If you’d like to take a look yourself, I recommend starting with the first playlist, which has everything in chronological order. Fair warning: the start is a mixed bag as Shawna-the-creator finds her own pace; also, Shawna-the-character, is a bit of a pushover in the first few, which can be annoying. The most recent instalments, not yet in the playlist, can be found here: Christmas Magic. It’s the compilation that finally compelled me to post here, because it hit all the right notes. I hope you’ll enjoy it too!
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 