We Need To Talk About Toby and "This Is Us"
If you’re like the majority of viewers who sat down last night to watch the Kate episode of the Big 3, you were prepped. Armed with a kleenex box and some comfort food, good blankets and plenty of moral support, countless women across the country prepared to sit down and experience their grief, fresh or all over again, alongside Kate as she dealt with the loss of her baby through miscarriage. In a show that gives so many gut punches, it was a natural turn to create reality and breathe life through tragedy into the characters, making the awareness and suffocating silence of being 1 in 4 families who experience the loss of a baby a Tuesday night topic.
Like so many, I hesitantly clicked over to the episode. After losing a baby last year, many episodes of television have been avoided to make sure I don’t experience those feelings as deeply all over again. We literally haven’t finished the last season of Downton Abby because of some of the questioning surrounding a character losing a baby (I don’t know if she did or not, but it was brought up and off went the TV). Sometimes, as one writer for ScaryMommy wrote yesterday, feeling the feelings is all too raw and real again.
I felt, after the year we’ve been through and having Harley on the other side of clubfeet corrections and six months old, maybe I was prepared to say ‘me too’ and nod and feel and cry.
I was wrong of course. Cause you’re never ready. You’re never ready to hear fresh words put to the darkest thoughts in your head. You’re never ready to see the faces you know you’ve made, the ignoring phone calls, the hesitance that comes with every decision.
What I WASN’T ready for wasn’t anything to have to do with Kate. It was Toby.
Yes, I cried and nodded and remembered and hurt with Kate, but as I looked across the couch someone else was with me crying and nodding and hurting, and it was my husband.
The most important thing that This Is Us did with the journey of miscarriage was it didn’t ignore Toby and his feelings. In fact, I’d venture to say that Toby’s gut wrenching speech to the packing distributor and his search for the baby bath tub so that it didn’t get delivered to the house was not only something that my husband would do but perfectly illustrated the different type of grief that spouses share when their loved one loses a baby.
They suffer too! They suffer and they feel like they need to be strong and they need to bottle their grief and save it and at the same time they feel like we’re ignoring their pain. It was so incredible to see male grief from miscarriage so perfectly illustrated on screen.
They say that healing comes from revisiting difficult moments and yes, I did feel catharsis after watching, but not entirely from the feelings I knew I had felt two years ago, but from finally seeing and understanding my husband’s side of things and where he was coming to terms with loss during that difficult time. We had a long hug and really really understood each other during a moment that I’d realized he’d been suffering in silence.
So thank you, producers, actors and writers. Thank you for giving us Toby and his dealings with loss and the aftermath of supporting someone while grieving. It was a powerful thing to see, and something that was a shining moment in a topic dealt with so well.
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