Documentary, 75 min.

A mother-to-be travels home to investigate her parents’ complicated divorce and find out why, after more than two decades, they still live together.

Katherin returns to the pastel sprawl of suburban Florida, where her parents, Jim and Susan, have spent decades in a peculiar state of together-but-not-together. In a house indistinguishable from the next, her mother—a once-ambitious, fiercely independent woman—remains stuck, sharing space with the ex-husband she somehow never managed to evict.

Determined to figure out how her mother’s life drifted so far from what she once imagined, Katherin starts bluntly asking the obvious question: why can’t you just make Dad move out of your house? Her investigation is met with polite deflection, selective memory loss, and the kind of stiff, two-word answers that only ex-spouses who have cohabitated for too long can deliver.

Faced with their almost comical refusal to revisit the past, Katherin digs in anyway, uncovering a knot of anxieties and generations of  avoidance.

Though shaped by second-wave feminism, Susan struggled to assert her aspiration for independence within the traditional and religious values of the society she lived in. She fell into the role she had been trained for, constantly prioritizing everyone else’s needs above her own. Now she spends her days cleaning her ex-husbands toothbrush and even buying a burial plot for him (right next to her, of course).

Jim once had artistic dreams, but he tells his daughter he abandoned them because he “just wasn’t that good.” That sense of inadequacy fed a depression that undermined both his confidence and his ability to provide for his family, a role he believes he failed at as well. As he aged, his isolation deepened, and a quiet loneliness grew heavier, settling into him over time and slowly making him incapable of handling the simplest of life's challenges, like replacing a broken tv. 

Katherin learns these experiences bond them in an unexpected way that is simultaneously comical, tragic, and movingly human. 

In the midst of filming, an unexpected pregnancy forces Katherin to face making her own family, and she finds herself staring down the age-old question:  How do you prepare a child?

Directed by Katherin Machalek
Produced by Annie Berman, Fish in the Hand