Under the Table

What The Bear Taught Me About Fear

Not long after we brought our baby home, my husband, David, and I were binge watching the latest season of The Bear. I know I know, I should have written this months ago when the season was more relevant but bear with me (pun intended). The seventh episode had this scene I couldn’t stop thinking about.

(Spoilers ahead)

Carmie’s daughter is afraid of doing her father-daughter dance and crawls under a table to hide and one by one, everyone joins her under the table — mom, dad, parents, friends, aunts, uncles. Never mind that this table seems to be growing in the most unrealistic way and everyone over the age of 30 somehow manages to crawl under without any sort of struggle or joints cracking. They all sit down under the linen in their wedding attire and go around in a circle and say what they’re afraid of, because once you say it out loud, it becomes less scary.

I was sitting on our living room floor, trying to extract painful, desperate ounces of milk from my lazy boob. My focus was somewhere between cursing my breast pump and the screen. Granted my body was still coursing with pregnancy hormones but this scene made me sob. It could be the most profound television episode I’ve seen in a while.

I looked at David and said, “we need to get the baby a table so she can sit under it when she’s older and afraid!”

We all need safe spaces to be afraid and we should be allowed to sit there until we find the courage to come out. In the show, the moral of the scene was this: if you’re not afraid, you don’t care enough. Fear is good. Give fear a name and once you’re ready to confront it, maybe you crawl out from under the table and instead, you have a seat at the table and have a chat together, looking each other in the eyes.

It reminded me of what my former therapist used to call the imaginary line of discomfort. There’s a line that some people will take your hand and jump over with you, no matter how scary or uncomfortable whatever is on the other side may be. While others aren’t willing to cross that line, they need to hang out on the side of comfort and ease and instead they might pull you back to their side, when in fact, you really need to get to that uncomfortable side. Which is to say, some people are folding-chair friends, others are crawl-under-the-table friends and you need to know which is which. Sometimes, you really do need to get under that damn table.

I wish I could give you this gift, the strength to confront whatever it is you’re afraid of. I wish I could set up a table outside, throw a linen over it and invite people to crawl under and sit in a circle, reciting what they’re afraid of until we all feel like we can exhale and unclench our jaws.

Fear isn’t a single thing. It’s a cul-de-sac of anxieties, each building a house and settling in. Before long, they’re trading cookie platters and showing up uninvited to every milestone’s party. Some are private: how to learn to be a parent and not burn out, whether I can be myself and still be the mother my daughter needs, what I’ll do for work when I decide to go all in again. Others are systemic: my health in a season when I can hardly care for myself, the cost of living, futures that feel inevitable and ominous.

There’s also the shame part. Being afraid can feel embarrassing, like you’re the only one who hasn’t figured out how to hold it together. But the table makes fear ordinary and gives you permission to shrink for a minute without consequence. As the saying goes, real courage isn’t about not being afraid; it’s about naming it and then deciding what to do next. Stay put? Move forward? The table has its own unspoken rules: sit, say it out loud, listen. Even just making space for that is a way of saying, this matters enough to break the pattern. And that break is what brings the thing we’d rather ignore right into the interrogation light.

And as new parents, we carry around our own overstuffed backpacks of fear. Now I’ll go- I’ll tell you what I’m afraid of.

I’m afraid to put the financial weight of our lives on my husband.
I’m afraid of giving up my career and not having a title other than “mom".
I’m afraid of being new at something again.
I’m afraid of not having all the answers; I’m afraid of the problems I can’t solve.
I’m afraid of how the world will change as my girl grows and I’m afraid I won’t know how to talk about the scary things eloquently.

This is the part of parenting no one warns you about. Your kids don’t just study how you soothe their fear, they study what you do with your own. If I shove mine down, my daughter learns fear is embarrassing, or maybe even unspeakable. If I name it, she learns it’s survivable.

The easy thing would be to bury it all, to keep playing “strong mom.” But naming a fear doesn’t make you less strong, it makes you more resourceful. Naming it doesn’t guarantee solutions. Sometimes the fear is accurate, and the outcome is bad but naming preserves dignity and connection. It buys you a level of clarity that panic won’t.

When I say, “I’m afraid I’ll never find my way back to meaningful work,” something shifts in my brain. Suddenly it isn’t a ghost anymore; it’s furniture. You can stub your toe on it, or sit on it, or shove it to the other side of the room. At least it’s visible.

It’s not about conquering fear. It’s about practicing sitting with it. Modeling that practice. Showing yourself and your child:

We can name the scary thing.
We can sit with it for a while.
We can decide when we’re ready to crawl out.

In The Bear, that under-the-table moment at the wedding is a turning point. They share their fears, not to solve them immediately, but to show a kid that fear isn’t shameful. It’s messy. It’s communal. And in that messy communion, there’s something brave: naming the hurt, letting it breathe for a moment, then choosing whether to stand or stay under the table a little longer.

In thirty years, I want my daughter to say fear was always welcome at our kitchen table, or under it. My hope is that she’ll never feel small for being scared, that she learns to look fear in the eye, name it, and then choose what to do next with it.

Some nights, none of us will be brave. The only move will be crawling under the table. And maybe the point isn’t raising kids who never feel afraid. Maybe it’s raising kids who know fear has a seat, too—and that they can sit beside it until they’re ready to stand up, push back their chair, and maybe even dance.