You know, I've been meaning to write about the adoption storyline on Parenthood for a long time. A couple of weeks ago I decided I would just wait until the season played out. Tonight it did. If you've got it DVR'ed, stop reading now.
The story started out with Julia meeting the coffee cart girl and finding out she was pregnant. She clumsily suggested she could adopt the baby. It was bad. She even told her sister that she felt like she was offering to "buy the baby" like she would coffee (though she wasn't, she was trying to adhere to the law in every way). There were lots of lots of potential adoptive parent missteps and entitlement in this. Lots of it. A lot of presuming the baby was theirs. Lots of paternalistic treatment of the expectant mom coffee girl. I found it irritating as hell, but it rang true so I can't discount it. I've known lots of people who said and did some of the same things. Hell, I did some of those things.I can't fault Parenthood for portraying them this way.
This is what I can fault them for, why not add another character; a social worker, a friend or someone tied to adoption to counter and challenge these assumptions? Someone who told Julia to back off when she told the expectant mom not to eat sushi. Someone who, when Julia said it made her uncomfortable when the expectant mom went out with "her" baby, would say "it's not your baby yet."
By letting the adoptive parent cliches stand Parenthood only reinforced the status quo, when they could have had a chance to challenge it and make people think.
This is what they did right. Julia didn't end up with the baby. The expectant mom really did have to remake her decision on seeing her child, and she decided to keep the baby. They gave the expectant mom a time or two when she actually challenged them (Julia and her husband) while pregnant. Her grief was real. She wasn't portrayed as an angel or a whore. And in the end, she embraced her motherhood. Which made me cheer.
Now, the ending was completely unrealistic with Julia and husband (I'm so bad with names) ending up with an emergency placement of a wating child. I know you don't go to the agency one day and end up with a kid the next, but I was happy to see adoption portrayed with a waiting child.
Plus, all the other happy endings of every other storyline made us all be squealy girls here in the Vindauga household.
Have you been watching it? What do you think?
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