By Steve “the Mailman” Breen Going Postal
A COUPLE OF DAYS BEFORE MOTHER’S Day, I occasioned upon the film, “Baby Mama.”
This fractured fairy tale of natal surrogacy had poisoned me with so much estrogen that I found myself later that afternoon discussing teal colored bathroom accessories with a style consultant at West Elm. I definitely lost some points on my “Man Card.”
The last film that similarly traumatized me was that other seminal chick flick, “Silence of the Lambs.”
To recuperate, I repatriated to a local gun range, which displayed a looming Jumbo-tron that bristled with episodes of Bruce Willis’ “Die Hard” man-thology. Safe in my church, I placated my inner biker princess and restored my testosterone-depleted demeanor with gunpowder, cheap whiskey and veal.
Don’t get me wrong, I found myself giggling like a girlie in the scenes of the Lamaze class depicted in “Baby Mama.” The spectres of the late great comediennes, Gilda Radner and Madeleine Kahn, were raucously resurrected by Saturday Night Live alum, Siobhan Fallon, as the birthing teacher that reprised Radner and Kahn’s infamous “Baba Wawa and Maweena Deetwick” shtick back when SNL used to be funny.
I played quarterback at the births of my kids, so the scenes were wholly relevant to my indoctrination to the warm and fuzzy approach of “natural childbirth.”
I seem to recall, however, copious amounts of “natural” sweat, blood, phlegm and wholesale screaming in the delivery room on the “big day.”
Despite the focus and intensity of our training, my then wife and I were both screeching for morphine during “transition.”
Hers was for her labor pain. Me? I was all about “sharing the experience,” so I was just going with the flow.
Despite the plethora of great scenes throughout this movie, the true ovarian oeuvre belongs to the intrauterine interplay between Tina Fey and Amy Poehler.
Tina Fey’s over achieving corporate exec whose bio-Rolex has been put on “snooze” yet yearns for familial fulfillment through the fecund fallopian tubes of Poehler’s trailer park doyenne was a comedic mugging worthy of anything done by Laurel and Hardy or Martin and Lewis, I haven’t laughed this hard since Schwarzenegger said, “I’ll be back.”
The post partum subtext of this story, however, highlights our pathological imperative to replicate ourselves at the expense of the plenitude of children that are already here, who, abandoned in governmental public storage, await someone that they can call “Mom” and “Dad.”
That this underlying narrative illustrates that one can harvest their very own “Mini-ME” for a $100,000 fee through a corporate baby farm quiescently begs the question: Who in the hell do you know that has “100 large” laying around the house to supplement a surrogate laying around the house in order to plump the baby bump, Michael Jackson notwithstanding? It seems an expensive way to avoid the stretch marks. Why not bust out those ducats to the local orphanage for a wee baby bairn that is already spitting up Enfamil and playing in the used kitty litter instead?
According to the 2000 U.S. Census, there were approximately 2.1 million children under the age of 18 that were available for adoption in the U.S.
As of 2004, 1.6 million kids in that age range were adopted.
If you’re fertility impaired then that means there’s still a lot of kids in the flux for you to love, honor and cherish without having to bust out a wad of Benjamins to create a kidlet in your own divine image and likeness through turkey baster technology.
California has one of the highest rates of children languishing in state foster care hoping you are the change they’ve been waiting for.
It’s a given that there are a lot of plainly retarded, bureaucratic rules concerning adoptions that hinder the process in this country yet there are folks out there who think that adopting a stray dog is more worthwhile than adopting a human.
They’re all our children, aren’t they? But then again it doesn’t take a village to raise a dog, does it?
STEVE BREEN is an empty nester with two great kids and still the “best looking mailman at the U.S. Post Office.” He
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on May 21, 2008. Read the original PDF.