Maybe it’d sound a little less lowbrow to say that I decided to watch the new television show, Life Unexpected, because I wanted to write about it. The basic plotline is this: nearly sixteen year-old girl tries to get emancipated from the foster care system she’s been in since birth and discovers that one hitching point is her parents never signed the relinquishment papers and thus their approval would be necessary. She manages to get the papers and her father’s address. Her existence is a total surprise to her very much slacker dad. You probably can guess how this goes. The court denies her bid for independence, because, although unorthodox in that they are not together (she was the product of a one-night stand), she has parents. Granted joint custody, these young thirtysomethings discover that in many ways their daughter is more mature than they are.
The show’s been getting extremely positive reviews, with comparisons to two shows I absolutely adored, Gilmore Girls and Everwood. Everwood chronicled the life of a brain surgeon/widower moving to small town Colorado with his two kids to create a simpler life after his wife’s passing while Gilmore Girls focused upon the rapid-fire chatty and sweet relationship between mother and daughter just sixteen years apart. Since the days of thirtysomething itself, I’ve been drawn to the make you laugh/cry dramas, especially with a little quirk added. Put another way, I like crying when I watch television (even when I watch television while exercising, which is how I tend to justify the time at the screen).
The I-want-to-write-about-this sight unseen part is that while Life Unexpected completely “fit” into my viewer profile, it is coming on the air just before my daughter, my adopted daughter, turns two. We have an open adoption and so the presence of Saskia’s mom (whom she calls Auntie) is not a fantasy for us. While Life Unexpected is undoubtedly a fantasy, children do reunite with parents never met. Sometimes, it goes swimmingly. Rarely, from what I’ve read or heard, does it go seamlessly. For all the prettification of this program—any grittiness Portland Oregon has to offer, and even all the rain, is polished to that upbeat television spin on grit (make it faux-funky cool) that obfuscates grit—two episodes in, we’ve established everyone’s pain over what has happened. What did happen? Lux required heart operations as a baby. Once she was healthy, she was nearly age three, and she reports, “unadoptable.” (Let’s clarify that it’s almost a certainty that even nearing three, a white girl without ongoing health issues—and probably even with some—would be adopted). Cate, at 16, thought she was making a more responsible decision than trying to raise a child while still in high school. At 32, Cate and Baze may be somewhat unprepared for parenting a teenager; however, it turns out, they are game.
Foster care isn’t like the portrayal so far in Life Unexpected. It seems to me the system is more broken and chaotic and doesn’t produce quite the acid-but-smart stereotype on the show. But the issue of teens long in the system and needing family ties is all too real and too huge. A story in the New York Times looks at how more energy is going into finding lost family members and encouraging adoption by these relatives. Judy Cockerton of Treehouse Communties writes about foster care in eye-opening and ultimately hopeful ways.
Back to the show: obviously, these are extremely pretty and likable (and Caucasian) characters. So, I’m not going to tell you this is at all real, even if some of the first two episodes have moments that resonate, in that each person’s experience, in some ways, may hurt the other people, and not because they mean to upset one another—it’s more that in life, that happens. Adoption inherently has a lot of that; good intentions are not enough to undo the fissure of a baby being separated from a mother. And that doesn’t mean good intentions don’t go a very long way (I believe they do) nor that being raised by the mother who gave birth to you saves you from this phenomenon of good intentions falling short (if you’re reading this you’re old enough to know good intentions do fall short).
A theme of Life Unexpected is going to be forgiveness. Baze trusted Cate that the pregnancy was “taken care of” and never bothered to learn how she’d accomplished that and she never told him about a baby and of course, Lux has every reason to mistrust and resent Cate and Baze. Forgiveness is a universal theme, a critical factor in accepting all sorts of difficult things we must reckon with, both big ticket ones and small disappointments. I think that’s why forgiveness is so compelling.
In books and across the Internet, are incredible stories of adoption from people representing all perspectives upon the experience. As I’ve mentioned other times, my friend, Dawn Friedman, is adoptive mother in a very open adoption—and through her writing, I have learned a great deal that’s moved me as a parent with children born to me and adopted. On her blog, Dawn wrote about a blog called Endure for a Night, written by a first mom, and I’ve learned a lot there too, as well as from many others’ stories. The most basic message is this: when you adopt a baby in an open adoption, you commit not only to the child, you commit to the adults. The process of finding a connection beyond the intimate one that is shared love for a child is unscripted and different in every case. To do it with as much grace as possible, acceptance and forgiveness and compassion are required. As is true for all families, adoption is not episodic and does not have an obvious finale. Unexpected certainly could be a word in the title, though.
