January 7, 2012
Musings
Parenthood
A well-known TV series set in a hospital environment has for long been cherished by the two girls of the house. My own first encounter with the program happened accidentally one evening a couple of years ago when I dropped down in the sofa next to the girls (both then well into their teens) to see what they were so intently watching. It turned out that that particular episode evolved around nothing but, it seemed to me, a gore of blood, dismembered body parts, people pierced by and literally stuck together with a pole, in such a way that one of them would, if luck prevailed, survive and the other one surely die when the pole was removed. The medical crew’s dilemma was who should live and who would have to go. I was shocked, stupefied, nauseated, definitely cast out of my comfort zone, to say the least ….by the horror of it all. I begged the kids to turn off the tv, for their sake and for mine. They looked at me in mild surprise, overbearingly, as with a child not before having been exposed to the realities of life. I didn’t have to, they assured me, but they would definitely continue watching, intrigued by and absorbed in the dramas (there were more than one going on at the same time, the focus with irregular intervals cleverly and with uncanny timing, shifting back and forth between them all). And after all, they said, it was only a TV series, i.e. fiction.