Motherhood and Media

This afternoon, I watched a bit of television while under the weight of a sleeping baby. I had tried twice to put him down in his crib, but each such attempt ended in waking, increasing fussing, and then full on crying. Today, the place he clearly most wanted to nap was snuggled on my body — and no substitutes were cutting it. Perhaps that's why the shows I watched during that time resonated so much: the first episode of HBO's The Baby and the first episodes of Netflix's imported Japanese reality show import Old Enough .

In the month or so before my due date, my family and I watched a whole slew of mediocre comedies about pregnancy, some of which I still plan on writing about in the next few months. And one of the last movies of this set that I watched was the 2012 comedy What to Expect When You're Expecting.

In celebration of Valentine's Day this year, my husband and I decided to watch a movie that had nothing at all to do with pregnancy: the 1984 romantic comedy Splash . Well, I should say that I decided. He merely told me that he'd never seen the movie, and I delightedly declared that we therefore needed to watch it immediately. But it really does have nothing to do with pregnancy... at least I thought it didn't when I suggested it.  As I watched this retelling of The Little Mermaid , however, I couldn't help but think that the story and all of its similar iterations actually could be viewed rather easily through the lens of a pregnancy metaphor.    Art credit : Karamfila,  @karamfila.s on Instagram

 As many of you may know, I really love to analyze both printed texts and films for what they have to say about changing societal contexts. (Heck, I love it so much that it's essentially what I got my first post-undergrad degree in!)  Well, as I've officially hit third trimester, I've decided it's a good time to do a dive into some movies, both older and newer, that feature pregnancy.  I was inspired to choose  People Will Talk , a film from 1951 starring Cary Grant and Jeanne Crain, as my first movie because I also managed to find a vintage pregnancy book from the era a few months ago at a local used bookstore. The book, The Story of Human Birth by Dr. Alan Frank Guttmacher, was first published under its title in 1947, and I think together these texts say a lot about pregnancy and norms from the late 1940s and early 1950s.

I have a thesis: retail therapy can be a real and effective anxiety aid, especially during pregnancy. No, I'm not saying that because I want to justify being a shop-o-holic! Here's what I mean... What comes up when you search for a "pregnant shop-o-holic" stockphoto

Okay, this is only tangentially related to the intersection of motherhood and media, but some days you just have to stop everything and do a historical analysis of the social politics in a beloved children's public television show...

 "I wonder if, when a person is pregnant in Star Trek , they use a transporter to beam the baby out of the mother," my husband mused. We'd been watching our way through the 1993 delight that is Star Trek: Deep Space Nine .  I laughed, we continued the episode, and then I kept wondering: how does something as futuristic and supposedly utopian as the Star Trek Federation handle birth?