One of the goals of this blog is to look at cultural things (books, movies, etc.) with a Catholic eye. But at the same time I don’t want to be known as one of those “uptight” people who hates everything that has a swear word in it and totally disregards any other merits of the piece.
I was thinking about this as I finished a novel last night. Until the Right Thing Comes Along, by Elizabeth Berg (who is, in general, one of my favorite novelists), focuses on a thirty-something protagonist, Patty, who is desperately in love with her intractable gay friend, Ethan. Not only does she want marriage (to, um, Ethan), she wants a baby. Badly. And she feels, like a lot of other women her age, the interminable ticking of the biological clock.
So what does she do? She and Ethan have a baby together. They attempt a move to Minneapolis, to see if living in a different place would encourage them to become more of a couple, but that doesn’t work, and they eventually move back to Massachusetts, where Patty has her baby. But she and Ethan don’t get married, and the book ends with Patty still single, raising the baby, and Ethan with a new lover, who is probably “the one.”
The back cover’s review notes that the book deals with “the impossibility of having it all.” Well, I guess. I mean, Patty doesn’t get Ethan at the end, which is what she really wants. but she does have her baby. Religion isn’t mentioned, but I’d guess the characters aren’t Catholic. (Some of Berg’s have been, so if it was important, she’d have said, I suppose) But still, it kind of bugged me that at the end we had Patty with her baby and Ethan with his lover and it was all sort of hunky-dory. Like, “OK well I didn’t get everything but I got something.” I kept thinking about the kind of life the baby would have as she grew up. How was Patty going to explain this situation? Would this make it harder for Patty to get the husband she so desperately wants? Or is that she really only wants Ethan? It seemed like an exercise in ‘if I can’t get what I want then I’ll take what I can get.’ I don’t know how I feel about that, and the book, which I had picked up as a quick read, sort of left me unsettled.
As a Catholic there’s no way I could condone this. I would never do it, even though I desperately want children, like Patty. But you see this everywhere–celebrities, in particular, seem to be big on the ‘I want children but there’s no Dad around (at least officially).’ Is it just the height of selfishness? Is it the inability for us to deny ourselves anything, to think beyond what we want, what we think we need? I’m forever hearing that “if God wants you to X (get married, have a baby, whatever), it’ll happen.” Now I’ll be the first to tell you that this can get annoying. (Well,OK, beyond annoying. It’s like hearing “offer it up” when you’re a kid and you don’t want to offer it up, you just want the brownie, dagnabbit.) It’s like we’ve moved totally beyond that. No one wants to hear “no.” So we get people like Patty, with the baby she wanted, but not the idyllic husband/family picture she had at the novel’s outset.
I wonder what would’ve happened if she’d miscarried, or if she and Ethan hadn’t been able to conceive. What would have happened to her character? How would she have grown? I think that would’ve been an interesting character study. But apparently…not.
So, am I uptight? Or what?
I guess the only thing to do is more prayer and, especially, for discernment.
