Reality TV

5-18-09

(WARNING: Spoilers of the season finale of The Office ahead.)

OMG! Pam is pregnant! Mr. Crud and I are watching the season finale of our beloved Office. The always adorable Pam hurts her leg. Jim takes her to the hospital. As the nurse wheels Pam into X-Ray, she asks Pam if she’s pregnant. Mr. Crud throws a knowing look. I wonder if it is a bit of misdirection to get us hanging viewers going down a blind pregnant alley. But no. A few minutes later Jim is called into the examination room for the results of Pam’s x-rays. Instead of a frantic rush to get her back on her feet so as to defeat the evil NY branch of Dunder-Mifflin, we see his face morph from shock to joy. They hug. He runs outside to tell his coworkers to “send in the subs” before returning to Pam for more celebrating.

(If I may poop on this sitcom parade, how exactly did this work? The nurse asks Pam if she’s pregnant on the way into the x-ray because x-raying pregnant women isn’t the greatest of ideas. Pam says no…so the nurse gives her a pregnancy test anyway? Are pregnancy tests standard when a woman of child-bearing age goes to the hospital after twisting her ankle? Did they x-ray her ankle and somehow tilt the machine up to catch an image of her uterus? In the parlance of the 30 Rock episode which followed: All these inconsistencies? Dealbreaker!)

And now back to our regularly scheduled blog entry about how my first thought after thinking the pregnancy development was kinda sweet (I’m surprised at how much I enjoy Pam and Jim’s cute premarital bliss.) was Pam is totally not going to have a miscarriage. A miscarriage scare so that she and Jim can know for sure for sure that they really want and love this baby? Sure. Everybody does that. But no miscarriage. Miscarriages in popular culture follow a few narratives:
• Bad woman gets knocked up and at the moment she decides she will change her evil ways to be a mother to this fetus inside of her, she has a miscarriage to punish her past misdeeds.
• Woman plans on having an abortion, but chicken-shit TV executives fear the wrath of the anti-choicers, thus have her cancel her abortion and allow her to have a miscarriage soon thereafter. Phew!
• Perfect cute couple are so in love and she gets pregnant and the birds are singing, but then she gets kicked in the stomach/has a car accident/falls down the stairs and she has a miscarriage. This technique is more common to Lifetime and weepy movies of the week.

My future master’s thesis in sociology/woman’s studies: Representations of Miscarriage in Popular Culture. (Please feel free to steal that. I’m more curious to find out the results than to do the dreaded research myself, although watching crappy TV in the name of research does have a certain appeal.)

The credits roll.

“She won’t have a miscarriage,” I say to Mr. Crud.

“Nope. It is a sitcom.”

I think about Jenna Fisher, the actress who plays Pam. She is hitting her mid-thirties sans baby bump. Does she want her own Peabody? Is playing pregnant a daily reminder of all that she is missing (or has lost—you never know a member of the miscarriage sisterhood from appearances) or a reaffirmation of her decision not to procreate? Or maybe she’s just doing her job.

As for me? We’re on the final week of the current TTC cycle. Either my period or a pregnancy test awaits this weekend. I have not the first clue as to whether magic happened this time around or if it is back to the drawing board. I have (mostly) stopped trying to guess. I don’t check on potential due dates or let myself get tangled in the superstition game. However I am looking at my boobs more than usual. Do they look bigger to you?