Baby Steps: Triggered

I am a sucker for a funny movie. In fact, more than half of the DVDs my husband and I own fall in that genre. Some of our favorites: Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Super Troopers, Office Space. We have no trouble watching the same ones over and over again. It’s like a short break from reality; a chance to embrace all things immature!

This week, I had a very different experience watching a comedy on television. It was one my husband and I have watched before and both enjoyed. I never realized how much my own life experiences affected the way I watched a movie until now. I just realized, the film totally changed because my life had taken a 180 since the last time I saw it.

The movie in question: Baby Mama. It stars Tina Fey as a career woman who spent her 20’s and early 30’s climbing the ladder at work rather than searching for a husband and settling down. She decides she wants a baby – with or without a life partner – and tries several tactics to get pregnant without success. The movie profiles her experience with the woman (Amy Poehler) that she eventually hires as a surrogate mother, when she finds out she is unable to carry a baby herself.

You can probably predict what’s coming…

My emotional juices started flowing right from the start! Tina Fey’s character barely reacts to the news that the doctor "doesn’t like [her] uterus" – but I sure did. She never even gets a real answer about why she is infertile. And suddenly, the comedy turned into a horror movie…at least for me.

I cried through the first 40 minutes or so before I decided to just change the channel. It was the first time I’ve really been triggered emotionally by something in my environment – and it probably won’t be the last. I don’t feel any lasting effects of this minor incident, but I might skip out on the movies about trying to get pregnant for the foreseeable future!