Why We Tell Stories Part 8: Saving the Family

I’ve mentioned on other occasions that my favourite short dramas are ones involving children particularly the ones who hog the best lines in a very chaotic often seemingly incoherent script. The kind of suspension of disbelief that’s required to sit through one of these stories often beggar belief. So the cute kids are the sugar that make the hard-to-swallow pills a bit more palatable. In these types of stories children are magical creatures. Those who grow up separated from one birth parent (or both) are usually the first off the block to recognize their long lost dad or mum. Often that acknowledgement happens within the first five minutes of the drama. Children are the catalyst. They too are the key to restoring a family in disarray. In many cases the children are prodigies bypassing the genetic limitations of their forebears using their specially endowed ingenuity to find the missing parent. It’s Hansel and Gretel on steroids. Ours is not to question how or why. Ours is to mock ogle, and giggle. It also celebrates childbirth in an age where fewer and fewer people in economically wealthy countries are having children.

The vast majority of these children — whether it be single or multiple births — are almost always the products of a hazy one-night stand. Aphrodisiacs and alcohol are often the poisons of choice. Occasionally it’s prostitution in service of a sick relative in need of exorbitant long-term medical care. Heaven looks on with pity and there’s a mix-up. so it’s the much sought after eligible CEO that’s the unseen prize. The embarrassing thing is that the children have greater clarity than their parents, their destitute mother especially, who often insists on playing hide and seek with their birth father for fear of him snatching her children away.

What’s really instructive is the fact that it is almost always the children who initiate the first contact or that public acknowledgement. In the case of separated children of multiple births, they might cause confusion and mistaken recognition. But it’s almost always the children that are first to realise who their missing birth parent is. On the other hand, the adult leads grope around pigheadedly ignoring the children’s cry for a parent. The mother especially who is usually more concerned about her custodial rights than the cry of her children’s heart to have a dad especially when she’s struggling to make ends meet with multiple children in tow. Wise beyond their years the children pity her and justifiably believe that she would be better off with their dad whoever he may be. More often than not she is better off with him especially if she has an agenda like revenge. Or particularly vicious relatives.

Note too that the children are unplanned… even “unwanted”. Yet they have a greater cosmic purpose in the bigger battle between good and evil.

The function of the children in this type of narrative is to protect not only their mother but their entire family with their siblings by searching for their father who luckily for them is usually the most powerful man in the immediate setting. Their father is blissfully unaware that he has left his sown wild oats wandering about. Tsk tsk tsk. Despite his wealth and status, his biggest sin is that he isn’t performing his obligations as the impregnator of the children’s mother. Due to that transgression, the children take on the role of family protector vacated by their MIA father. To her he’s only the sperm donor but to the children, their family is incomplete without him.

The celebration of the children in these stories is suggestive. Adults are severely denigrated and dumbed down because it is adults who get in the way of their happily-ever-after. In a very recent entry, a brood of superpowered triplets are born to a hapless unmarried Cinderella type mother who falls prey to an evil stepmother’s schemes. A charlatan fortune teller under the pay of step-mother informs the gullible and superstitious father that his daughter’s offspring portend misfortune for the family and so in typical fairytale fashion, they are thrown into the forest to die. The father of the children drugged by an unknown enemy pounces on the show’s passing Cinderella figure and uses her as his “antidote”. The result of his hasty treatment choice is a family he has no knowledge of. Five years later the CEO still in search of his one-night stand strides past her in his hotel. It’s all very absurd but the triplets are adorable prodigies. Rescued by a priest, the children grow up to fulfill their calling — the oldest is a business tycoon, the daughter is a pugilist and number three becomes a great doctor. One fine evening, Mum and Dad happen to be in the same hotel, drugged of course, and their progeny scheme to bring together. Things don’t go according to plan because the next morning the CEO thinks that the woman who wakes up beside him set him up. He offers a nice fat cheque but she is righteously insulted — tears up the cheque and does a runner before he can say who he is.

The allusion to Cinderella here positions the mother of the children as the ultimate damsel in distress. A woman who has been systematically abused by her step-mother and half-sister, reduced to waiting on them hand and foot. Her children stolen from her at birth and she’s about to be sold to an unsavoury character for marriage. On one occasion, she leaves behind her anklet for her prince to find and contemplate its importance. Is she the woman he used that fateful night? It takes him up to three encounters before he is able to join the dots. Long before the father recognizes the mother, the children are already on top of things protecting her as best they can. According to the thinking driving these seemingly absurd plots, adults with all their biases and assumptions are blinded from the truth that’s right under their nose.

Misunderstanding is the bedrock of many a C drama. Many dramas wouldn’t exist without that because a happy marriage based on clear active communication is a boring one. Only in the hands of a lesser writer would that be true. In the case of our triplets story, the CEO has to misunderstand to prolong the push and pull. He’s been looking for Cinderella but he can’t see her because his cynical self can only see a scheming woman who’s trying to bed him and become mistress of his estate.

There is a reason why she’s a damsel in distress. And really there’s nothing pathetic with being one especially if you’ve been systematically abused your whole life. She needs to be plucked from the toxic mire especially after the death of her unreliable father. Help from outside is what’s needed. But it isn’t just that. A woman with small children is particularly vulnerable and the man who used her as an antidote needs to take responsibility for the humiliation that she suffers from falling pregnant out of wedlock. Children are forced to protect adults or do the job of adults when the adults abdicate their responsibilities. It is interesting to note from the triplets story and others of this kind that when the children are safe in their family home, they can happily be children. At least until the home invaders comes for them.

So the fairytale ends happily — not all fairytales do incidentally and not for everyone — for the heroic children because the family they crave to be a part of has become a reality. They are instrumental in bringing together their parents and dispatch the evil forces that threaten to destroy them all.