Things I Wish I Had Written

Man, I wish I had written this--it's just so damn funny and so damn true.

In a Salon.com review of the new movie The Invasion, the latest of the Body Snatcher movies, Mary Elizabeth Williams writes:

Yet what might have been the movie's worst misstep turns out to be one of its few clever conceits. The child-in-jeopardy motif is an overused cinematic crutch, but the fact that the story follows a mother and son heightens the drama and works as a metaphor. What is parenthood, after all, if not a fierce protectiveness mingled with torturous sleep deprivation and the constant threat of someone barfing all over you?

This is the true fear, isn't it? It was what Alien was about--the fear of pregnancy and childbirth writ large. But given the advances in medical care over the last 200 years, childbirth is much more rarely the death sentence it was in the past. It is, however, nearly guaranteed sleep deprivation and the certainty of close acquaintance with the expulsion of bodily fluids.

It is also the fear of becoming mindless--the childless person's fear that friends who become parents only want to talk about their children, uninterested in what had made them who they were before the advent of parenthood. With the added horror that these people don't realize, or don't care, how much they have changed!

After all, isn't pregnancy itself a sort of body snatching? Pregnancy-related memory loss, sleep deprivation lasting for years, touching all those things babies expel from their bodies--sometimes even at projectile speeds? Who needs a movie when you have real life?