Adam turned 13 on Thursday and his birthday has been dragged out over the last few days with movie “dates” and almost his entire class in our house yesterday and I think there is still one straggler here that will be tossed shortly. I was chatting with one of the mom’s yesterday and learning her story….single mom, immigrant, doing the absolute best she can for her kids in a new country. Basically the story that created Canada (I apologize to the First Nations people for that hyperbole). The kids classmates come from every sort of “family” makeup you can think of. This is an incredibly diverse neighbourhood and what I love about that is that there is no ‘proper’ family, culture or colour. The kids accept and adapt without blinking to whatever situations their classmates live in. No judgement.
Well some judgement. I had to laugh when my kids exclaimed that a child they new lived in a ‘basement suite!!’ Oh the horror. I don’t know how our housing arrangement is deemed posher than that, but go figure. Don’t worry, we had a talk about that.
This is supposed to be a Netflix post, so will harken back to pop culture here…as a kid all the books I read and all the shows I watched had plumy English kids with housekeepers or nannies and ponies. I envied all those seemingly perfect lives, even knowing it was fiction. Pretty much the same way we watch families on film and television. We know they aren’t real, but we all sort of WISH it was. So yes, fictional families can reflect impossible archetypes that would never exist in reality, but they can also be cause for catharsis and give us the ability to look back at our own families and be thankful and happy with what we have here in the real world.
My kids have used Netflix to check out Fresh Prince of Bel Air. My son knows the ENTIRE song. I always loved Gilmore Girls, because I liked to think that that was the dream version of me and my mom. Film and TV families always used to be so ‘perfect’ but now at least they tend to reflect the diversity and that there ‘can’ be fun in your disFUNction and even if your family is cray cray, perhaps it will be the fodder for the next great film, book or tv show.
Currently I am loving Grace and Frankie. They are a delight to watch together.
Check out Netflix for family fun.
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