To be Hope

Seventeen year ago, when I was a moody, wandering, depressed nineteen year-old college student, I developed an obsession with the tv show thirtysomething. I was a young teenager when the show first aired, and didn’t pay attention, until living in an upstairs room of a house, isolated, wanting to be someone else, I discovered late night reruns on lifetime television. When everyone else was asleep, I would sneak downstairs and eat two bowls of ice cream and watch Michael and Hope, Elliot and Nancy, Melissa, and what was Hope’s best friend’s name? The one with the sexy voice? I wanted to be her. I wanted the voice. But really, I wanted to be Hope. Perfect looking, perfectly married, perfectly together, perfect mother; her biggest problem was that her husband (very cute, very creative) didn’t notice the laundry to carry it downstairs. He would only carry it downstairs after she asked him to. Pshaw.

For about a year and a half, I disappeared from my own life into their life for an hour each day. I bought the soundtrack. I pretended a lot. I was an acting student – wasn’t this practice? Eventually, I think the reruns stopped, or I moved and no longer had cable television.

And now here I am, 36 years-old, with a new toy called Netflix. Last night I searched thirtysomething. Yep – all four seasons. I took a chance. Would it be as good as I remembered? Would it hold up to time? Or would it go the way of other things I loved in my youth because I wanted to escape into them, rather than because they were quality (Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Aspects of Love, for instance).

Season One, Episode Four: “Couples.”

In the spirit of Rashomon, a couples’ evening devolving into an argument between husband and wife is told from four points of view, interspersed with an assignment to create an ad for a plastic surgeon, culminating in a kids’ backyard birthday party and – at last! – Michael and Hope realizing that their fight about the washing machine had no major significance, that their friends are really the ones with marital trouble. They kiss and hold each other for dear life in the messy kitchen. Cut to WG Snuffy Walden’s catchy theme.

Oh joy! It holds up! It’s melodramatic in just the right way, lit with just the right tinge of realism, Michael appears without his shirt, Hope wears a dress slit open in the back in that special 80’s style. There’s the perfect amount of insecurity, heart-to-heart talks, and comedic supporting players. And their quirky, mysterious boss Miles hasn’t even entered the scene yet.

While watching this on my laptop, pureeing corn and butternut squash, pouring it into tiny jam jars for a seven month-old with an enormous appetite, there it was, staring me in the face: this was my life. I had gotten my nineteen year-old wish: I had become Hope.

Now, to be true, I don’t parade about in short t-shirts and bikini underwear. But I do suffer from the up and down moods of taking care of a baby all day. Some days when Mark comes home, I grab him and kiss him; other days, I'm ready to pound the bugs on the walls with his racquetball shoe (we have neither bugs nor racquetball shoes, but I could relate). I have some work that takes me out of the house, and, unlike Hope, I'm usually excited to leave and be an adult sans kid for a while. We also never see Hope in her pajamas at noon. But, all in all, the truth is there: I have become a thirtysomething wife and mother. Seventeen years of traipsing about to find myself, and I land where I wanted to be from the very start.

The treasure is always buried under our feet, right? But on the journey to find it, we see how beautiful the pyramids are.