With its 10 pm time slot, ER is on too late to make it one of my regular views, but I was intrigued enough by the promos (“What was she thinking?”) for last night’s show, about the reunion of Dr. Kerry Weaver with her natural mother, that I gave it a look.
Perhaps it’s because I can’t put the characters into context, I was disappointed by the show.
The major themes – adoption reunions, birth mother guilt, Evangelical Christianity, acceptance of gays – were confused and disconnected and as a result, munged into an ill-constructed mess.
In fact, the title of the episode was changed along the way from “Shortness of Breath” to “Just As I Am” – and neither title particularly made sense.
I could empathize with the Kerry character when she wondered if she was lost to adoption because she had a birth defect, and it made sense that her natural mother would feel a stab of guilt that this was something she’d “given” to her daughter.
But then the corollary theme of Kerry’s being gay was introduced, and here I got lost. The natural mother, an Evangelical, didn’t reject her because of this second revelation, but, maternal guilt surfacing again, was concerned that Kerry’s sexual identity was the result of the trauma of being given up for adoption.
The episode ended with Kerry’s debating a New Testament reference with her mother in a plea for acceptance, something which confused me because it seemed her mother was perfectly willing to do that in the first place.
And here at last, was revealed the point of the title: “Just As I Am” was not about adoption at all, it was about gay rights.
I appreciate ANY mainstream media outlet that tackles the subject of adoption without sugarcoating, but by making gay rights the main focus, NBC lost an opportunity to delve into the dramatic possibilities of reunion, an extremely complex and volatile subject on its own.
For myself, being an adoptee has had a much larger impact on my psyche, identity and life experience than gender, race, social class or any other factor, being homely the sole possible exception.
Thus, I find it hard to believe that a gay adoptee, meeting her natural mother for the first time, would ram her sexual orientation down her mother’s throat and demand acceptance of her lifestyle.
It’s a non-sequitur, it makes no sense, and if I as someone who has thought about adoption for decades was confused by it, imagine how mystified the general public must have been by the “message” of this particular story.