One by one, we learn about each woman and her circumstances. We learn about her partner and their living circumstances. With each episode we get drawn into the intrigue of what will happen next and whether the characters will be able to work through the challenges they face.
At first blush, it would seem that it's merely a story about six bloated women who will ultimately go through a time of screaming and groaning and exposing their bottom to the world so that they may receive a slimy, wriggly, wailing newborn. Well, we do go through all of that but there's more to each of the six stories.
One woman discovers, at 37 weeks, that she's expecting twins. An hour later, she discovers that her husband was fired five months before but never told her. Their car has been repossessed, they are in arrears on their house payments, they have two adopted children who are very much a part of the parents' lives, and Mom has been blithely going about preparing a nursery that the family cannot afford. The final straw comes when Dad takes the children for pizza after school but can't pay the bill. His solution is to feign being a terrorist and robbing a bank.
There is also the older woman who became pregnant by a lover who is 25 years her junior and has a lot of maturing that needs to be done before he'll be ready to become a responsible father. Meanwhile, Mom is going through a torrid divorce from a resentful husband and even more resentful adult children.
The unwed teen has been hiding her pregnancy from her widowed long-haul driver father. She's been resourceful enough to rent tapes about childbirth but she has no clue about what's happening to her. Housekeeping skills have not been part of her maturation agenda. She stumbles into the class in full labor. Meanwhile, her dad has fallen asleep at the wheel and suffered a serious injury. The teen and hre baby's after care become a major issue.
The young Indian couple are having their ups and downs. It doesn't help that she claims she became pregnant while they were honeymooning. She confides to one of her friends that she's not really in love with her husband but he's a good man. Tensions rise when her doctor questions why her ankles are so swollen this much in advance of her due date. Complications arise not only with her pregnancy but also with determining the paternity of her baby.
The lesbian couple are going through the strains of living out of the closet with the teenage son of the non-gestating partner. The ex-husband is also the father of the the coming life. What is ultimately revealed is that the pregnancy was not started by in vitro fertilization and the couple are falling in love with one another.
And then there's the prenatal class instructor, a nurse, who is expecting the child of her boss, the OB/GYN for the women in the class.
Yes, it's a bit of a soap opera scenario. The thing of it is, the story is well written. You don't get bored with weekly screaming and grunting sessions. It's the intricacies of each story that pull the attention. It's the tension that mounts causing the viewer to wonder what will happen next. The writers make the audience try to anticipate how the challenges will be resolved and ask their own selves how they would handle each one or whether they would be able to do so.
The writers succeed in making this a story of diversity in a unique way. Each mother faces a unique situation. There are different social issues at play, different ethnicities represented, different economic circumstances. Even the children pose non-traditional challenges that wouldn't be expected in a traditional family drama.
For example, one of the fraternal twins was a successful birth. But his sister had a difficult time and will be a special-needs baby. Those twins are special to their adopted older siblings. As far as those two are concerned, they are a family of six, all special and all equally loved. The teen son is going through rage and hate for his mother now that she's come out. He's abusive and disrespectful. Getting him to curb his behavior toward her is not the responsibility of her partner nor her ex-husband. Although she's good at being demanding, it's at the wrong time and her aggressive behavior is directed at the wrong person.
The story winds the audience into its telling but there's a bit of a snag there. This is a story premised on six expecting women. Those pregnancies are the primary basis of the show. It's not feasible to have the same six women having a new pregnancy year after year. So how will the series perpetuate itself? Perhaps by morphing into a story about raising children. That friendship bond can only last so long when lives become disparate because of disparate circumstances.
Spoiler alert: This show only lasted for one season.
The good things about it are the acting, the writing, the symbolism. It makes for some good conversation about dealing with Life circumstances and how many options we actually have. It's eye opening to consider Life outside of our circumstances in order to safely consider how long we should stay on a particular path before taking a turn onto another road that may get us to our destination in a more comfortable or safer manner.
Even though it's a brief indulgence, it's worth making friends with these women and becoming involved with their lives. We learn that maternity is only the beginning of the story.
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