Mama Tried, by Martha Thomases – Brilliant Disguise

January 3, 2009 Martha Thomases 4 Comments

Maury Povich helped me be a better mother.

I don’t know the man, nor do I know his wife, the television journalist Connie Chung.  I’ve never been anywhere they’ve been, not even a crowded elevator in the NBC Building.

Nor do I have any real desire to make their acquaintance.  They may be very nice people, but they don’t really interest me, personally.

Several years ago, on a vacation from middle school, my son tuned into the Maury Povich show while I was working out on my elliptical trainer.  I was scornful.  I didn’t like talk shows where the audience screams at the guests.  If I watch a talk show, I want to watch talk, not taunting.  I can supply my own cheers and jeers.

And I did.  I explained my preferences to my boy, but he said that everyone at school watched the show.  “It’s hilarious,” he said.  So, because I was already sweating and didn’t want to mess with my rhythm, I watched.

The audience was screaming.  The guests were screaming.  It was difficult to understand what they were screaming about, since so much of what they were screaming was bleeped out.  After a few minutes, I figured it out.

The guests for this program were couples who had broken up after the woman had a child, and the man insisted the child was not his.  The Povich show had done DNA tests.  After what they considered to be a reasonable amount of arguing between the interested parties, they’d announce whether or not the man in question was, in fact, the father.

This went on through the entire show.  People cheered or booed, depending on the results and their sympathies.  When the results were announced, the person who had been found to be wrong often fled the stage in tears.   Cameras followed, and we were treated to the spectacle of some person’s hopes and dreams fall apart.

My son thought this was hilarious.  I was aghast.  People went on television for this, aired their dirty laundry in front of millions?  What were they thinking?

We watched a few hours of this stuff over the next several weeks.  After a while, I recovered from my horror, and began to talk to my son about what we were seeing.

“They could have avoided this if they used condoms,” I said.  “You don’t have to have intercourse to have a good time sexually,” I added.

More important, “There are people you might find attractive, but you don’t want them in your life for the next 18years.  That’s what contraception is for.”

Most important, “You might want to know someone is crazy before you have sex with her.”

If I had said any of this as part of a lecture, I would have felt like a total dork.  However, it made sense as part of our conversation about the shows we were watching.  We were talking about problems with sex the same way we talked about problems with the script of Man on Fire, a movie so bad that it made us both laugh at Denzel Washington.

There were other themes on other Maury shows, including mothers who tried to dress like their daughters (usually both were too fat for the clothes they sported) and spying on your kids. These were way less fun than paternity tests.

Even though my son is no longer on this coast, I watched a few Maury paternity shows.  They went more quickly than I remembered, with more dysfunctional families per hour.  If I wanted to use these episodes to teach any life lessons, I would have been rushed.  There was less jeering by the vindicated not-the-fathers, and more tears all around.

It wasn’t so much fun to watch by myself.  Lesson learned.
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Martha Thomases, Media Goddess, wishes everyone a better 2009.