My oldest son was born in early February 2020. A blissful seven or so weeks before the world shut down due to the Covid-19 pandemic. It surprised almost everyone how quickly it shut down the world.
But postpartum little old me, up early for months with a tiny crying baby, knew it was coming. I had been watching a 24-hour news cycle, paying very close attention to the impending doom as I sat rocking and feeding my baby in the wee hours of the morning as I took the “late shift to sleep, early shift to get up” with my husband.
A week or so before the world shut down, I had texted my best friend at an odd time of day for anyone not giving around-the-clock newborn care. Her husband is a doctor and someone I would trust with my life. “Does he think this as bad as they say it is?” She responded back during normal people hours, “Yes, and he thinks the schools will close for many weeks.” All of my studying of the news from around the world was clicking into place.
So I continued to get up at 4:30 in the morning (did you know local news starts at 4 AM?) and watched the news through this lens. For weeks, as the world shuttered and I woke up with a newborn, I watched and watched and watched.
It goes without saying that watching an unending doom-and-gloom news cycle is not healthy or happy for anyone, postpartum or otherwise.
Fast-forward to June 2023, a different time indeed. My second son was born, and I promised myself I would not fall into any cycle of overexposing myself to the news. Instead, I was going to overexpose myself to feel-good movies that made me laugh—movies that were new to me and movies that I was happy to revisit.
I had this idea the evening after my C-section with my son. I was flipping through the hospital TV as my son and husband were snoozing away, and I came across Sweet Home Alabama, a Reese Witherspoon classic. It is one of my top-10 favorite movies ever (Legally Blonde, another Reese Witherspoon classic, being in the top 3). When my husband woke up, I told him to get the remote to turn it off. I was in too much pain from my C-section to laugh at “Felony Melanie.”
But it got me thinking—what movies did I love that I hadn’t seen in a while? What movies had I always wanted to see but hadn’t? What movies were going to make me feel good about watching them at all hours of the day for the next two months?
When we got home, I started a list on my phone of movies—then I quickly used Google to search where I could stream them. If I couldn’t stream them anywhere on any of my services, I tried to see if I could record them at some point in the next few weeks while they were being shown on TV. I added all of this to my list so that at any moment’s notice, I could decide what movie to watch and where to find it.
I made it through many more Reese Witherspoon movies during my maternity leave (she’s a queen of this genre, isn’t she?). I also watched Father of the Bride for the first time in probably 25 years and watched Father of the Bride Part 2 for the first time ever! I made it through the Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan classics, Sleepless in Seattle, and You’ve Got Mail. I watched movies that came out when I was a kid, but I wasn’t allowed to watch them at the time due to their R-rating (Varsity Blues and There’s Something About Mary being two in particular). I watched some terrible but also amazing rom-coms from the 2000s, like Patrick Dempsey’s Made of Honor and Leap Day. I revisited Almost Famous and A League of Their Own. I quickly remembered how funny Steel Magnolias is, but also that you need to stop halfway if you don’t want to cry for the rest of the film.
I continued to add so many movies to my list that I am still going through it almost a year after my son was born.
I’ve always been a big consumer of media and pop culture, but this experiment really made me think about how it affects me. There were mornings my son was up way too early but then I remembered that after I changed him, fed him, and settled him back to sleep, I could sit and watch whatever movie I had picked out the night before and was suddenly in a much happier mood to get up in the dark while the rest of the house slept.
I still watch the local news many mornings, but I now know when to turn it off. I still pay attention to national and world news, but I now know when to close out of consuming to process it instead.
I am not saying a steady diet of rom-coms at 4:30 in the morning changed the chemistry of my postpartum hormones. But I can say this kind of diet didn’t hurt any – except for making me laugh too hard for my C-section incision!
