The old version of the film “Yours Mine and Ours” with Henry Fonda and Lucille Ball is about a couple who marry after both are widowed… one with 8 children and the other with 10… It’s a story of rivalry, acceptance and eventual love between the siblings as much as it is a story of the couple.
There is much hilarity and confusion – culminating in the closing scenes of the film where the mother has woken in the night having contractions as their ‘first’ child begins its arrival. The whole house is woken, this one cries, that one needs to go to the bathroom, the oldest son is having fisticuffs downstairs with the oldest daughters date who has been pressuring her. Someone reverses the car out of the garage and over the motorbike of the boyfriend, the contractions come closer and closer and the oldest daughter “needs to talk” after the exchange with her date!
While he carries a little one who wants to go back to bed up the stairs and returning with his labouring wife back down the stairs, the girl asks her step Dad “Am I being ridiculous and old fashioned? Larry says I don’t love him”. His answer was this:
“I’ve got a message for Larry… this (nodding around him to the house, the children, the confusion, his wife in labour), this is what it’s all about. This is the real happening. If you want to know what love really is, take a look around you… take a look at your mother. It’s giving life that counts! Until you’re ready for it, everything else is a fraud. Life isn’t a love-in, it’s the dishes and the orthodontist and the shoe repair man and ground beef instead of roast beef. And I’ll tell you something else—it’s not going to bed with a man that proves you love him, it’s getting up in the morning and facing the drab, miserable, wonderful everyday world with him that counts”
(The movie is on Stan if you want to look it up 🙂 )