On a recent Saturday evening, after a roundtrip drive from Cincinnati to Columbus for a Sisters in Crime mystery writers event, I settled in at home to watch escapist TV and found a movie on the Hallmark Channel titled Dad’s Home. It was an enjoyable little romp in relax mode, until after the movie was over, I asked myself, “Why did I waste time on that?”
The premise, and here is a spoiler alert, is that the Mom was somehow gone from the picture and the Dad was raising two kids alone. Dad lost his 20 some year job in advertising, with a firm he helped build. The kids were concerned and all he said was, “We have money.” There was no further story line to explain the money. Why was he working if they had money?
Anyway, Dad gets a job interview at a new kind of advertising place, where they have yoga balls for chairs and he realizes that it’s not a match for him. Story movies along and then he gets an interview with an old type ad firm, gets an offer and he says yes to the job. Complication comes when the new boss calls and says, surprise, the job is in Cleveland. The family will have to relocate from what seems like the West Coast to snow land.
The Dad is still going along with the job offer and then he realizes his kids are happy where they are. Why move? The implied scene is that he calls the new boss and says no to the job. As I remember it, the movie ends with a happy scene of the kids playing in their sunny yard. The feeling I had after watching the movie, was “What? What about the money, how is he going to support his family?” No mention of an income stream in the movie and I felt ripped off for the time I spent watching that story, as income streams are a concern of mine.
Walking up the stairs to bed, it hit me. Mainstream consciousness, collective unconsciousness, whatever it’s called, is changing. Despite the headlines of unemployment and the high price of gas and the housing ups and downs, some undercurrent within a collective us realizes that money is no longer the driving force of our reason to be. It took me a few minutes to realize that’s what Dad’s Home offered — the Dad was being driven by family considerations, the happiness of his children in their current location, rather than by the income benefit of continuing his career in a field he had chosen decades previously. The story line that I filled in for myself is that Dad eventually got a job in another line of work.
One anchoring mantra I use these days is “Everything I need is here.” It takes all that I have sometimes to live by this experience, and it is an experience when I stay in the moment, rather than meander through worry or fret or fear. This TV movie helped reflect for me that in our new century, new age, new time, New Field the rules are changing and inner happiness is now currency.
May we all use it!
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