'Offspring' returns. Yippee!

Steve's Saturday golf means I can please myself with all manner of girlie shit on the tellie, if I have had the foresight to record something worthy. And as luck would have it, on a quick flick around last night I saw that the final episodes of last season's 'Offspring' were being replayed, so with a flickity flick flick, it was sitting there for me today. Don't ya just love technology?

2 Hours, well less cos I fast forwarded through the ads, of emotional rollercoaster. I laughed and cried like a baby. Yes I had seen it all before, but I had no trouble watching as if for the first time. I reckon it is so well put together!

When I wiped away the last of the tears I was left wondering about the family dynamic of both Nina and me.

To summarise, this is Nina's lot:

• an interfering but quirky loveable mother.
• a father who isn't her father who is divorced from her mother but still loves her all the while he is off on a grey nomads journey with his baby son and his mother who was heavily involved with another bloke but broke it off to go a wandering.
• a latterly discovered biological father who is more than a little odd but pleasant enough who had a renewed affair with her mother, but that too died a strange death.
• a flaky sister and a soon to be ex brother-in-law.
• an organic hippy type of brother and his girlfriend and baby
• and of course there are other various hangers on who all add spice to the action.

She is surrounded by all this madness and mayhem but is beautifully loved despite or in spite of her own bit of peculiarity. And how lucky is that!!

My lot is smaller and far less harmonious and definitely less humorous:

• Dead dad gone too soon, no angel but a lot of fun.
• Bitter twisted estranged mother.
• Dead felon brother who I hadn't seen since he had smashed his way into my house and stole stuff and threatened to kill my sister 20 years ago.
• A sister who has become part of her husband's 'Look at me, Look at me, Look at me,' cult and therefore finds Steve and I too fat to tolerate.
• Beautiful daughter and grandie boy.
• Steve who has accepted this lot as he has found 'em, which for most of 'em is not at all.

I don't know anyone who has a 'normal' family, in fact I don't reckon I could describe what that would be, but I am pretty sure it wouldn't be Nina's.

And maybe that is why this show is such a hit. It certainly encourages us to think that familial harmony is possible and that if all else ends in a heap, you can always rely on 'blood'.

I am pretty sure that my Bell doesn't watch what she would consider such dross, but if she did I hope she would say that she is as loved as Nina, even if her family numbers don't quite add up.