On a soap opera the characters who are men can have children pop up from out of the woodwork, it makes it easy for the writers to introduce new, young characters into the storyline and have them already connected to the existing characters. Good strategy.
Women don’t have it that easy. We know when we have had a child, kind of hard to forget being pregnant all those months and then going through labour.
If you were a writer on a soap opera what kind of strategies could you come up with to bring in a new character and claim the Mother is a female character who knows nothing about having a baby who could be that age at this time. How would a writer get around that?
Well, for the more “mature” female characters, we assume they were in their prime child-bearing years during the flower-power, drug-laced ’60’s, so I would expect that several of them might have had babies and given them up for adoption, and now those adopted children are doing what ALL adopted children do when they reach adulthood–find their biological parents!
You always come up with something I hadn’t thought of. 🙂 I went the science fiction direction with aliens and time travel.
an interesting quandary. not one to watch soaps, but versed enough in the viewing habbits of my exes to understand almost anything goes as long as it has a half way reasonable explanation…
the woman could have been pregnant with twins that the doctor never told her about. the combination of the trauma of childbirth and whatever drugs she may have been given for the pain caused her to not realize the bait and switch or more appropriately the theft and additional labour.
And there’s always amnesia. Boring but effective.