30,000 foot perspective:
Premise: In the year 2033, women who have been wronged by men (including but not limited to abused, discriminated against, neglected, condescended, publicly shamed, erased, marginalized, used, discarded, treated in a marriage like a subordinate, an employee or a roommate for that matter) are instantly imbued with a SuperPower: they can impregnate the perp. They do so via their assigned Righteous Angel—no contact required, no worries; the egg comes from a cache saved through the millennia by prescient, pioneering women-turned-angels, aka The Righteous Squad ("TRS") who saw what was coming—namely an eternal imbalance because, ya know, only women could bear children ... until now. TRS tipped the scales—to equilibrium—by making men prego. After innumerable long-term, peer-reviewed studies, it was confirmed that men actually had to endure 40 weeks of creating a being + 30ish pounds + varicose veins + hemorrhoids + labor + delivery + nursing + 3 years of diapers and potty training + one decade of not sleeping and play dates with small tupperwares and Raffi and relentless comparison analysis from other primary caregivers + the parental-ire epoch of adolescence... to understand. TO GET IT.

TRS monitor the Y-chrom bad behavior from their Cloud-Based Fem-Aerie. (Picture it: Cloud spas, Cloud Whole Foods hot bars, Cloud spin classes, Cloud City Arts and Lectures lectures; Cloud Good Vibrations, Cloud book clubs.) TRS doesn't miss a single bad apple. Needless to say, men throughout Europe, Russia, China and the US start getting pregnant at an alarming rate. The media is apoplectic; it’s all the twittersphere can tweet about. #metoo becomes #youtoo.

We are now, officially, all in this together.


Ground Zero:
The harried father-to-be (played by Will Farrell for sure) answers the front door in his distressed AC-DC t-shirt meant to cover his bulging belly and acid-wash paternity stretch jeans. We estimate that he is seven-months along based on his hair and skin, which are, in a word, problematic. He has forgotten to bathe … for at least a week. His socks don’t match. The dog barks uncontrollably behind him, refusing to heed the fruitless voca alta commands from the unraveling man of the house.

The FedEx delivery woman on the other side of the door hands him an unwieldy 40-lb package – Looks like it’s your new bouncy seat, daddy. If only they had one for new parents!” (Guffawing.) "You’re going to need it. That and the inflatable donut for post-delivery, if you know what I mean.”

“No, I don’t know what you mean. Enlighten me,” rubbing his moobs which are swollen and sore but not as swollen and sore as his cankles.

“Your wife can fill you in. She’s been there. Good luck!" (Beat.) Smirks, spins and turns. “Oh, here she is now.”

Wife (Julianne Moore please) pulls slow-mo into driveway in a midnight blue Tesla Model S P100D. Steps out in stilettos, hair swinging, from the passenger side. Her personal assistant (who drives of course so she can work) emerges from driver’s seat.

“H! Oh, Excellent! The self-soothing seat arrived! What’s for dinner, babe?” …

more tk

"Our real blessings often appear to us in the shape of pains, losses and disappointments; but let us have patience and we soon shall see them in their proper figures." —Joseph Addison


Yeah, working on that. 

“Back Where They Belong”
 
She was having a shit week in paradise. Her kids were headed back to live in Marin with their father for the upcoming semester and her birth grandparents (a term adopted people use), had just died within five days of each other. They had been married for 70 years.
 
She was, in other words, being drawn and quartered.
 
To say her abandonment issues were triggered would be a massive understatement.
 
Conditions were ostensibly perfect. Great teachers, nice peers, a dog, a car, a 4000-square-foot home three blocks from the beach where the Obama’s spend Xmas (for Chrissake), one mile from a stellar, quaint—but not so quaint that it didn’t have a Whole Foods and a Core Power Yoga—downtown. Turns out the small IB high school didn’t “stick.” 
 
The kids were “emotionally immature,” the 16-year-old declared, two days after school started, which here meant, they didn’t party like the kids in Marin. While her daughters didn’t exactly self-sabotage, they did become (affectionately) known as Dark and Stormy. As in, they reacted like teens. Normal teens. Mostly, they missed their friends, plain and simple. And neither the mother nor the idyllic environs could trump the visceral pull of their hometown peers. She knew and accepted that.
 
The mother’s attempts to convince them, however, that it was okay to choose hard over easy, challenging over comfy, new over familiar, resilience over caving, were undermined by the middle daughter’s indomitable will (a trait that would undoubtedly serve her well in life) and the father’s back channeling with the (under-qualified, way-out-of-her-depth, 28-year-old) school counselor and the (overpaid) Marin therapist. While the father had initially been in favor of the girls staying in Hawaii for the year, he didn’t love paying child support and was keenly aware that having the girls return to Marin mid-stream would, in fact, devastate the mother. She deserved it. The preferred narrative, as heralded by said father—who traveled weekly for work and monthly for fun and … oh, sold cannabis and vaping products for a living—was that the high-schoolers would be “back where they belong.”
 
She prayed this would be the case. If it wasn’t, there would be hell to pay. And it would be on them.