Did you see The Family Man last night on ABC? Nicolas Cage is single and a hugely successful Wall Street guy. Then in an It’s A Wonderful Life / Scrooge kind-of-way he gets a chance to see what life would have been like if he’d married his girlfriend and become a family man. It’s way different than his life now (thus the comedy). He’s still ambitious and at one point in wanting to take a job in the city his wife tells him…
If you need this, Jack, if you really need this, I will take these kids from a life they love and I'll take myself from the only home we've ever shared together and I'll move wherever you need to go. I'll do that because I love you. I love you, and that's more important to me than our address. I choose us.
By the time he goes back to his old life he has a new way of seeing things; so much so that he goes after the old girlfriend to try to get in real life what he had in his George Bailey-state. And he finds himself telling her…
I don't know, maybe it was just all a dream. Maybe I went to bed one lonely night in December and I imagined it all. But I swear, nothing has ever felt more real. And if you get on that plane right now, it'll disappear forever. I know we could both go on with our lives and we'd both be fine, but I've seen what we could be like together. And I choose us.
I was completely sucked in and had tears in my eyes as I thought what if something turned out different and I hadn’t married Brenda? What would life be like if I had missed all this? Then today she came upstairs with a heavy look on her face, like she was in one of those downward spirals that sneaks up on you; the garage was a mess, the bedroom needed painted, the other bedroom needed the trim finished, my home office still had stuff stacked on the floor. All this was supposed to be done months ago (by me). And I’m in the middle of a (non-family) project when she (nicely) says this and I’m not going to be able to do any of those things right now and my heart hurts because I’ve dropped the ball and because she hurts and I can’t make it better. What would I choose us look like at this moment? I stop what I’m doing and listen and make some pathetic plans. That’s all I can do. And she’s happy. How? Why? Because she loves me, and that’s more important to her than the undone stuff. And I’m thanking God this is not a dream.
