By Mallory Mattingly
Hollywood Actress’ Countercultural Parenting Advice? Have Kids Early
EVERYBODY LOVES RAYMOND star Patricia Heaton produced the film UNEXPECTED, which chronicles a couple’s journey of infertility, and she’s sharing some of her motherhood advice along the way.
“Bob and Amy are at a crossroad: she wants to adopt a baby, he doesn’t. Will renovating a house and rescuing animals solve their problems? Will their new handyman and his son’s pregnant girlfriend be the miracle they are looking for? Or is the solution to their problem completely…unexpected? A comedy about life, love, adulting… and a bunny named Binky,” an official logline of the film reads on Prime Video.
Heaton shared the trailer on Instagram, writing, “Follow the journey of Bob and Amy as they navigate the ups and downs of adulting and discover that sometimes, life doesn’t go as planned. Perfect for anyone who has ever felt like they’re just trying to keep their head above water.”
Patricia Heaton realizes discussing hot topics like infertility can be hard, noting that people are also “waiting longer to try and get pregnant.” But she has some advice for young people who want to raise a family.
“So they’re in their 30s before they’re trying. And I understand that we’re living in a different time now,” Heaton told Fox News Digital. “You might feel like, in your 20s, you’re not ready, you can’t afford it. But, if at all possible, the earlier you start, the better. You have better chances because once you get in your 30s, and then you realize there’s an issue, the clock is really ticking.”
Heaton and her husband, David Hunt, share four sons. For the actress, motherhood is “indescribable.”
“Being a mother is indescribable; joy, worry, delight, frustration, but ultimately the greatest satisfaction and deepest human love of your life. So grateful,” Heaton wrote in a post on her Instagram along with an old photo of her sons.
The book Enslaved By Ducks, which is about a couple who adopts several animals, inspired Heaton’s UNEXPECTED, but the original concept wasn’t working as a movie.
“It was very amusing, but it wasn’t working as a screenplay,” Hunt, Patricia Heaton’s husband and the movie’s director, told Fox News Digital. “And we had a reading in our house in L.A. with some actors and it kind of died a death. And I turned to the writer who we’d been working with for a while and I said, ‘We need a new engine. Let’s make the couple childless, and they can’t have kids, and they think about adopting…animals as a substitute for the children, and blah, blah, let’s use that.'”
With that change, the writer produced a script in just one week.
“He said, ‘Yeah, it poured out of me.’ He said, ‘I never told you this’ — And we’d been working with him for several years — ‘Both my daughters were adopted.’ And it was at that moment that we realized, ‘Oh, yeah, we’ve really hit on a nerve here because this is an issue that’s not talked about enough,'” Hunt revealed. “And we had had a lot of friends who had struggled with the same issue for many years, very painful experiences they went through. So that was kind of the genesis of it.”
UNEXPECTED will have viewers laughing and maybe even crying by the end of the film. It’s now available on Prime Video.
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