9 Chickweed Lane

2-20-2023

A friend of mine very literally threatened to throw an intervention so I'm going to keep this short.

It's weird to introduce yourself to a stranger with your full name, right? I met a bunch of people at a party a few weeks ago. None of us exchanged last names.

Mary seems to attend a lot of concerts. Very cultured. Very refined. She even recognizes Hugh somehow.

And I'm tickled by her "his... wife!?" thought balloon, like the idea that he's managed to trap someone in a marriage is so unbelievable, so surprising.

It's interesting that she states he accompanied a cellist, not was accompanied by a cellist. Xiulan was the focal point. I guess her very large pregnant stomach didn't interfere with playing the cello? I have no idea how that works.

Xiulan is wearing street clothes, a baggy turtleneck and loose jumper, to dance with her husband who is in a tuxedo. Formal gowns for pregnant people exist, and also she's a gazillionaire and can easily have all of her clothing custom made. But no, she made this sartorial choice.

And I guess her turning to the side after taking off her coat was meant to be a Big Reveal except 1) regular readers already know she's pregnant and 2) she looks pregnant from the front.

I've been pregnant and I cannot imagine a very pregnant person enthusiastically dancing the tango. Not as far along as she is, anyway. Pregnancy is exhausting, it changes your center of gravity, and it limits your mobility.

The only way to redeem this stretch of story is if this all acts as a means to re-introduce these characters to the strip, a sign that we're going to be seeing more characters doing stuff, more story telling, Edda and Amos actually interacting with other people. But, I mean, they didn't interact with these people at this event, they dipped before anyone else arrived so they could fuck. So I don't know if this is even possible.

I expect we'll see Isabel and Burkhardt next.

2-16-2023

Mary's dress (jewelry?) has changed and her hair has grown. Just how long has she been trapped here? Hell is truly other people, especially in 9 Chickweed Lane.

A big reason Mary wasn't attracted to Amos when they were in high school is that he was a fairly repellent person. He had poor social skills, poor personal hygiene, talked about the end of the world a lot, was quick to insult her, had a pretty big ego. He matured quite a bit since then, has become a pretty decent adult, but he was pretty gross for the entire time he was pursuing Mary. And I guess she's being punished for not seeing what a diamond in the rough he was.

And the latest person to do the punishing is Hugh Godalming, a man universally considered utterly repellent by everyone in Julliard with him except for his eventual wife Xiulan who fell in love with him because he plays piano so pretty - which is a bog standard feature with McEldowney. It doesn't matter how utterly vile someone is, as long as they Do An Art Well they're redeemed. Edda, and thus Amos and Seth and poor betrayed Mark put up with Hugh for Xiulan's sake but that really seems to be the only reason he has friends: because his wife has friends.

So that's Hugh, a man so disliked that classmates would leave the room when he entered it.

He's managed to Find True Love so let's rub Mary's face in her lack of same, eh?

One wonders who he's going to dance with: his massively pregnant wife? His wife who has quietly given birth to some unspecified number of children of some unspecified gender and is now as slim as she was pre-pregnancy? Someone else? Anyway, he's here to tell Mary all about his beloved wife at length, I'm sure.

The way Mary describes Seth and Fernanda's behavior, by the way, is the way that Edda has described sluts in the past. Only when Edda did it she was in the right to do so; Mary's just being a prude.

It's weird to see this group of friends shuffling on then off stage, by the way. Edda and Amos and Seth and Fernanda and Hugh are all friends... friends who apparently had plans to meet each other? But they aren't actually interacting. Edda and Amos danced and humped and then left. Seth appeared, then his female wife Fernanda, and they hump danced off stage left. Then Hugh came in. And none of them have overlapped with each other, spoken to each other, seen each other. This entire sequence is centered around Mary and how bad she is for not having a One True Destined Love and how they're awesome for having achieved that. They exist as props to demonstrate how Bad Mary is. They aren't even characters, they're props. They're devices.

Props and devices that have a reserved table I guess?

3-16-2012

McEldowney had his first "Edda Might Be Pregnant" strip in 2012.

She and Amos weren't married, and she was working as both a ballet dancer and a model, two incredibly physically strenuous professions that require being slender. As it turned out, she wasn't pregnant and might actually have fertility issues. Although a pregnancy was completely unplanned, and at a terrible time in her life, she was still deeply affected by not being pregnant. It was a mournful time for her.


5-21-2022

And knowing that it might actually be an issue?


5-24-2012

Personally, I'd prefer if this exchange hadn't occurred during them fucking - especially as several previous strips had been very sweet. But it raises the specter of infertility between a young couple who apparently have everything else going for them.

They eventually marry, enjoy not having children for a while, then plan to have their first baby.

Xiulan and Hugh decide to have a child at the same time, although they don't wind up conceiving until after Edda and Amos' kids turn... two? Six? Some indeterminate age. That doesn't stop McEldowney from making "men are tired from too much fucking" jokes though. ("jokes") (Xiulan and Hugh may or may not have stopped trying to conceive at some point?)


7-24-2019


3-26-2019

It doesn't happen right away, which is pretty normal! But it keeps not happening despite them actively trying including charting ovulation. I do want to point out that most people can't just tell when they're ovulating - some people can feel the egg bursting free but that isn't super pleasant. Usually you tell by a variety of methods including charting your cervical mucus and/or using urine test strips. You don't just suddenly... know. Life would be so much easier if that were the case.

Also the rest of this week involves security guards watching them fuck in an elevator. Let me clarify this: they start fucking in an elevator at which security guards monitoring the elevator via security camera stop the elevator between floors, trapping them in the elevator. Two security guards literally make popcorn and watch them fucking. When their supervisor walks past she joins the security guards in watching two people, who they've trapped in an elevator, fucking.


7-26-2019

I don't know why she'd need to tell him "right after the recital" unless she didn't want to bum him out before the recital. Maybe her period JUST started? Either way this is an incredibly difficult thing to deal with and speaking as someone who's grappled with infertility... it really can be hard to bear up under the repeated disappointment. Every month there's the potential, the possibility, the chance to fall in love with something that might not happen. McEldowney doesn't get into it (thankfully) but apparently she's just not getting pregnant as opposed to having miscarriages.

They both go to their respective doctors and get deemed super fertile. Which isn't how it works and is a really abrupt resolution to what had the potential to be an interesting and touching story line - which frankly is a hallmark of this strip. Any time there's some sort of actual conflict or chance to develop a character McEldowney veers quickly to the side to get his characters back to fucking in a tub or on top of a diner table or on a city sidewalk or something.

She gets pregnant literally immediately afterward. There's no more upset or concern or stress. We, the audience, don't even get to see her and Amos realize it and celebrate. She's just suddenly puking and then at the doctor's office. NB: in Chicago unless you're very high risk doctors won't see you until you're at least 8 weeks along. At least that's how it was with my pregnancies.

It is, of course, twins and they are the most dramatic form of twins possible: Monoamniotic twins. McEldowney spins this as not only dangerous to the twins but somehow dangerous to Edda and at one point she responds to her gravid belly that she won't let anything happen to them, she won't make THAT choice. The implication is that someone at some point mentioned a selective or complete abortion and by golly she just won't do it! It comes out of nowhere, there's no lead up to it, and is from the same guy who has Straw Feminist Abortion-Pushers.

Edda actually being pregnant involves multiple weeks of Amos penning letters to his unborn child/ren about how sexy Edda is as well as a lot of flashbacks to them being small children and talking about having babies/conceiving babies.

Edda, of course, goes on bed rest in the hospital and has a C-Section which is MAJOR abdominal surgery. They literally remove multiple organs before replacing them. A few days later she's in her ballet togs in the NICU dancing.


11-19-2022

Lately McEldowney has been dragging on a months-long tease involving flashbacks to Young Edda And Young Amos Discussing Conceiving Children so we might find out that she's pregnant again in a year or two real-time despite their discussing Amos getting a vasectomy.

Edda becoming pregnant was A Very Big Deal.

There was a lot of lead up to it, and McEldowney obviously started thinking about it back in 2012. Having kids is a big thing for both Edda and Amos. But their journey to conception was entirely about mad fuckin', no actual details about charting ovulation or altering diet or switching up what kind of underpants Amos should wear.

Once she got pregnant there was no actual discussion of parenting or decorating a nursery (or co-sleeping, which is part of parenting). There was no baby shower, none of their friends made a fuss over her. Seth visited her in the hospital and told her how sexy her legs were. That's about it.

Once the infants were born there was absolutely no exploration at all of what it's like having premature twins in the NICU: having such small, fragile babies; having to leave them there and go home without them. We haven't seen Edda or Amos interact very much with their children. They don't read to them or play music with/to them or play with toys with them. Edda and Amos spend a lot of time at the pond at Edda's mom's place, at various swimming pools, and at the beach, as well as at a playground with swings. Their daughters are rarely shown with them. They're like terribly-drawn accessories.

They don't have any parent friends. Their kids don't interact with other kids. Edda doesn't have siblings, but she has cousins. Are any of them grown? Do they have kids that her daughters play with? What about Diane's kids? What about school? Are the girls in school? Or in day care? Or in any sort of classes? Do they have friends of her own? They exist fleetingly to talk about their mom's tits, or how much hotter she is than other adult women they know, or to comment on the sex lives of those around them. They're like a Greek chorus but really pervy and also intensely creepy and wrong-feeling because they're kids somewhere between the ages of four and eight.

Edda's body has changed drastically since her ballet and modeling days, too. Aging does that, no longer being a professional dancer does that, and pregnancy really does that. Being pregnant absolutely fucks you up: it can leave you with a broader rib cage and larger feet. It fucks up your abdominal muscles, as well as your pelvic floor. It can jack up your back. Your body never really goes back to the way it was pre-pregnancy. And this would be SO interesting to see! How does Edda feel about this? What does she do to cope? We see her dancing, still. We've seen her passed out on the floor after dancing (which nobody in-strip sees as an issue?). She apparently plays piano professionally and accompanies ballet classes. What does it feel like to WATCH dancers but not DANCE? How does she feel about Seth, who's still dancing?

Speaking of Seth, ballet dancers, and homophobic assholes who somehow manage to turn gay men straight, how does Fernanda feel about no longer being able to dance due to a knee injury?

Edda and Amos are both professional artists. He's a cellist who also plays piano. She's a pianist who worked as a professional dancer (and model) and is also an excellent illustrator/cartoonist. She most likely sings, as well. How aggressively do they steer their daughters toward the arts? We've seen flash-forwards of their feral daughters both playing piano and dancing ballet. Is that their choice? Do they love it? How strict are Amos and Edda? How do they interact with the parents of other Art Kids? What happens if the kids have other interests... what if they want to play oboe instead of a stringed instrument? Or drums? What if they choose tap dance or Irish dance over ballet? What if all they want to do is study physics?

We'll never know any of this as long as there's new places for McEldowney to depict his characters fucking. Or the same old places. Yeah, that'll do too.

I don't understand why you'd add children to a strip and then do nothing with them... unless the entire POINT isn't the kids, it's the conception/pregnancy.