2010, Samantha Stevens Style

Season 2 of "Bewitched" is now available on DVD at our local video store. I rented it because I knew that my kids and their developmentally disabled aunt would enjoy watching it during her recent holiday visit. Maybe I was hankering for a little magic in my life, too.

Five minutes into the first episode, I was conjuring a Woman UP post comparing "Bewitched" to "Mad Men," both set in the 1960s, commuting distance from Madison Avenue. The shows feature brainy, shirt-waisted blondes married to advertising executives who must endure boozy, boorish, cigar smoking, white-haired bosses. Between Samantha's nose wiggling, and Joan Holloway's stellar executive functioning skills, it's obvious which gender steers the programs' respective ships.

Donna, Christine, Mary, and Bonnie have well addressed the spoils of the Steinem battles in nuanced posts that convey the hope in Samantha Stevens' twinkle and the disappointment in Betty Draper's deep sighs. Listening to my sister-in-law belly-laugh at Tabitha's ability to float her favorite stuffed animal into her crib reminded me of a 2009 Woman UP post that hit close to home.

Last fall, Bonnie wrote of the shocking rise of young people diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorders. More than half a million young people already diagnosed will soon enter the age of adulthood. Will they function like the characters featured in films like "Rainman" and "Adam," or television shows like "Big Bang Theory?" What will adulthood look like for these kids? Due to my mother-in-law's recent sudden death, at some point in 2010, we will move my sister-in-law to live closer to us, and I will have more detailed answers to this question.

After a few hours of giggling at Samantha Stevens' shenanigans, my sister-in-law, an expert on sitcoms, explained to my children the distinction between a warlock and a mortal. My kids accept her ability to recite jingles from old television commercials, her accurate mental record of the birthdays of every nuclear and extended family member, her inability to modulate her voice, and her tendency to perseverate (repeat something insistently) when she's nervous. She speaks openly about her pervasive developmental disorder (PDD), calling it her "special source."

For my husband, the reality of adding a new responsibility to our jam-packed, post-modern lives, is cloaked in the gauzy grief of having just become an orphan and the endless minutiae entailed with saying goodbye to his parents' house, his hometown, and his childhood.

The morning my sister-in-law was scheduled to fly home, I turned on the final episode of Season 2 and she curled up on the couch, sandwiched between her neiphes (her composite word for niece and nephew), my little boy's leg slung over hers. I tried to wiggle my nose, not to cast a spell that would remove the challenges of our new family arrangement, but to grant myself the goods to make it magical.