TalKing of the Hill - Peggy Hill: The Decline and Fall
Added 2024-12-16 05:00:03 +0000 UTCAs 2024 comes to an end, our coverage of season four begins! This month, we catch up with Peggy after her (SPOILERS) non-fatal skydiving accident, and slowly watch her ego crumble under the weight of a full body cast. Meanwhile, Bobby finds himself playing caretaker for a new baby thanks to Cotton's bad dad ways and Didi's postpartum depression. Will these two plots merge together in an emotionally satisfying finale? Well, this is King of the Hill, so you better believe they do!
Comments
I'm fortunate in that I have employer-sponsored healthcare and had it when my kids were born. I don't think I paid anything out of pocket related to the birth of my kids. Even so, it's darkly amusing to get that itemized receipt and see how much money it cost and the stuff the hospital bills insurance for. It's just such a massive scam perpetrated between healthcare providers and insurance. It actually cost me way more to get a surgical procedure to make sure I don't have any more kids than it did for me to have two kids. The best analogy I have for postpartum is actually topical in that it's kind of like Christmas. There's a lot of excitement and anxiety built up as it arrives, and then an emotional crash. I don't think there's any way to predict how it will impact new parents, or even repeat parents (that second kid is arguably more disruptive than the first because you don't realize how routine-oriented you become with a young kid), and there's no way to really prevent it. Both parents need a plan on how to deal with it going in and be on the lookout foy symptoms in themself and their partner. Sleep deprivation can certainly be a contributor an the best advice I received and pass on is to alternate nights for those wake-ups and night feedings. That way you can count on getting a solid night's sleep at least every other night. It sucks when you get that one night when the kid seems inconsolable or wide awake at 3 in the morning, but at least it's temporary.
Joe Hodgson
2024-12-19 20:48:14 +0000 UTCI’m sorry you had such a hard time with ppd, happy to hear you’re doing better
Anna Mansager
2024-12-19 18:01:51 +0000 UTCPeggy surviving would be mentioned by everyone for the rest of her life. I know this because my mom’s friend was using the bathroom, and she gave birth. This was over 50 years ago, and everyone still knows her as “Name Redacted, who had the baby on the toilet”
TJ Gaines
2024-12-18 20:47:59 +0000 UTCTexans are also particularly judgmental whenever it comes to eating beef. They are seen as a beef eating/cattle raising state, so they are really big on eating beef rare. Theyll say "that cow should still be mooing." Asking for well done steak in Texas would be a hate crime. Now they will cook the hell out of pork and chicken cause the USDA always had very high Temps for killing all the bacteria out of their meat.
SilkiePJ
2024-12-17 15:57:15 +0000 UTCSorry for the long comment
Byron Lagrone
2024-12-17 15:32:44 +0000 UTCPost-partum is a thorny beast and I'd like to talk about it here. background: During the birth of our first child in early 2014, my wife and I both went through PPD and the support network was about as you'd expect; I got a lot of bad advice and so did she, and we also weren't in a position to seek out therapy. I am glad that we happened to make it through that time but I also feel that a lot of it was sheer unadulterated luck. Crucial components of our consensual decision to have a second child in 2022 were our past experiences and getting therapy/diagnoses/meds when those became available to us. bad advice we received (paraphrased): - You are the oldest child and took care of your younger siblings, so you should have no problem with a baby! You are depressed for other reasons! - Therapy is for quitters/losers/alcoholics - Take refuge in catholicism [or your religion of choice]! - You already went through grief when a sibling died, so obviously you can't be feeling the same things again about a new baby. That would be ridiculous! - We can help with a newborn! (people that say this are well-meaning but it is unlikely that they are able to do this) - You have to go back to work right away to afford rent/food/power (we both did and it was awful; getting that advice from someone you trusted makes it a lot worse) the advice I can give (with the obvious caveat that this is my experience and All Babies Are Different): - first and foremost anyone and everyone can get depression. It is not a personal failing and it is generally unreasonable in all senses of the word. - Sleep deprivation is unavoidable and can make anyone's behavior unpredictable. - Planning for it can only get you so far; ahead of time I thought "I will use books and video games to get through any hard times" and the depression said "so much as looking at a book or video game during this time will make you feel exhausted, joyless, and useless"; that's not to say don't surround yourself with happy things, but to expect your particular thing you find that brings you joy to be something (maybe) unexpected*. only tangentially depression related: If you have a way to get them, and can forgive this flattening of an expression, the most important items to have in your inventory during the boss fight of your life are: close friends/everyone's therapy/everyone's meds and/or psychiatrists/diapers/wipes. These are in no particular order. If you don't read all this but want to ask me about post-partum depression (or US healthcare, an industry I have worked in since 2010) you can find me on bsky @byronic.bsky.social or mastodon @level2wizard@mastodon.social * in my case, and to my eternal shame, it was going to a taco bell and getting three crunchy tacos and a Dr Pepper.
Byron Lagrone
2024-12-17 15:32:06 +0000 UTCBesides the two people surviving chute failures that Henry mentioned, there was also Victoria Cilliers, a sky diver whose chute failed to deploy properly because her husband tampered with it in hopes of killing her. She survived because she fell back first into a freshly plowed field that was soft — just like Peggy!
Anna Mansager
2024-12-17 11:30:08 +0000 UTCSmall correction Henry, it's Movie Madness not Maniacs but yes, an amazing place.
littleterr0r
2024-12-17 00:26:25 +0000 UTCAnd in response to a guy bad-mouthing his wife, Bill embraced crime paranoia and neo-slavery
wildlandblazer
2024-12-16 19:59:39 +0000 UTCSomething that I’m focusing on a lot more this watch is DeeDees postpartum depression There’s been a lot of conversation about that lately and I’ve been doing a lot of reading and listening to a lot of other women and mothers on podcasts talk about their experience and specifically about how we focus on the child way more than the mother I really believe the king of the hill is aware of this Because when Peggy is being told of DeeDee’s condition and that she has postpartum Peggy is immediate concern is for the “ poor baby” And my immediate thought was “ that baby’s gonna be fine it’s in the hospital full of doctors and nurses and grandparents and uncles and aunts Nobody’s there for DeeDee When Peggy started saying “that poor…” I finished it in my head with DeeDee’s name and then Peggy shocked me Just some of that great social commentary that can be inserted into a show in such a subtle way
Tyler the Destroyer
2024-12-16 19:05:44 +0000 UTCIf we’re talking about healthcare in the Clinton years, seems relevant to call out that Hillary was put in the center of a push to expand healthcare rights and access to more Americans. A Dark Avengers of Republicans, libertarians, and the health insurance industry was assembled by Newt Gingrich to vilify the plan and Hillary by extension. In addition to tanking health care reform for over a decade, this planted the seeds for a large scale, Right Wing vendetta against Hilary and helped create the perception that she was “widely unpopular” (even as she received more votes than nearly anyone who’d ever run for the White House). Clinton years sucked for a lot of reasons, but it’s more accurate IMO to call them the Clinton-Gingrich years. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_health_care_plan_of_1993
John Halski
2024-12-16 16:38:37 +0000 UTCQuick note: We know from a couple episodes Hank does prefer medium rare steaks and burgers. I can't recall the episode, but when he's talking to Bobby about grilling meat and how to know the difference between medium-rare and medium, Bobby asks what they should do if someone asks for it well-done, and Hank says, "We politely, but firmly, ask them to leave." And in the trans-fat episode, Hank and Buck's food truck proudly serves rare hamburgers, even.
Andrew Bouvier
2024-12-16 16:08:03 +0000 UTCThe guys talking about the healthcare jokes in this episode. Oh if they only could have known just how relevant this subject would become very, very shortly!
Saya Clarke
2024-12-16 13:53:46 +0000 UTCI think the Helen Keller line was Hank mixing her up with Helen Hayes, the First Lady of American Theater. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Hayes Hank has sort of a recurring gag of him not quite remembering showbiz stuff, like when he said Weird Al killed himself in the '80s, but that was a different parody singer, Dickie Goodman.
Echo Cimarron
2024-12-16 13:02:33 +0000 UTCHank looks like such a creep in that screen shot.
Andrew Yeager
2024-12-16 12:47:47 +0000 UTC
