Last night we watched If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, an A24 film written and directed by Mary Bronstein. It seemed, from the trailer at least, to be a psychological drama about parenting a disabled child, told from the perspective of the mother. What it was though, was a surreal Lynchian dread movie with smatterings of Aronofsky's Mother!, a dash of Beau Is Afraid, and the paranoid, claustrophobic angles of Polanski's Repulsion. The film is semi-autobiographical, based on real events spanning an 8-month period in a San Diego hotel where she took care of her sick child. We were not prepared for the two hour stress fest that was to ensue. But the real star wasn't the impeccable performance from Rose Byrne, or the cinematography, but the sound design. I wish I'd seen the movie in theaters. We did manage to get close, watching it on the big screen here on the farm, with an overhead projector and a sound system, but this is no substitute for a full theater experience. Apparently they recorded the music for directional speakers, which provide a thoroughly immersive sound. As it was, the film was immersive enough, but I do hope one day to re-experience the psychological drama as it was intended to be seen.
This morning, after feeding the chickens and collecting firewood I had to tend to a power outage in the water supply room. Outside the wind is howling. When it gets that windy up here in the mountains, we lose power. Fiddling with the fusebox bought us a renewed supply of electricity, but I had to leave one set of switches in the down position to get the power to stay on. Part of me fears those switches are responsible for something essential. A message has been sent to our honeymooning friends in Thailand. Hopefully they see it soon. The responsibility of caring for another person's home is a big one, and fears can easily begin to swirl and gust through the bare branches of my synapses. Or is it dendrites? Or both...
Speaking of fears, I've come to realize I have deep fears about having children. Not inspired by the movie, of course, but the movie did help surface some of them. If caring for someone else's home can cause fears to balloon, I shudder to think of what caring for the life of a small vulnerable human could inspire. Images of abduction, molestation, accidents resulting in death, dismemberment and deformity dance in my head. And none of that is to imagine the possibility of a child born with an incurable or untreatable illness, disease or disability. Then there's the inevitable parenting mistakes that are bound to happen; the wounds and traumas and scars. It's a nonstop, 24/7 lifelong commitment to pain and suffering. Joy and elation and learning and satisfaction, too, I'm sure...but those other parts, those haunted parts, prowl through the dark alleys of my mind. On one hand I accept it. I know those things are part of the exclusive package deal, but part of me wonders if that's a deal I'm actually interested in. There was a line from the movie where Rose Byrne's character Linda says something like, "maybe I'm a person who is not supposed to be a mom; not everyone can do it."
Maybe not everyone should.
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