Mother and Child is a film not be be missed, though critics overlooked

Lorraine

The last batch of comments on the previous blog (Practice Babies: Unnatural Mothering) rapidly degenerated into snarky lobs across the net--are we no better than the discourse between the opposite political factions in this country? Apparently not. I admit a bias: I side with the folks who say: you can have your "expert" opinion, you might be better read (of those self-same experts) but those authorities do not know how I feel. They do not speak for me. And this is how I feel.

What I'm sorry about is that so many negative comments were posted, and I posted them. It's hard to decide when the first one ought not to be posted, because the two sides reflect opposing kinds of discourse: one is "I feel this way," and the other side says, "The experts say" you don't, and everybody gets riled up. I was particularly disappointed with the whole business when one commentator (apparently a first mother) wrote and said that she no longer will use her name, but only  post under the veil of "Anonymous."

'Nuff said.

So, let's go to the movies, given these weeks of awards, award shows, fashion shows based on award shows, and some of us (that would include me) trying to squeeze in all the award-winning movies in order to have an opinion (I love film) before the next award show...which brings me to Mother and Child*-- which is not winning any awards but should be. It's a movie I missed during the one week it played out here at the end of Long Island. I had to wait until it came out in video recently, and then I happily heard that it made at least one critic's best of the year list, David Edlestein of New York magazine and NPR, and hope that gives it at least spurt of viewers.  Everyone with even the slimmest of connection to adoption ought to see it. Juno it's not.

It's a movie about us:  We birth/first/call-us-what-you-will mothers who lost our children to adoption.

Mother and Child,the very title evoking the Mother Mary and Christ child, is about the damage relinquishing a child does to us, not just for a year, but for our entire lives. That emotional hole in our heart is seen clearly in the character of Karen (Annette Bening), now a seemingly childless grownup woman, a physical therapist at a home for the elderly, who clearly has never gotten over giving up her child. Karen is emotionally flat except when she displays an unnatural dislike of her housekeeper's daughter, who obviously reminds of of what she has lost: her own daughter. Karen was forced to give her up when she was 14 by her now elderly and obviously dying mother she cares for with barely concealed rage.

Yeah, it's painful because it takes us back to when, no matter the circumstances.

Karen's baby grows up to be a brittle, bright and ambitious young lawyer, Elizabeth (Naomi Watts) who seems to have a steel plate where most have hearts. She lives and breathes: attachment issues, comittment issues. Like some adoptees we know. She doesn't want to search because her mother could have, right? So why didn't she? I hear that comment from both sides of the fence, and it's especially poignant when someone searches (as in Jean Strauss's film, Adopted: For the Life of Me) and hears that the search comes too late, the one searched for has died, and would have welcomed the other person...but did not seek out the other because she felt she did not have the right.

When Elizabeth get pregnant by her boss, Paul (Samuel L. Jackson), a widower, she will not even tell him he is the father, though he is willing to be more than the sperm donor, to be a father, in deed as well as biology.

And of course, there is the story of a couple looking to adopt, and seem to have found a willing young woman to give them her baby, but lord, was I cheering hard when the smart-talking young woman, who doesn't want to be like her mother--a single struggling mother--but (spoiler alert) thank god at the last moment changes her mind and takes home her baby. The director, Rodrigo Garcia, uses this moment in the hospital to show us the intense, immediate grief of the would-be adopting mother when Ray (Shareeka Epps) decides to take her baby home. Then all hell breaks loose in the hospital corridor. It works in the film but I couldn't think of scene in any film where the women who is giving up her child has ever been allowed to carry on. No, that would be too much, right? We are not allowed to show that much emotion. Please point out any film that I'm missing where this is shown.

There were many personal touchstones for me: Bening getting in the car of her suitor, Jimmy Smits, and telling him what's wrong with her: that she gave up her daughter. She is damaged goods, in other words. I told my first husband when we were driving to a restaurant on top of a mountain in Altamont, New York, the historic Altamont Inn. He said, Why don't we get married...and I knew I had to tell him on the spot, right then and there. Not even wait until we got to the restaurant. Not say yes until I told him. He had to know first. I remember looking out the window and not answering for a few long seconds before I mentally gulped and found the words to tell him about my daughter. Watching Bening dole out the same news took me back to when I had to make that very same confession.

There's' more to the story but I assume that most of the readers here are going to see the movie. It has a somewhat happy ending, just as does my own person saga, for a year ago I found my granddaughter, also of mixed race, that my own daughter gave up for adoption in 1986. That has been nothing short of joyful, and the movie ends with the same up note, as Bening is able to get to know her granddaughter...as Elizabeth dies in childbirth, a letter is misplaced so theirs is not reunion, and the child ends up with the woman who lost out on the other. Okay, a bit of a plot device, but I did not care, and weirder things have happened in life.

Bening won a Golden Globe last night for The Kids are All Right, which also dealt with identity issues (and more about that tomorrow(, which is fine, but her performance in Mother and Child was overlooked because the movie itself was a bust at the box office and overlooked by the majority of critics. Naomi Watts does a great job also as the cool, emotionally distant adoptee. Yet that Mother and Child was made at all is a great leap forward for first mothers because the film acknowledges our pain, and that time does not heal all wounds. A great many of us end up depressed and sorrowful all of our lives. Last week I came across this: 

“While only an insignificant proportion of birth mothers had been diagnosed with a mental health problem before adoption (three percent), in the time between the parting and contact, 24 percent had psychiatric diagnosis mainly for depression, with half of them having inpatient treatment."**

This is from the most comprehensive follow-up survey of first mothers after surrender, one done published by the British Association for Adoption and Fostering, the leading UK-wide membership organization for all those concerned with adoption, fostering and child care issues. 

Thank you, Rodrigo Garcia, Annette Bening, Naomi Watts, Samuel Jackson and others. You made a movie that tells the world that for those of us who surrender our children, for the children we surrender, adoption always begins with a personal catastrophe. --lorraine

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* See Jane's review and reaction: The Movie: Mother and Child packs a wallop

** Triseliotis, John, Julia Feast, & Fiona Kyle, The Adoption Triangle Revisited (2005), p. 91.