I almost didn’t recognize Amy Adams in Nightbitch. (Aside: It’s startling how ordinary celebrities look with some extra weight, no makeup, and regular clothes. They’re just ordinary people snazzied up with physical trainers, makeup artists, and a personal stylist. I wonder what I would look like with a physical trainer, makeup artist, and a personal stylist . . . . I would look fucking amazing. Yup. Fucking amazing.)
Amy plays a new mother, two years into matrescence. You don’t know what matrescence is? I wrote about it here. There’s a very satisfying montage of the monotony of stay-at-home motherhood right near the beginning. The mind numbing, mind dumbing routine of Amy’s life as a mom starts with her dropping a pad of butter into a cast iron skillet and proceeding to cook 3 frozen hashbrowns, 2 for her and 1 for her toddler, over and over again. She does this a thousand times. Every morning, this is what they eat. It repeats in a loop so you don’t know anymore where it starts or ends. Maybe it starts with eating the hashbrowns and ending with the pad of butter.
I have to admit I thought the hashbrowns cooked with butter in a cast iron skillet was kind of highfalutin. (Aside: I watched Anne of Green Gables (1985) and the Sequel with my mom recently. Do you remember that movie? Highfalutin mumbo jumbo, said Gilbert.) What kind of exhausted mom can be bothered with a cast iron skillet? Am i supposed to believe she cleans it and seasons it every single day? And hashbrowns every day? Wouldn’t toast be easier? Or frozen waffles?
And then I remembered.
I remembered me when my first was around 2. And 1, and 3, and 4. You can’t imagine alternatives. You don’t have the energy to turn on your imagination machine, that fleshy, mass inside your skull. Probably looked like apple sauce if I’d had the guts to crack it open and look inside. You’re dumb as a door knob. Amy’s dumb in the same way. I remember feeling like I was without anything resembling creativity inside me.
Amy got stuck in the soul sucking diurnal loop of living day and night with a toddler with the cast iron skillet, butter, and frozen hashbrowns. One day, for reasons that escape her, she reached for it, and then she couldn’t stop, because she could no longer think to reach for something else come breakfast.
To make a sad situation truly depressing as fuck, she doesn’t even sit in a normal sized chair at a normal height dining table during meals. Not ever. She eats all her meals and drinks her wine, balancing her sits bones on a toddler chair, her knees soaring up past the table surface. Her life, even her meals, are brought down to the level of her child every single day.
When bedtime rolls around and she tells us about how she fucked up by not sleep training her kid, I laughed out loud. I will regret sleep training my kids for the rest of my life. She will regret not sleep training her kid for the rest of her life. Both of us, all of us, think we fucked up our babies for doing the very thing other moms wish they’d done.
Why couldn’t we have loved our babies better from the start? we lament. It’s the question all mothers wrestle with for the rest of their lives. Tell me it isn’t true.
This is how the marathon of forever trying to catch up to our love of our children begins. We feel we are constantly behind, chasing our love that is always just out of reach, never feeling like we have it in hand, never feeling like we love them enough.
I watched Amy in moments of attunement with her son, and I couldn’t help but wonder what I looked like in those brief and too infrequent moments when I thought I was a good mom. Did I get it right? Did I read my kid right and respond right?
The finger painting scene. OMG. I did the exact same thing with Henry at least a dozen times. Why is she doing that? I groan as I see myself in the scene. At least Amy learns the first time and never tries it again. But not me. I tried it again and again, hoping for some different outcome with Henry, an outcome that wasn’t just a toddler having fun making a mess.
When Amy sits at the library sing along, I saw myself back in the day feeling snobby and standoffish. I, too, was the mother who thought she was too good a writer to be at a library singalong for toddlers and could barely keep from rolling my eyes, bored out of my mind. I wondered how the other moms could be so into it, so into their kids, singing along and clapping. But then again, I was great at pretending. I looked just like them because I made sure of it. I wanted to look like a good mom. And the last thing I wanted was to draw attention to my disengagement deep down in my adult writer soul.
So far so good. The film was capturing much of full time motherhood perfectly.
***
Also perfectly accurate:
-Feeling like an ungrateful, angry cunt for resenting motherhood.
-Never wanting sex.
-Thinking I disliked other mothers, but finding great friends among them. (Aside: Misogyny is spoon fed to every last one of us from our crib to our baby’s crib. And yet in the face of womanhood and later motherhood, hating women doesn’t stand a chance against the reality of women. The most incredible people I know are women and mothers. Every last one of them. Misogyny becomes ash when you actually get to know a woman as a human being.)
-Wanting to kill something. Feeling homicidal too often for it to be normal.
-Eating way too much box mac and cheese.
-Trying to delude herself into thinking that being consistently present for her child would be enough for her.
-Feeling that being an artist (in my case a writer) was a silly dream.
-Watching the husband leave for the work week and feeling the most intense envy at the consecutive nights of uninterrupted sleep he would get.
-The bullshit garbage mothers are expected to say to other mothers/women about motherhood. How mothers say the bullshit garbage knowing it’s bullshit garbage. Why do we do this? I never agreed to wear a muzzle or ask another mother to muzzle herself. Patriarchy did this. Fuck patriarchy. Amy calls it when she says, Men must be terrified of us. So they muzzle us. And then we muzzle each other. Fuck patriarchy.
-How unforgiving mothers are to each other who show the slightest sign of struggle in public with their kids. Again, fuck patriarchy.
***
Then, like all the other narratives about successful motherhood in popular culture, the film fails to save motherhood out of the swamp of patriarchy.
Amy’s motherhood is rescued only by having her separate from her husband and her child (on weekends). The absence of her family is the only way for her to crawl out of that swamp that is dissolving her sense of self and return her to her “true” self inside her studio. Creativity/autonomy/freedom and motherhood/dependency/responsibility are strict dichotomies. They can’t coexist in the socioeconomic suburban environment that Amy is embedded in.
The solution to the deadening effect of motherhood is to relinquish motherhood. Even if it’s just on weekends.
This is not to suggest that I am critical of this solution or have an alternative. I, too, don’t know any other way for an artist to create than to widen the distance between herself and her children regularly.
Sure, it’s dynamic, the distance. You get close, you get far. You swing between cuddles and goodbyes. And in the absence of the other, a woman can be with her imagination and paint or write or sculpt or whatever.
That’s the only way I know how to write. Even with the door closed in my office, I cannot sufficiently ignore the nervous systems of my children moving around the house to orient mine entirely to my writing. They have to be off the reservation entirely for my body and mind to turn its attention to itself completely.
But is getting away from the kids the only way to be creative if you are a mother? Is getting away from the kids the only way to become fully human again?
***
In the movie, it is only when Amy she manifests her artistic power in the world with an immersive art show that her husband recognizes her as a complete human being. It is only when Amy proves her ability to create value that is valued by society that her husband respects her, that her graduate school friends respect her. Raising a child devalues her in their eyes. Even in her eyes. But making paintings gives her value as far as everyone is concerned.
(Aside: It was a brilliant and necessary feat of imagination by the director to have an art show displaying Amy’s art. As a rule, if you have an artist in a movie, you must eventually show the reader/viewer the artist at work and then show us the art–play the music, hang the paintings, narrate excerpts from the manuscript. If the screenwriter or director fails to provide the incontrovertible evidence of the art on screen, the film, including the characters, become suspect. The movie falls flat. If you’re interested, the actual artist who created the painting for the movie is Junyi Liu, a Chinese painter based in NYC. She’s fucking amazing.)
Unlike the characters in the film, I identified Amy as a complete human from the opening scene. Perhaps this is the privileged perspective afforded by my being a mother, too, who not only struggled with the loss of her identity, but recently discovered that only I get to define my worth. Seeing Amy’s incredible paintings and the striking installation piece did not surprise me. The art was stunning, but it wasn’t a moment of humanization of Amy. The show didn’t make her worthy and valuable. She was already all of that from the first scene as far as I was concerned.
But it seemed neither the writer of the book/screenplay nor the director nor even Amy felt this way. I don’t think most audiences could take her seriously either–they are like her graduate school friends, like her husband, like her mommy friends–without the art show at the end. Even the mother friends Amy makes are initially friendly to Amy because of the her art career before motherhood. Although they are far more accepting of Amy as she is than anyone else around her.
The point is the standard of a complete human being, unchallenged by the movie, must include being a mother and having a successful career. The standard is, instead, exemplified.
Does it have to be like this? Can a woman be a whole and powerful just being a mother?
***
Probably not. At least not in a world that is ruled by the power structures informed by sexism and capitalism and racism. Until motherhood and caregiving is extolled as one of the greatest and gravest of responsibilities, until mothers are supported financially as a matter of course and invested in generously by the community/government, until women are treated with the same respect as men, the sexist and capitalist standards of human value will remain in tact, and the standard will rule our the valuation of motherhood.
This is why the ending was so unsatisfying for me. The solution to the difficulties and complexities of motherhood provided by the film was limited, ordinary. So very acceptable.
I think the secret solution that could address the problem of motherhood in a more nuanced, iconoclastic, feminist, innovative way lies in the Amy who acts like a dog.
Amy only really enjoys motherhood in the film when she begins to embrace her animal impulses, her feral, embodied, instinctual self. She engages in play with her son around the reality of her metamorphosing body and she shares her creative expressions of this metamorphosis with her son. The scenes where she pretends with her son to be dogs is when she fully comes into motherhood, when she doesn’t isolate mothering from her imagination.
These scenes, unfortunately and disloyally, are framed by the script and the director as a woman sliding into insanity. They leave both the audience and the extras around Amy deeply uncomfortable, alarmed actually. It’s madness, is the stance the movie takes to Amy’s fusion of motherhood and creativity. You see it in the faces of the people at the Whole Foods food court when she shoves her maw into meatloaf. You see it in the husband’s face when he’s told that his son eats from a doggy bowl. You see it in her face when she finds her dead cat.
The dead cat was particularly pointed in the film’s denial of the possibility of motherhood itself as art. The movie suggests by the destruction of the cat that motherhood and creativity is not just incompatible as I already elucidated above, but that it is destructive and dangerous.
I don’t agree. I don’t disagree either. I don’t know.
But I feel like the true solution to modern motherhood is found in those scenes of Amy being a dog with her so. The truth is in the fully invested, attuned presence of the mother and child in the creative play she summons with him, together.
This is so different than the solution of leaning into the career by leaning away from the child.
I don’t know. I don’t have any answers. I just feel like the equation presented in the movie is not just banal, but wrong, not that I have any idea where the fix is needed. I wish the movie had shown me the fix.
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