Mothering
This article first appeared in the Minden Times in May 2024.
Being a mother is hard work; being a good one is almost an act of god. Being a mother often comes with being a daughter and a wife, each of which can also be hard work.
A delightful black-and-white film called C’mon C’mon (available on Gem for free or elsewhere for fee) captures all the elements of this big job. Bachelor Johnny (played with nuance by Joaquin Phoenix) steps in for a few days to care for 9-year-old Jesse (Woody Norman) while his mom Viv (Gaby Hoffman) heads out for a few days, which of course becomes longer, to settle her husband Paul into his new job and home in a nearby city. Paul has bipolar, Viv teaches writing at university, Johnny interviews kids in Detroit, New York and New Orleans about what they think of life, and Jesse does…hmm the mystery of being 9. By the end of this journey, which does as good a job as anything I’ve seen or read recently of exploring the agony and ecstasy of family relationships, Johnny and Viv can have a meeting of mind and heart over a visit gone wrong that caused a year of estrangement. Johnny, who didn’t know then what he knows now, can properly apologize for criticizing how Viv cared for their mom as she died of dementia, and giving unsolicited advice about dumping her husband because of his crazy behaviour.
Nothing much left out, is there? The title derives from Jesse interviewing himself on his uncle’s equipment, asking himself what he wants from life. Jesse brings the searing intelligence and candor he’s displayed in various ways, not all charming, to this question. He concludes things don’t always work out as planned, and you gotta just C’mon C’mon, a phrase that has been used with every possible emotional cadence in the course of the movie.
Of course life doesn’t deliver as planned and of course we manage by putting one foot in front of the other as best we can. That pretty much sums up mothering as well. Johnny is humbled by his brief encounter with mothering; Viv is a steeped in humility and eloquent about the day-to-day of C’mon C’mon. Watch and wonder. Do the best you can. Forgive yourself and others. Find joy and beauty whenever and wherever. Celebrate every good thing. Open yourself to the experience of loving others: it will wound you grievously, but also infuse you with a richness of heart and soul not otherwise available.
Gem also has on offer three other films about mothering. Unless is based on Carol Shield’s book about a daughter who inexplicably drops out of university to sit mutely outside Honest Ed’s with a sign that says ‘Goodness’. She won’t return to the bosom of her family so they go to her. They sit with her until she has digested the incident that stole her words and her will to live ‘normally’.
Trouble in the Garden follows a young Indigenous woman who is arrested while protesting the theft of native land in Caledon. She is bailed out by her long-estranged brother, a real estate agent who is selling that land to, among others, their parents. She is a Sixties Scoop adoptee whose birth story was left outside the home, with – in hindsight – predictable consequences. There are several variations of mothering in this movie: the adoptive mom who did as she was instructed, the birth mother whose daughter was wrested from her, the sister-in-law pregnant with her second child in an apparently text-book suburban life, and another more shocking variation that I will not divulge because it resonates only in context.
All the mothers (including Johnny) in these movies were well resourced, solidly middle-class people. In Scarborough we see how the hard job of mothering becomes ever more difficult in the face of prejudice and its predictable offspring – poverty, lack of access to resources, illness. All the badly behaving people in the film are white. They are not necessarily privileged in an economic sense -- although some are, but so are some of the racialized people – but merely by the colour of their skin. This makes the movie clunky but sends a strong message about social inclusion. The angriest and saddest people in the movie are white people who are marginalized. People of colour understand that they miss the mainstream because of something out of their control, and they find community in that shared exclusion. But white people have no one to blame but themselves, which tends to make them look for scapegoats. I don’t think the truth is this black and white, but sometimes nuance fails to convict.
Four takes on mothering. What do we learn? It is never easy. It lasts a lifetime. It is best done in community. It is incredibly essential to the well-being of the whole. Let’s valorize mothering.
