On Sunday morning, after a Saturday spent vomiting (him) and cleaning up vomit (me), my eight-year-old son walks into my room and says, “Are you right-handed or left-handed?” Right-handed, I tell him. “You’ll live fifteen years longer than a left-handed woman,” he says, walking back out of the room. He seems totally recovered.
I try to rouse myself. Despite having fallen asleep when Elias did last night, I’m worn out. I don’t know if I’m sick or just spent, but I could use a day in bed. Elias walks back into the room to lie down and cuddle while he encourages me to get out of bed. The cat comes and lies down on the other side of me. “Two small creatures,” I say. “I’m surrounded by small creatures!”
“Well, two that you can see,” E remarks. I feel a small internal jolt, and I look back toward the doorway, where E’s gaze has landed. I think he’s hearkening back to his uncanny preschool days, when he knew he could get my attention by commenting on the unseen entities apparently surrounding us. (“Don’t sit there, Mommy. That is Robert’s seat.” “Who is Robert?” “A grownup who lives here.”) But then he just says, “You’re also surrounded by millions of microorganisms you can’t see.”
“Do cats have sentience?” he asks. I tell him, yes, but not human sentience. “What if they had human sentience?” he wonders. We talk about how strange that would be. Help! I’m trapped in a cat body!
“What if trees had human sentience?” he ponders. I tell him there are myths about this. Humans turned into trees. “Yes, but those are myths, not truth.”
I’m formulating a thought about the emotional and spiritual truths in myths, when he says, “What is Area 51?” I tell him what I know—it’s a restricted military area where some people believe the government is keeping UFOs. Maybe aliens? He says he wants to go inside and look around, and when I tell him he’s not allowed inside, he exclaims, getting out of bed, “I WILL BATTLE MY WAY INSIDE!” Then walks out the door to watch more YouTube or play more Minecraft.
Then the cat leaves, too. I just lie there.
*
In March 2020, shortly before the world as we know it shuts down, I find myself thinking, “Room. I’m like the mother in Room. Trying my best under constrained circumstances.” I internally chastise myself. I’m not locked inside a room with my small child. No one is holding me prisoner. He has more people than just me to help teach him. He has school. I can walk out the front door any time.
*
My Melancholy Mom compatriot, Jessica Mesman, has written about how The Babadook is one of the movies that resonates for her in a special way. This one resonates for me as well, but the one I’m thinking of the most recently is Close Encounters of the Third Kind. This is a film that recurs for me quite often as I think through artistic obsession and parenthood. In fact, I referenced it in an online course I taught through my business this summer, writing,
I'd like to invite you to ponder that which tugs at you. Artistic production functions around obsession and compulsion to some extent. Have you seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind? After their encounter with aliens, both the Richard Dreyfuss character and the Melinda Dillon character become obsessed with producing artistic renderings of a mountain they've never seen. It's the thing that pulls at them, which they can only begin to comprehend through repeated artistic attempts. The compulsive art-making in that movie is an interesting take on the tugging within that precedes creative production. (Here's the famous mashed potato scene.) Aliens/artistic initiation-- same difference. It's about the desire to connect to mystery, to the unmanageable or ineffable in a life.
I also have a couple published poems that mention the movie, along with this one that no one has snapped up yet:
I’m Sorry I’m Teri Garr
I’m sorry I’m Teri Garr in Close Encounters and just want to get through one goddamn meal without you making it about yourself and your “vision.” Some of us have learned to have visions in the off-times. I’m sorry I want you to get it together and help me watch the kids, just take them to the drive-in or something. I’m sorry I seem shrill and vapid here in my nightie and my woman’s body—you are wearing me the fuck out. I’m taking the kids and leaving for my parents’. I’m sorry I no longer fit into the narrative. I’m sorry I’m such a good actress that I’ll tug at 1970s girls who watch the movie again later as adults, the way I wasn’t really given a narrative but made one anyway, with my body and my face and my utter disappointment and my abrupt goodbye.
So, there’s Richard Dreyfuss the obsessed de facto artist and Teri Garr the fed-up housewife who just wants a normal life. But there’s also the Melinda Dillon character. Dillon plays a mother who is raising her son alone for undisclosed reasons. She is also someone who was already an artist when the visions of Devil’s Tower begin appearing to her. At least this is suggested by the art supplies she already owns and the degree of skill evinced by her charcoal drawings. The trajectory of Dreyfuss’s character is that his creative obsession drives off his wife and children. Dillon’s character is a single mother who is also an artist, whose small son has his own obsessions (communing with aliens). She’s a Melancholy Mom.
*
Thinking about what to write this week, I wrote Jessica, “Can we watch Close Encounters tonight and discuss it?” Her reply: “I have to make an Alexander Hamilton costume for Alex tonight.”
“I have all these thoughts about horror movie moms I want to talk to you about,” I tell her. “But we’re too busy being horror movie moms to have the conversation.”
And then, from out of the ether (and/or from Indiana) comes the reply: “That’s the tweet.”
Melancholy Movie Moms
Love this! (Also, tangentially, have you read Soseki Natsume’s _I am a Cat_?)
Love your explosion of feelings and words, Joanna. You're the best!