Does anyone remember the movie Doomsday? I'm sure it was a critic's nightmare; it was garish, disgusting, violent, and probably lazy from a film perspective. It's a movie set in England, wherein a mysterious disease is unleashed, and the northern part of the country is walled off (the medieval geek in me loved the re-appropriation of Hadrian's wall--see, it was educational!). Those north of the wall are left abandoned and descend into savagery, depravity, and cannibalism. In one scene, a guy drives recklessly through the countryside with his decapitated girlfriend's body (head sloppily reattached) in tow, seeking revenge. You can guess what happens to the head. Anyway, I loved the garishness post-apocalypsy trashiness of this movie, and its uberviolence (as you can probably tell from the glee with which I composed this paragraph).
But no more. I can hardly watch this season of American Horror Story. Its constant barrage of brutality makes me cranky for the whole evening, and I am generally unhappy after watching it. What happened to me? In part, I think culturally we may be growing sick of violence because it's so ubiquitous (to give credit, I heard a great analysis of this on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour), but in part, I think it's mommyhood.
I live in constant fear that something will happen to Nola. It was so hard to make her, and she is so precious to me. I can't imagine my life without her, and after the Sandy Hook shootings in December, I find myself thinking about the possibility of one day having to do so. It's horrifying--and nothing new for mommies across time and across cultures, I suspect. I've been obsessed all week with anchoring all the furniture in our house after reading a story posted to facebook about a dresser falling on top of a 3 year old, and killing her. The pathos of dead children is awful and terrifying and makes me hold Nola closer, even when she's woken up (uncharacteristically, to be fair) 4 times in one night and I am desperately tired.
But it's not only TV and movies. Oh no. Apparently it's books, too. And it's not just me! It's Daddy, as well. We're both reading Justin Cronon's new book, The Twelve, a follow-up to his novel The Passage. (side note: must be inspired by vampire culture and turn from impoverished college professor, like Cronon, into best-selling novelist. Seems like a good gig. Except I haven't written a blog post in 4 months. Damn.). There is a great deal of violence to children in this novel--or at least, there is a great deal of anticipation and inevitability of violence to children. We see various narrators watching parents with young children desperately trying to save them as the vampire-y apocalypse falls upon them. We know that all of these people--the parents as well as the children--will likely not survive. And yet it's the children that bother me.
I have never been one of those people to say "but won't you just think of the children?" I hate the pathos appeals of childhood innocence as somehow being superior to other lives. The loss of any life is terrible--why fetishize children's lives above adults'? And yet, with the arrival of Nola, I (unsurprisingly) care more about her life than those of other adults, and perhaps even my own. I'm not sure yet if this care spreads to all children culturally--but Sandy Hook shook me, as it did most people. I don't want damage to be done to children. I wonder if it's because I think of the parents, though, as much as the children? I think of the loss those parents endure, and it makes me feel sick. I try not to imagine it.
Sandy Hook didn't start this reaction to violence, though it has surely affected its continuation. Having Nola has made me see all people, not just Nola, through a different lens. All of you had a mother who loved you (perhaps in a misguided way, if your relationship with her is troubled or nonexistent), and for whom you were the whole world. She stared at your head and watched as your hair grew slowly over your ears, as your teeth popped through, as you went from being a tiny thing who couldn't reach for a toy to being an army-crawling machine of dog and kitty torment, leaving a tidal wave of toys in your wake. She couldn't wait for you to fall asleep at night, but once you did, she missed you. I feel kinship with all these other mothers out there, and I see more clearly that adults were once the beloved babies of their mothers. It makes me more patient with idiots. It makes me see history differently.
I short, I have become a different person, because of Nola. I suspect my negative reaction to violence will fade, and I think I still secretly love Doomsday, but for now, I might retreat to the land of gentler stuff, with puppies and rainbows and mommies and babies who grow old.
It's good to be back.
