There is no doubt that art in its many forms has the power to move us, which is one of the reasons why I so lament the generally odious state of our culture of late. So rarely do I see a film that really stays with me anymore, but when I do see one, it tends to really set me on edge. Tonight was one of those nights. I was reminded of the way I so often felt in LA, sitting alone in an art house movie theatre (usually the Laemmle on Beverly) sobbing quietly - some film always pushing the sore buttons of the loneliness and isolation that weighs heavily on me when I am there. Now that, is another story, and yet still tied with this one, as what I'm really trying to get to is the whole human condition - the sharp, pungent, painful sting that is life. The twists that can shake our lives to their very foundations. It's almost irrelevant what film it was; what I'm really getting at is how vulnerable we are because we love -- something that has never been clearer to me than it has become since I had Nahanni.
Now, to appease curiousity, the film was Babel, about which I knew nothing but watched because of Cate Blanchett whom I will watch in anything. I was so easily pulled into the worlds portrayed there, the vastly differing lives of people in so many cultures, and although not exactly comparable, I couldn't help but draw parallels to what happened to Ez and I the day Nahanni was born, and because he is away this weekend, those same vulnerabilities I succumb so easily to on long stretches in LA washed over me tonight. I'm an easy mark these days - I put Nahanni to bed, exhausted after a long day of just she and I and then I see someone holding a child on TV and I miss her - it's like that. So there they are, in Morocco, she bleeding, dying before his very eyes and the most intimate scene I've seen in a million years - he's holding a bedpan for her and in this moment of intense vulnerability they kiss; they remember how much they are in love - it was heartbreakingly beautiful. So many things are called to mind for me - why it takes such big events to help us remember the most basic emotional things. I really understood that moment because when I returned home after the hemorrhage, weak as a kitten and vulnerable beyond words, Ez held me like that, he carried me to the toilet and performed all the things I could not do for myself. In those moments, open like a wound to the world I was at my most vulnerable and I saw not only how much he loved me, but how much I loved him, how often I have taken his gentle kindness for granted. In the film, I watched this man (played by Brad Pitt, achingly un-retouched, lit to look like a man and not a star) suffer the possibilities of this loss and I felt like I understood them in a way I could not have before all of this. I watched as they loaded her onto the stretcher and I knew the look in her eyes to be true and real because I had it on my own face that day - fear, exhaustion, confusion, more fear. There was a shot of the clear blue sky from her POV as they jostled her toward the ambulance and I instantly was transported to that same blue sky above me as the stretcher jerked its way through the grounds here on the way to the ambulance, how dichotomous it was to be covered in blood and shivering under such a beautiful blue sky. I watched him talk to his children from the phone in the hospital; trying to choke back all the emotions that flooded through him and I thought of Ez having to call everyone on the most momentous day of his life and try to sort through everything he must have felt. I thought of how you would do anything not to upset your children, how their pain must be felt tenfold through you even a continent away and I shivered at the thought that my child could ever suffer, be terrified, lost or injured.
I've said it before and I'll say it again - to have a child is to throw yourself under an emotional bus; everything we do is to protect them from ill and our greatest fears are that we might somehow fail. My friend Tracy always says that her mom would say 'You are only ever as happy as your saddest child' and I understand now how much that must be true. It strikes me what an incredibly intricate and complicated thing love is. The love we have for our children, our spouses, our friends, our parents. How vulnerable we all are to one tiny bullet, real or imagined, literal or figurative.
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