“And then you’re holding the abstract in your arms”

Last Sunday, after a day of mediocre parenting, I suggested that we all have popcorn for dinner and watch a movie.

In general, I’m a really reluctant movie watcher, in a way that I tried for a time to convince myself was a sign of strong character but that I’m now fairly sure is just kind of a personality defect. Sitting down to watch a two-hour movie that I’m not sure I want to watch, unless it’s something that falls into the tiny tiny particular category of movies I want to see, makes me feel as trapped as being on an 18-hour flight in coach. The idea that I will have to sit in one place and pay attention to one set thing for a long period of time to something I am not sure I will like makes me panicky and claustrophobic. The thought of going to see a mediocre but fun action movie for relaxation purposes does not seem fun or relaxing to me in any way.

If this sounds at all like a humblebrag, rest assured that it is more of a phobia that causes me to completely miss out on various important pop culture experiences, including the entire Star Wars franchise, and that also makes me less fun or interesting because I will never ever ever ever ever be the person who suggests staying up too late and watching a bad, or good, movie. (Related: I will never be the person who suggests staying up too late, period. Let me go to bed at nine, with my phone and my book, for all of eternity.)

With Alice, though, I’ll watch stuff. I mean, I guess. It helps that most children’s TV is 23 minutes long on Netflix and if you’re sitting with your child on your left, then your phone can be on the right side of your leg like your hidden, more interesting child. It also helps that watching anything with a toddler is a little bit like Mystery Science Theater 3000 (I have watched Mystery Science Theater 3000) where you’re not interested in the plot of the show so much as what the audience commentary is going to be. We’ve been watching a little bit of Planet Earth, and I was so relieved to learn that the jackal is not eating the baby but “carrying him” (cue my own silent scream and turning the TV off).

Furthermore, not even I could argue that 5 p.m. was “too late” to start watching a movie, so I burned some popcorn badly and told my husband that whatever we watched could not be “at all scary,” he picked some critically acclaimed animated French film about a bear and a mouse, and we settled down to watch.

Alice was standing up to watch it so that she could access popcorn on the coffee table more easily. [Note: After publishing this I heard from a pediatrician friend who told me it’s a really bad idea to give kids under five popcorn. So don’t do it; we won’t from now on.] Two minutes in, the mice, who are all students in some kind of French boarding school, hear the mistress, who is a bear, coming, and fearfully jump into bed.

We’ve been reading Madeline a lot and so I thought that this opening scene might draw some interesting parallels. All I could see was Alice’s back and I noticed that she was shaking, like she was having a seizure standing up. The calm passed through my mind was not “my child is shaking with fear” but “those are odd full-body tremors.” Then she turned to us CRYING SILENTLY and good god, it was indeed “shaking with fear,” two minutes into this movie. She was saying something about “I DON’T WANT THE BEAR TO SEE THE MOUSE.”

The fucking French, with their moody brown and gray animated colour “children’s” movies! We didn’t sit around to watch the guillotine scene that I assume next. What we did was possibly worse, which was trying a few minutes of a shitty live-action version of Charlotte’s Web. You know when it’s three AM and you’re getting kicked out of a bar and you’re like, “Okay, we’ll go to ONE MORE bar but just for one shot?” It was like that.

I should note that I despise Charlotte’s Web because Fern’s father tries to kill the pig right at the start. If somebody asked me “What is the plot of Charlotte’s Web?” I would answer “That asshole tries to kill the pig for the entire book.” This also happens in the movie version, but watching Fern’s father wander around menacingly with an ax wasn’t what bothered Alice, because she knows not what an ax is. The tipping point into badness, rather, was a couple minutes later when Wilbur bashes himself repeatedly into a fence trying to reach Fern as she gets into her school bus. This scene, filmed by a known child murderer, is supposed to be “funny,” apparently. There was more sobbing. “PIG WANT TO GET OUT!” It would have been heartbreaking had I not been busy smashing the TV with a brick, then hitting my husband with the same brick for suggesting family torture night in the first place.

We’ve spent a lot of time encouraging our daughter to be “tough.” When she falls down, we say, “You’re okay.” We encourage her to climb up the playground structures by herself, to slide down the slide whichever way she wants. We pat big strange dogs showily and overenthusiastically, to teach her not to be afraid.

Emotional toughness, it turns out, is an entirely different and more complicated concept. I don’t know how to teach it and I’m not positive that I want to. It doesn’t help that becoming a mother turned me into an emotional wuss, an experience I understand is not uncommon. I remember talking to an old colleague about this once. It was before I had a kid and I asked him what being a dad was like.

“It’s like, when I see little animals I just think of him,” he said. I didn’t get it at the time but now it makes perfect sense to me. When I see a photo of, say, a fox in a trap, or a baby seal, when I hear about baby Beluga whales separated from their mothers because boats are fucking up all the whale communication, the face I see or imagine is my daughter’s, superimposed on top of the abused animal’s face. I mentally add another layer of suffering to any sad scene, making already tragic situations feel unbearably personal.

A friend recently asked me if I’d read A Little Life, and I said I hadn’t yet but wanted to. “Would you have trouble with the child abuse parts, though?” she asked.

“Oh, probably,” I said.

“Like, in what way?”

“Oh, just that every time I hear about a child being abused I imagine my own child,” I answered cheerily.

Oh, just that! Oh, that’s cool, you’ve just made the entire world about you. Oh, suffering matters more now only because it could happen to her.

Months ago I was reading All the Light We Cannot See on the subway. An older woman plopped down next to me and asked if I was enjoying it. My first reaction, as usual when any stranger makes contact, was JESUS FUCKING CHRIST. But I got into a conversation with her about the book. Her parents were Holocaust survivors, she said, and she has a daughter. She can’t read anything about the Holocaust anymore.

“Yes,” I said. “This book honestly isn’t that bad. It doesn’t have that many scenes like that. But I have turned into such a wuss since I became a mother.”

“It’s just,” she said. And I know she said exactly this because I wrote it down two minutes after I got off the subway. It was certainly the smartest thing a stranger had ever said to me about how becoming a parent throws you into a pit of hypothetical suffering.

“Before you have a child, it’s abstract,” she said. “And then suddenly you’re holding the abstract in your arms.”