#13 'My heart is beating so fast'
Ponyo's Lisa, Shaun Tan's Sphinx, and other moments of parenting—fictional and non—that get me through days of fear or overwhelm
Stuart Heritage, a writer I really rate, took his son to see Makoto Shinkai’s 2022 film, Suzume, when he eight. This is one of my daughter’s favourite Japanese anime movies. The difference, as Heritage highlights, is that she speaks Japanese and his kid did not. But he’d somehow taken him to a subtitled screening: “The poor kid was unexpectedly watching the film on the highest difficulty setting.”
But then he watched the boy watch the movie with rapt attention. “I wanted to abandon ship, but then something weird happened. My son didn’t seem to notice the subtitles. He didn’t say anything, in fact. He sat there engrossed until the final scene, when he leaned over and whispered: “My heart is beating so fast.” I couldn’t have been prouder.”
Heritage wrote that piece as part of a round-up of writers relaying memorable movie experiences they’ve had with their children. I wrote about taking Tsubamé and her friend Raheemah to see Spiderman: Across the Spiderverse (see #10 here below). My one Grace Allen* read my entry and asked if I’d write something here about “cobbling together mothering from bits of screen mothers”.
She and I worked together for a few years. On a grim work day, an anecdote from either her kid’s world or mine (or any other little face in Zoom morning conference) would definitely make things better. Then there’d be the inevitable tricky parenting days, when you get to work casting about for some kind of anchor for a mind at sea with tiredness or anxiety or frustration or, just, like, overwhelm. “I remember our conversations about Lisa in Ponyo,” Grace wrote, “and how I try to channel her unflappabililty and trust in her child—if not her terrible driving".
Then in May I sent my dad a list of things about fathers that I’d been compiling in my head without realising it. A lyric, a headline, a spoken word piece, they’d all meant so much to me.
Here then, a medley of my parenting anchors for you.
Moominmamma, the OG, and the character my Tsu Tsu mostly compares me to. I’ll take it. The rock garden, the jam-making, the bag, the apron, the lateral thinking. “Mama thinks the [hotel suite] room is too big, so we’re all going to live on the bed.”
When Tsu Tsu was 16 months old, and, as
put it once, conceived of me strictly as an extension of her own self, my friend Ute found the drawing at the top of the post here, and emailed me: “just saw this”, she said. “had to think of you. it's by shaun tan.”** I’ve held on to it for the past 10 years (how mad is it to say that?). It is so funny and so cute and so real—the brightness of that kid!—and also so not how I feel on many, many days, but also how I’d love to always feel. Wouldn’t you? ***One day, Grace and I realised that we sometimes both try to channel Ponyo’s Lisa. I love the sequence before the one below: Ponyo is running on the waves and Lisa is driving and the two mirror each other in verve and guts and total undimmed splendour.
I love everything about Lisa really, but what I often try to hold on to is her tone of voice. Cos she’s juggling and striving and doing it all and it’s hectic and intense but then she speaks to her kid and there is such kindness in her voice. Sometimes I hear myself or rather, I feel what I’m feeling when I say something and I wish it were softer. Or I’ll be stomping to get where I need to be on time so I’m not late for my kid or whatever and I’ll wish there were more grace in my steps and gestures. Like I feel like the storm or the raging sea, and sometimes that’s what you have to be, but also sometimes I’d like to feel like gentle sunlight or shade too.
Like that bit in Star Wars: The Force Awakens where Unkar Plutt offers Rey 60 portions for BB8 and at first she goes to grab the armload, but then reconsiders giving the droid up and slightly steps back and instead, with such a lightness of touch, only takes the payment she’s due for her scavenged haul. That lightness of touch, that’s often what I’m striving for.
Lisa is no shrinking violet. She can plough through a storm, drive like a Nascar racer and slam the phone down in protest. But when things are as intense as can be, she just scoops up the littles and tells them only what they need to know to feel safe.
“Iii, Sousuke to Ponyo, donnani fushigi de, ureshikute, odoroitete mo, ima ha ochitsuku yo. Ii?” “Ok, Sousuke and Ponyo, however strange or happy or surprising this all is, let’s stay calm. Ok?”
They nod their heads.
And, more to herself than to them, she says again, “Ii ka ne.” “Yeah, it’s ok?”
I love that bit of dialogue. It’s so very real and human, the way she is reassuring herself in there too. Yup, I mean, I think I’m doing ok, maybe?
Marmee in Little Women and the way, when her daughter Jo confesses how angry she gets sometimes, so angry she “could hurt anyone and enjoy it”, Marmee says, “You remind me of myself.” And then how she says she’s angry nearly every day of her life and not patient by nature, but she’s learned to not let it get the better of her. Oof.
This scene in Michael Clayton, where George Clooney, the titular fixer with the dodgy day-job and the no-bullshit demeanour, is in the car with his boy, Henry, and they see Clayton’s younger, troubled brother. As they drive away, Clayton stops the car and speaks to Henry. I think about this all the time.
I also always think about Maher Shalal Ali being the father Chiron doesn’t have in Barry Jenkin’s 2016 masterpiece, Moonlight. The pauses and the sincerity in the way he talks to him, how he listens to the boy, how he takes him seriously, without ever talking down to him or dismissing his questions. The time, the beautiful time he has for him.
Tammy and Eric Taylor, from Friday Night Lights, I mentioned the other day. Ponyo and Sousuke are nursery-school age. My kid is now at secondary school. So FNL feels closer, more relatable now. The doubts I have about whether I’m getting it right and the strength I need to hold it together and the grace to also let her stretch out and take up space all loom larger than they did before. It feels more daunting, or at least, different. But no less special.
I keep thinking about Tammy staying to help Tyra clean up her house after a disaster with her own mother and the way she doesn’t react to the teenager’s attitude but doesn’t back down either. And then when she talks about her own teenager, she’s not overbearing. She just says, “That’s my girl” with all the love in the world right there in her shoulders. That’s my girl, that’s my kid, my ward, my gift.
Dìdi! I loved director Sean Wang’s Nai Nai & Pó, so so much. So I was very excited to watch his debut feature, about a teenager called Chris Wang, whose sometimes friends call Wang Wang and whose family calls Dìdi. Joan Chen plays his mother, in a performance Ann Lee describes as “astonishing” and “achingly gentle”. And she really is. Again, she’s such a melding of grace and softness and uncowed resolve.*****
The boy is going through some stuff and runs away one evening, but is then upset that his mother doesn’t come looking for him. He thinks she’s ashamed of him. She has this really honest talk with him, where she says, sure, I never thought my life would look like this, but you’re my dream. Totally echoes a line in Friday Night Lights, where Tammy says to her muddled teen too: you are it, you are what I dreamed of.
That of course brings me to the artists I respect most profoundly who are mothers****** too, for whom those two selves are indivisible yet often, in practical terms, incompatible, but who, each one, somehow do as Phyllida (Barlow) did, and do it anyway. As I’ve written before, I’m essentially never not thinking about this passage from Charlotte Higgins’s awesome interview from 2017, when Phyllida told her that “children and making art was ‘impossible’ and ‘extremely complicated mentally, like oil and water’.” Phyllida said it was a relief to be able to say it how it is. But her life also shows that she did it, she persevered through that imponderable life arithmetic. She made wonderful things and her children are wonderful adults.*******
So too, about An-My Lê’s photography and how steeped it is in her upbringing and family story and her relationship with her mother and her own children, while never shying away from the socio and geopolitical.
And then, Ruth Asawa. Look at this beautiful, beautiful work. An-My gave Tsubamé a picture book about Asawa’s work, A Life Made By Hand, when she was little. And I’ve since realised that arts education and encourage children and young people to make art was central to her practice. Parenting as making things.
This is the one my other Grace Allen and I bonded over. Tsu and I first went to see Spiderman: Across the Spiderverse with lots of kids. And we loved it so much we went right back, with Grace and her younger son, Xavier.
The film is the sequel to Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse, which was awesome. Miles, who is now 17, is on top the world but also letting his parents down without meaning to because he’s just got stuff to do and places to be and whole worlds to save and they feel hurt but also scared and worried and lacking but also so very proud and they just love him so much and then his mom says, Ok go.
“For years I've been taking care of this little boy, right, making sure he is loved, that he feels like he belongs wherever he wants to be. He wants to go on to the world and do great big things. And what I worry about most. is they won't look out for you like us. They won't root for you like us.”
What she does is she makes him promise to look out for that little boy of hers. That has me choked up, every single time, but also, it’s so damn useful. I channel that speech a lot, a lot. I want my kid to fly, of course I do, I remember that feeling so well of needing to myself, but now, of course, I can see it from both sides too. This bit of dialogue knits together those feelings in a way that makes sense.
Tenderness. The line in Zach Bryan’s poem, Fear and Friday’s, “And I have stood atop the Empire State Building with my father” and the way he comes to the end of his breath on the last word.
The headline of this piece about Bulgarian photographer Valery Poshtarov: “Sons, when did you last hold your father’s hand?”: “A few years ago,” Poshtarov says, “while walking my sons to school, I found myself thinking that, although I held their hands daily, one day they wouldn’t need me alongside them, that we would lose that sense of physical closeness. I decided to photograph my own father and grandfather holding hands – but it was the start of the pandemic, my grandfather was 95 and we wanted to keep him safe. We couldn’t meet for over a year.”…
…and how it brings to mind this poem by Robert Hershon:
Sentimental moment or Why Did the Baguette Cross the Road?
Don’t fill up on bread I say absent-mindedly The servings here are huge My son, whose hair may be receding a bit, says Did you really just say that to me? What he doesn't know is that when we're walking together, when we get to the curb I sometimes start to reach for his hand
And then I come back to this kid’s book, Premier Matin, by Fleur Oury. It’s about a reluctant child’s first day at school.
“Get up, Little Bear”
But Little Bear doesn’t want to get up.
He rolls himself up tighter in his ferns.
“What’s up, Little Bear?”
Premier Matin, Fleur Oury (Les Fourmis Rouges) What I’m realising, every day, is that no matter how big they get, they still need exactly this. It’s like you just have to figure out how—how to finely tune and gauge it for them so it meets them where they’re at.
Notes
*I realise now that I keep mentioning two Grace Allens. They’re fantastically wonderful humans, whom I love, and we’ve recently realised, their birthdays are basically a week apart too, how mad is that.
**Check out Tan’s book, The Arrival, a masterpiece of a wordless graphic novel.
***It’s giving Michael Rakowitz’s date-can Lamassu vibes—The invisible enemy should not exist (Lamassu of Nineveh), a piece I love deeply—but with the stoicism of all the Samoyeds and Golden Retrievers toddlers keep covering in stickers.
****Wang told Lee he wanted to show "a different side of Asian motherhood” than the tiger mum cliche that lazy writers too often reach for: “My mum and a lot of other mums I knew growing up were sensitive, tender, emotional, empathetic and artistic.”
*****(Read, too, Ann’s very moving piece about the Christmas that changed her, the last she got to spend with her mother. That was part of another series, to which I contributed this piece about a Christmas spent with my other mother, Hazel.)
******I’ve said it before but read Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood, by Hettie Judah.
*******“The urgency, during these years, of raising children, the raw need to get something done, the feeling of being “under siege”, the impossibility of it all, still shows in her work. She uses the shortest route to get something done,” wrote Higgins.