Salon.com > Mother and Child

Helping my mother grieve

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Cary,

At 20 years old, I suddenly find myself fatherless, and as the oldest child, the person my mother is leaning on.

My father had dwarfism, with severe respiratory problems and chronic pains that plagued him especially during the last five years of his life. Recently, my mother and he were in Spain on a trip. The universe is unsympathetic, and my mother ended up bringing his urn back home in her backpack. It was a huge shock to all of us, though after talking about his health lately among ourselves we have concluded it shouldn't have been; he was living on borrowed time. The doctors told him years ago that a reasonable life expectancy in his condition was 35 to 40 years old, and he was 54 when he died, and his breathing had gotten worse with every passing week. We also suspect he knew the end was near, though he never said anything or complained of more pain than usual.

Why “Mother and Child” insults parents like me

Thu, 20 May 2010 00:20:00 +0000

It's been a bad few months for adoptive parents, publicity-wise. First, there was the Tennessee woman who put her 7-year-old adoptive son back on a plane to Russia, saying she no longer wanted to parent him. Then, there was Sandra Bullock's decision to adopt a black baby from New Orleans, a move that brought forth sneering comments about the Oscar winner's "white liberal guilt." The two cases have wildly different outcomes but both betray a certain cultural ambivalence toward adoption in general and adoptive mothers in particular. Whether they're portrayed as misguided bleeding hearts or evil stepmother equivalents, adoptive moms can't seem to catch a break.

Now comes Rodrigo García's new film, "Mother and Child," an ensemble movie that uses adoption as its overarching theme. "Mother and Child" is getting rave reviews, with critics praising it as "timely," "extraordinary" and "a masterpiece." As an adoptive mother, I found it insultingly one-sided.

“Mother and Child”: Pushing past adoption clich

Fri, 07 May 2010 11:03:00 +0000

Writer/director Rodrigo García's fourth feature begins with an adolescent couple making out on a bed to the strains of dreamy '70s guitar. The girl solemnly lifts her shirt -- and, without a change in music, the scene segues to her cradling a now-swollen belly in a TV room occupied by other pregnant teens, and then again to an operating table where her scream is joined by the scream of an infant. At which point, a 50-ish woman (Annette Bening) opens her eyes, and resignedly climbs into her elderly mother's bed.

Lay it all out, brother.

García always has made the kind of ensemble films ("Nine Lives," "Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her") that have become nearly as insidious a cinematic cliché as the big-budget action movie. In some ways, "Mother and Child" is no exception. To wit: A snaggle of seemingly disconnected subplots rotate around an overarching theme (in this case, adoption). Coincidences occur that both reveal the great wisdom of the universe and handily move the plot along, and virtual strangers profoundly affect each other by trading clever paragraphs of dialogue in unlikely places (a rooftop).