You Were the Bird: On Petite Maman and motherhood

Abstract

You Were the BirdOn Petite Maman and motherhood Georgia Cloepfil (bio) In the opening scene of Céline Sciamma's film Petite Maman, a young girl named Nelly moves from room to room saying goodbye to a series of unnamed women, all gray-haired residents of a senior care center. Behind the last door, Nelly finds her own mother, Marion, tidying up in her recently deceased grandmother's all-but-empty room. Her mother takes a seat and overlooks the grounds of the facility. There is a gulf between the threshold of the door, where Nelly stands, and that of the window, where her mother contemplates the reality of her new role as a motherless mother. The movie's title pans across Marion's back. Perhaps for the first time, Nelly is glimpsing the ocean of her mother's grief and experience–and she can't quite stretch across it. [End Page 74] One of the movie's strengths is its ability to lay bare a moment of realization that all young people have at some point: our parents were people (with loves, grief, ambition) before we came into the world. They had mothers. We watch as Nelly recognizes that her own life overlaps with Marion's, but it will never run parallel; the procession of generations marches onward. When they finish packing up her grandmother's room and drive away, Nelly reaches toward her mother around the headrest of her seat and feeds her cheese puffs one by one as she drives. Then a little sip of apple juice. Then a hug. The tender opening scene reminded me of a passage I read (and underlined) in Anne Truitt's Daybook long before I had any plans to have children: Mary's son was born early this morning. After hearing the news, I lay back in the predawn dark and, as the tide of happiness receded, I saw that it had pulled out on some long, bare inner shoreline of myself and had made the slope glisten for the last time: Both my daughters are now mothers and in the proper nature of things more mothers of their children than they are daughters of their mother. We reside on an axis between mother and daughter until birth, death, or another dramatic event threatens to tilt us abruptly in one direction or another. There is a sense of inevitability but also a deep melancholy to this sentiment, and I worried for a long time about making my own mother feel its truth. I discover that I am pregnant on an August morning. The test sits on my dining room table, its two decisive blue lines bisecting. The news is not a surprise, but it still brings with it a feeling that life has unexpectedly accelerated. To me, the passage of time has always felt like a fierce wind. It's something to take shelter from, something to brace myself against or evade. If I am not careful, everyone I love might be taken up by a violent rush of air and carried forward with me. The novelist Samantha Hunt once [End Page 75] Click for larger view View full resolution Joséphine Sanz and Nina Meurisse in Petite Maman. © Liles Films, courtesy NEON. [End Page 76] said that it makes sense to think of mothers as makers of death. She meant that we make our children's deaths. But I'm not there yet. What's inside of me barely feels alive, is barely felt. Embryonic and invisible, the pregnancy still seems like the impetus of some other change. Even if it is "the proper nature of things," my becoming a mother means that my own mother is, suddenly, a grandmother. I have the sense that by becoming pregnant, I am singlehandedly ushering my mother toward the next phase of her life and then toward her death. My worry hardens into fear. The week after I tell her that I am pregnant, my mother's mammogram reveals a tumor in her right breast. She waits weeks for news, for surgery, for a plan. In the silence she can barely sleep, and neither can I. Rationally, I know that the...