In the 2021 movie C’mon C’mon, Juaquin Phoenix plays an uncle of a smart, eccentric little boy, whom he has to take care of, after his mother leaves the city to take care of her ex-husband. What this movie is about, among other things, is the sheer energy and effort it takes to mother a child, that is to say, to care, nourish, support, educate, and correct a child that takes years to grow up, and still need you.
After only a few days, Phoenix calls the child’s mother and asks her how she does it, the single parenting? Her answer is an honest one: I don’t know. You just have to guess what’s best for him, and mostly pretend that you know what you are doing.
Later in the movie, Phoenix reads a line from Rose’s book, which says how mothers are burdened with the task of correcting everything that is wrong with this world. It was this book that I’ve read now: an essay on love and cruelty.
Come to think of it, it really is so: mothers are eventually responsible to hide away the bitterness and harshness of the world, to defy everything that is wrong and posit an image of optimism, hope, courage, and goodness. For if they fail, the very fabric of our society will start to come unstuck. Every bit of sanity that we have will start to wither away. There wouldn’t be a force to balance the abundant evils and errors of our world.
Given how much depends on our mothers, it is a shame they get so little credit when it comes to serious talks. Sure, religions offer its due respect towards mothers, which also becomes our primary source of realization that mothers are key to our lives, both individual and combined – but in matters of society building, town planning, policies and government, social gatherings, and in every decision that shapes our we function as a nation or a society, it is almost always men. And even if women are included, they are not there as mothers, but as politicians and activists.
Motherhood and mothers, it seems, are constraint within the walls of the home only – outside, it is as if they don’t even exist, as if their products are now ours to use without any concern shown towards where it came from.
Yet motherhood stays a larger-than-life topic, both because of its religious extravagance and complicated societal dynamics, and to tackle it well, one has to sit and think, and feel, and observe how a community comes together, where it falters, and how can it be put back on its core. In all of these aspects, mothers play an integral, although receded, role.
Rose’s book, or lengthy essay, tackles the question of motherhood from the perspective of cruelty and love. How on one hand our societies and their general behavior have become really harsh against the mothers, and its ever-changing meaning and responsibility in today’s divided world, and on the other, questions whether love is really integral to motherhood, or is it also a societal construct. It starts with medical expenses of NHS, UK about the labor and pregnancy cases of immigrant mothers, and how the west is involved in a combined effort to disallow any pregnant women to be treated under the program of NHS.
With this case in point, Rose begins on her argument of how mother, in the end, is the sole bearer of everything that is wrong: immigration, weak men and fathers, government policy, and so on. Although an appealing and thought-provoking stance, Rose’s book becomes inundated, so quickly, with an inflow of research papers and articles and stories and so on. Not a paragraph goes by where a couple of bracketed information is given, or an article or paper isn’t referenced.
It wouldn’t be wrong to say that it reads like a research paper: boring to look at and difficult to read. Such consistently punctuated and hindered writing becomes a frustrating reading experience, and now matter how important the subject-matter, one can’t but close the book. I tried new chapters in hope for better prose or a more readable argument, but none were found.
There’s almost nothing that this book offered to my understanding or thinking on the subject of motherhood. A highly disappointing book.
Ratings: 2/5 ** August 19, 2022_