"It's a bit strange but I just watched Stepmom with a couple of friends after work. I want to know what you thought of it when you first saw it, when you were sick, and now."
What a loaded question. The movie came out when I was getting a divorce from my ex-husband. Within two years, I was a single mom battling cancer. Mollie was roughly the age of the daughter in the movie. That was about as similar as the movie got to our own realities. But she found a dvd of it at a second hand store and watched it incessantly.
We talked until 5 am Pacific time, discussing a lot of our perceptions and feelings around the time. What we decided is that Hollywood is very good at making life look neat and pretty; wrapped up in great houses and happy endings. It rarely gets divorce or cancer right, and wasn't a good measure of what our reality was. Does divorce ever leave peoples lives that unscathed? I'm fairly sure that it would have been impossible to hide my cancer treatments. Especially after my hair fell out. Magical mid-night horse rides on snowy nights are hard to come by. And people who are dying do not have the energy to create memory quilts. Or even the time between medical appointments.
Mollie told me that she was embarrassed to be re-hashing 11 year old feelings again. I told her that she was 11 and that the situation she was in was too complex for an 11 year old to deal with. She needs to work it out now that she can comprehend the reality of it.
The good thing for her is that I didn't die, leaving her to be raised by the evil stepmom...;0)
You gave Mollie some very wise advice.
ReplyDeleteHollywood glosses over far too many important issues - leaving the perception that they can/will always be worked out just fine. Which can lead those people for whom it is not true feeling like failures. Which is so very wrong.
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