"I cried during 50 First Dates," and other confessions
It's true. Yes, I know it was a B comedy with predictable jokes and some borderline offensive portrayals of Hawaiian culture. While I have been known to love me a good Adam Sandler flick, (Happy Gilmore, anyone?) I usually gravitate towards the more arty side of Hollywood (Supersize Me, The Motorcycle Diaries, In America). But something about the ending to 50 First Dates really got to me. And I am not talking about a tear in my eye kind of thing. I was sobbing. If you haven't seen it, and you want to, please stop reading. This is not a great movie, but it does have a thoughtful and somewhat unexpected ending, and spoilers are spoilers. You can come back and read this after you run to Blockbuster or move it up on your Netflix cue and watch it.
It wasn't the love story part that brought forth an epic amount of tears. It was the idea that Drew Barrymore's character, Lucy, can go through life and all of it's extreme joys and sorrows and frustrations, and not remember it. At the start of the movie, her family has things set up so that she never actually experiences any drama of life. Each day is the same day over and over again for this woman with no short term memory (the result of a car crash). We all have those boring or mildly amusing days that are unmemorable. But we also have the Big Days, when we go on a vacation, or get a job offer, or see an old friend, or make incredible love, or have a baby, or hike half dome. Lucy doesn't get to experience any of those Big Days until Adam Sandler's character, Henry, falls in love with her and demands that she live a full life, even though she won't remember it the next day.
Okay, this is the part you really shouldn't read if you haven't seen the movie. Last warning!!!
Really!!
Okay here goes. The fact that Lucy does experience all of these Big Day things: a wedding, sex, pregnancy, the baby's first kick, the birth of a child, her baby's first steps, and on and on but still can't remember is so tragic to me. The movie argues that this is better than a life unlived and I agree. But it is horrifying for me to imagine not remembering the experiences that are dearest to me: my daughter climbing a ladder for the first time, my husband holding me as I pushed her out of my body, my toddler saying her sister's name and laughing, the girls hugging their grandparents goodbye.
For the record, the same impuilse made me cry while watching Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind, another movie that plays with memory and loss. Good God I cried hard with that one. At least that movie is a respectable arty film. Remember this post? And Mike's song that goes with it? I think the reason these films and Mike's song* make me so emotional is that I fear that I do live in a state of memory loss. I remember the Big Days, but how many little moments have escaped me?
The pictures I included have Natalie as she was for something like 14 months of her life: with two fingers in her mouth. Always those same two. Other moms would stop me in the supermarket, almost in tears, saying, "Oh, my son used to suck those two fingers!! That really brings me back!" I would smile knowingly, as though I understood what is is like to have your child grow up and miss these years. The truth is, I don't truly understand that yet. Yes, I love being a mom of little ones, but when people tell me to enjoy it because it flies by, I want to politely suggest that they are on crack. But we can expound on that another day. To continue with my anecdote, there I was, not a month ago, at an Angels game, when I saw another baby with her fingers in her mouth, just like Natalie had done when it hit me that Natalie hadn't done that in, I don't know, at least a week or two. Heck, when did she stop sucking those fingers? I really hadn't noticed that she had stopped doing something so elemental to her nature until I saw it in another kid. See what I mean about daily amnesia?
So I hope, like Lucy, that I get to experience both the Big Days and the daily ups and downs of life. And unlike Lucy, I pray I can remember them all and allow these memories to evoke the experiences that I hold so dear right now in my life.
*which isn't going to be on his album and for that I can not forgive him. But still check him out here (webpage) and here (MySpace).
It wasn't the love story part that brought forth an epic amount of tears. It was the idea that Drew Barrymore's character, Lucy, can go through life and all of it's extreme joys and sorrows and frustrations, and not remember it. At the start of the movie, her family has things set up so that she never actually experiences any drama of life. Each day is the same day over and over again for this woman with no short term memory (the result of a car crash). We all have those boring or mildly amusing days that are unmemorable. But we also have the Big Days, when we go on a vacation, or get a job offer, or see an old friend, or make incredible love, or have a baby, or hike half dome. Lucy doesn't get to experience any of those Big Days until Adam Sandler's character, Henry, falls in love with her and demands that she live a full life, even though she won't remember it the next day.
Okay, this is the part you really shouldn't read if you haven't seen the movie. Last warning!!!
Really!!
Okay here goes. The fact that Lucy does experience all of these Big Day things: a wedding, sex, pregnancy, the baby's first kick, the birth of a child, her baby's first steps, and on and on but still can't remember is so tragic to me. The movie argues that this is better than a life unlived and I agree. But it is horrifying for me to imagine not remembering the experiences that are dearest to me: my daughter climbing a ladder for the first time, my husband holding me as I pushed her out of my body, my toddler saying her sister's name and laughing, the girls hugging their grandparents goodbye.
For the record, the same impuilse made me cry while watching Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind, another movie that plays with memory and loss. Good God I cried hard with that one. At least that movie is a respectable arty film. Remember this post? And Mike's song that goes with it? I think the reason these films and Mike's song* make me so emotional is that I fear that I do live in a state of memory loss. I remember the Big Days, but how many little moments have escaped me?
The pictures I included have Natalie as she was for something like 14 months of her life: with two fingers in her mouth. Always those same two. Other moms would stop me in the supermarket, almost in tears, saying, "Oh, my son used to suck those two fingers!! That really brings me back!" I would smile knowingly, as though I understood what is is like to have your child grow up and miss these years. The truth is, I don't truly understand that yet. Yes, I love being a mom of little ones, but when people tell me to enjoy it because it flies by, I want to politely suggest that they are on crack. But we can expound on that another day. To continue with my anecdote, there I was, not a month ago, at an Angels game, when I saw another baby with her fingers in her mouth, just like Natalie had done when it hit me that Natalie hadn't done that in, I don't know, at least a week or two. Heck, when did she stop sucking those fingers? I really hadn't noticed that she had stopped doing something so elemental to her nature until I saw it in another kid. See what I mean about daily amnesia?
So I hope, like Lucy, that I get to experience both the Big Days and the daily ups and downs of life. And unlike Lucy, I pray I can remember them all and allow these memories to evoke the experiences that I hold so dear right now in my life.
*which isn't going to be on his album and for that I can not forgive him. But still check him out here (webpage) and here (MySpace).
posted by Sarah at 2:16 PM
6 Comments:
I agree 100%! I cried the day we brought Benjamin home from the hospital because I was so scared I would miss something, some small part of his life. Now that I am expecting a second child, I am absolutely terrified that I will miss something. How can I watch all of the amazing things that either of them is doing if I am watching the other one?! Even though I have taken over 15,000 (literally) pictures of Benjamin and I often have the video camera running, I still haven't caught everything. It is scary to think how fast his phases of activities, expressions, etc. fly by. In the meantime, I'm just trying to enjoy every single bit of it.
P.S. I felt the same way at the end of 50 First Dates. Imagine having children and not knowing anything about them.
I sometimes wonder if crying is an afflication of motherhood. Everything seems so much more intense because you see how it affects the little people that you grew inside your own body. And I suspect it's just as intense for those who adopt children. Maybe it's the pressure of loving and being responsible for someone so completely - maybe it turns us into pressure cookers ready to spout a leak at a moment's notice. I went to see Birth The Play on Labor Day weekend (http://www.birththeplay.com/theplay/index.html) and I sobbed all the way through. I realize it was intense subject matter, but I felt like I was the only person in the room blubbering to that extent. Fortunately, I had one other friend sitting way in the back who confessed to the same thing. And one last confession: sometimes I cry reading children's books because they are so sweet. "Guess How Much I Love You?" has made me cry on numerous occasions - to the extent that Daisy has asked me to read it just to see how it affects me.....
The magnet on my refrigerator says "We do not remember days....we remember moments."
When I see little girls standing at the bus stop in their green plaid jumpers and navy and white middies, I get tears in my eyes every time!
Love, MOM
OK- another great blog!
I love that movie as well. Cried Cried Cried.
Because I am such a geek, here is what your blog made me think of.
Just got inspired-
The awareness of how precious these fleeting moments are is a proof that we as well as our God must be:
1. personal and in relationship to us (as opposed to merging into homogenous union with Him)
and
2. co-eternal
1.this what you really hit on for me- If our lives simply are the empty play of dead matter temporarily made animate by a consciousness that will simply cease to be as it dissolves into some bright homogenous light, then what was it for?
Birth is a lie, death a lie, sin, salvation, bondage, pain, suffering, struggle, enlightenment, service, devotion, love, all lies. And in the end, even a personal relationship with the God that saves you from death/confusion/emptiness etc is also a lie.
This is not only abhorrent, it is banal.
This life is true, God is true and we are true in the way that only the truly real can be true. That all three eternally co-exist -
In relationship
2. co-eternal because we are of Him- sparks from the fire that is our God. "We are His energies Who is the Possessor of all energy" as the Vaishnava scriptures say.
"Never was there a time when I did not exist, nor you, nor all these kings; nor in the future shall any of us cease to be."
-Krishna, in the Bhagavad Gita 2:12.
K--I think of you every time I want to catch something on camera and don't have one nearby. "Darnit! Kimberly wouldn't have missed this!" :)
Tera--I so wish that play were playing here in the LA/OC area. I will def. try to see it one day!
Mom--I love that magnet.
Franz--I am so glad the movie touched you, too. We will have to talk more about your comments so that I can really get what you mean. I agree about being in relationship with God (as opposed to being "absorbed" by God after we die to this life), but why is all life experience a lie? Feel free to comment back here, but this topic makes me think I should be reading YOUR blog!!
Sarah: "but why is all life experience a lie?"
Those schools of thought in Hinduism that posit an homogenous dissolution of all seperate identity into the Supreme Truth (Brahman) must frame reality as two tiered (the apparent {to which belong this world and all experiences and personalities in it} and the really real world {the world of ultimate reality or Brahman which is by definition formless qualityless and unquantifiable}).
This is commonly called impersonalism and is very often found in the Abrahamic faiths as well and is vehemently opposed by Vaishnavism.
i.e. we respectfully feel that it is a load of huey.
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