Life on a children’s ward can be darkly funny. It has to be. Without humour, all a parent has is the mute howl of something even darker: their worst fears.
And so, when my daughter was having her bone marrow transplant, I embraced all opportunities for theatre. Like the time she decided to put disposable cardboard urinals on her feet and cantered, bald-headed, down the corridor, like an immunosuppressed Bambi. Or when, on yet another boring afternoon, she idly chewed through her Hickman line (a monumental infection risk); we laughed on seeing the note attached to the replacement line – “NO BITING” it read, in the surgeon’s scrawl. And I became intimately familiar with the seven “types” on the Bristol Stool Chart, including three varieties of sausage, “soft blobs” and “fluffy pieces”. In the parallel universe of the fourth birthday celebrations my friends’ children were having outside of hospital, these might all have been descriptors for party food.
It is in recognition of all this that writer-director Mary Bronstein’s new film, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, was made. In hospitals, particularly where children are concerned and even more so for their parents, black comedy is a tool for survival. The film’s protagonist, Linda, played by an Oscar-nominated Rose Byrne, is a mother and psychotherapist whose life begins to unravel under the pressure of caring for a child with a serious, unnamed condition, all the while working and holding up the scaffolding of family life in her husband’s absence. Byrne’s performance deservedly won her a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy, which might strike the uninitiated as a curious category for a film that is not a musical and has precisely zero lols. But a black comedy it is.
That said, If I Had Legs doesn’t fit neatly into any genre. It is braided with horror tropes, which in a sense aren’t necessary: for a mother, the horror of having a seriously ill child needs little embellishment. Still, much of the film’s action takes place in the small hours, scored by the beeping of an infusion pump that crescendos with Linda’s emotional turmoil. We can infer that her daughter has come through the most intense period of treatment and is now allowed to sleep at home, where Linda’s task is to help her gain significant weight. This is easier said than done; not only are they staying in a beachside motel after the ceiling of their apartment collapsed, but the child is not meeting her targets. She has a feeding tube connected to her abdomen, through which Linda hooks up bladders of formula milk at her bedside. It is in the darkness that she often leaves her sleeping daughter to feel some version of the freedom that eludes her, snared as she is by duty but, more importantly, by love.
Arguably, motherhood itself has a genre problem, dangling somewhere in the no man’s land – and it does feel an especially women’s land – between romance and tragedy, comedy and horror. I have known a version of Linda’s life, a life so frightening that I bristled at the notion of it inspiring entertainment. But as I watched it, I also felt seen. Only a mother who has gone through it, as Bronstein did, could have written scenes like the one in which the feeding tube is inserted, the child screaming in distress while Linda holds her down expressionlessly, a rogue tear betraying her pain. It brought back our equivalent moments – for cannulas, naso-gastric tubes, sedatives – all workouts for both body and mind, efforts that challenged my understanding that this was for the best. Of course it was, but “the best” can still come at a cost to both child and mother.
Slanted motherhood – a term coined by author Jessica Moxham to describe parenting a child with a disability – has too often left me feeling unqualified. I chose to have a baby, I have thought, not to play God, as choosing to move forward with a risky but potentially life-changing treatment required us to. “I just want someone to tell me what to do,” says Linda to her ice-cold therapist (played by Conan O’Brien), who embodies not just the limitations of therapy in the face of something objectively hard, but also the truth that there are no shortcuts here. To borrow Michael Rosen’s words in We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, Linda can’t go over it, she can’t go under it, she’s got to go through it.
We made a lot of slime during my daughter’s long hospital admission. Stretch it enough and it splits, a fitting metaphor for the demands of caring – and for Linda’s experience. Linda is low on support; her daughter’s grandparents go unmentioned, but we frequently hear the critical tones of her husband (Christian Slater) through the phone receiver; he is working away but still manages to find time for himself. After he has been to a baseball game with colleagues, Linda is understandably irked; for her, leisure time is an alien concept, pleasure a foreign country.
Parenting shifts the tectonic plates of a relationship at the best of times; in a high stakes medical setting, those plates are spinning. Doctors, analysts and even the child’s father are no substitute for a mother’s presence. Linda’s dilemma is a singularly maternal one in the modern world: pressures come from all directions and preclude self-care. If I Had Legs is a reminder to strive to create the idealised “village” around parent-carers. And for those who want to help, don’t ask them how: send food and something to occupy a bored child.
My daughter lived in an isolation cubicle for six long weeks. We both craved liberty; sometimes I imagined that of a childless life, all the while wanting to be nowhere but by her side – or by her brother’s at home. On one occasion, I snaffled two bottles of (banned) wine into the cubicle, only to leave them undrunk; flexing the muscles of freedom, if only minutely. The title If I Had Legs I’d Kick You alludes to something like this: how mothers are rendered immobile by love. In the film’s final scenes, Linda flings herself into a turbulent sea, seeking escape but unable to achieve more than collapse on the beach. She is brought-to by her daughter, whose smiling face implores her to come home. “I’ll be better, I promise, I’ll be better,” says Linda, in a nod to the Winnicottian “good enough” mother.
For Linda and me, love and a touch of dark humour provide the recipe to keep going. Today is not just the film’s release date but my daughter’s birthday, marking seven years of motherhood. Before she was born, I would not have chosen to parent on the precipice like this, visiting hospitals far more than any rhyme time or sensory class, but for her it is what I would choose every time – soft blobs, fluffy pieces and all.
If I Had Legs I’d Kick you is in cinemas now
