Parents Are Just People
On humanizing your parents and the places that remind you of them. Plus, three must-watch films about family.
There’s this heartbreaking scene in About A Boy, where the single mom (played by Toni Colette) can’t stop crying while she’s making her son breakfast. He looks at her dumbfounded as we hear his inner thoughts, “The crying had started again and it scared me cause now it was in the mornings. She'd never done that before. I couldn't figure it out, nobody was dead.” Realizing his awareness of her, the mom attempts to pull herself together, braving a frumpy smile as she brings him his cereal.
In the more recent film After Sun—which follows a Scottish father and daughter on vacation in Turkey—the dad similarly struggles with depression. The daughter—observing his every move but also carrying his genes—describes an overwhelming sensation of being weighed down; like she can’t bring herself to move. Her father’s eyes flit in quiet recognition—at eleven-years-old, she already understands depression before knowing it by na…