Private Life, 2018. Written and directed by Tamara Jenkins.
Joy, 2024. Directed by Ben Taylor, screenplay by Jack Thorne, story by Rachel Mason,
Emma Gordon, and Shaun Topp.
A Mouthful of Air, 2021. Written and directed by Amy Koppelman.
I FLY TO BOSTON and back in one day. The Uber driver asks, pulling up to the hospital, what I’m in town for.
“This,” I say, as if it is obvious. “This is the event.”
*
When it’s decided, I stay in all weekend to watch documentaries on plane crashes. I curl up on the rented couch before the rented screen in the rented room. This life is temporary. Nothing is mine.
I am terrified of plane crashes. For years the only place I pray, and every time.
It is only after that I understand.
(If I can face this—plane after plane slipping into the pitiless sea—then whatever comes next—)
A feeling rises inside—not quite lightness, but the lift of your body when, all around you, the plane suddenly drops.
*
The decision: to make a baby.
To make a baby requires, for me, from me, effort. Requires intervention.
A doctor. A prayer. A coming between.
*
The transformation of woman to mother is a magical event, but it is also a medical one. Not only for me, but especially.
*
I drive two days to get to Northampton because, from Cincinnati, it is very far. The car full of books and sun, a suitcase of blouses in the trunk. I have come to teach poetry for a year at the college of terribly bright and mythically sad girls. Sylvia, my copilot, snores softly.
This is the past of the past, but I am telling you now because it is important. This is what would happen in a film that trusts its audience. To be difficult. To establish empathy, context. White Volkswagen Beetle with gingham seats. Singing “Landslide,” my eyes brimming earnestly. Miles of trees, green still, but turning. Can I handle the seasons of my life? The secret inside. Do you see me? I am glowing.
Because the sun has begun to set.
*
The moon’s concern is more personal:
She passes and repasses, luminous as a nurse.
Is she sorry for what will happen? I do not think so.
————-——Sylvia Plath, “Three Women”
*
I lose the pregnancy a week into the semester. It begins quietly, like autumn, one red leaf falling into water. But I know.
I sit all day by the window. The light, the trees, all gold. Only the sun moves, which I perceive as the shadows.
*
The difference between bear and bare is so slight. They are aural twins, fraternal to the eye. But a world apart. One is to carry. The other’s limbs—nothing in them.
*
Sylvia Plath, after whom my cat is named and totem of Smith College where I teach that year, was one of the first women to write (or, I will distinguish, publish) poems about the medical realities of motherhood: pregnancy, abortion, miscarriage, and postpartum depression and anxiety.
In 1962, she completes the poem-play “Three Women.” Plath is newly postpartum, her son only a month old, and she is proud. The poem takes place on a maternity ward and is delivered through three voices: one woman who miscarries, one woman whose child dies shortly after birth, and one woman, unmarried, who gives her baby up. Three women, not mothers: their taboo experiences of motherhood deprive them of that title. Mothers and not mothers. To speak of/from either/all of these experiences remains, decades later, revolutionary.
When I walk out, the first woman says, I am a great event.
*
In the years I make the conscious, arduous journey toward motherhood, a number of films come out that center its pursuit and metamorphosis. Perhaps it’s been like this for some time, the only difference being my heightened attention. But I think there really might be a shift, a new, radical transparency about the experiences of women. Not only the fuckable women, a (pregnant) friend differentiates, but the apparently already fucked. Mother as protagonist. Mother as story. Mother as event.
Watch—the mother, emerging. Watch. The mother emergency.
*
Screaming. When there is no sound. The white wand. The black room. The womb. Black. The heart which isn’t. When my screaming begins. When the doctor shrugs a little. NO I WILL NOT. Circle like an open mouth. LOWER. A zero. Not nothing, there it is. On the sheet. It can’t be. MY VOICE. Me. Where I am. Not saying. NO. Not saying. A thing. Screaming.
*
I cannot contain it. I cannot contain my life.
*
Because it is the third consecutive loss, I receive a diagnosis: recurrent pregnancy loss. And because I am living in Massachusetts, one of the few of the United States with mandated fertility coverage, the doctor begins the conversation. Assisted reproduction.
Now the film speeds up. The days. Drives back and forth to Boston along back roads, the leaves gold, gold, then gone. Standing in front of collegiate wood paneling in my snow-damp Oxfords. The scene when the package arrives, as if it were ordinary, crocuses thrusting through the frost. Glimpse the vials stowed beside the eggs in the fridge. The olive-hued bruises when I, in a sweatshirt and underwear, tie up my hair in the morning. Come in close so you can see. The shine of my eyes. My face. When I mistake the doctor’s name for rain.
*
Private Life (2018) follows a couple who, for most of the movie, pursue the dream of a child through IVF. I begin to watch, then stop. The planes I can face, but not the plunge of the needle into the tender spot. It’s too familiar. The woman’s hip on the bed in the ocher light, the tentative touch of her husband, his ring glinting.
I am too afraid. I am too afraid to see how the story ends.
Private. In the beginning—to bereave, deprive, rob.
In front of.
One’s own life.
*
“Holy shit. Holy shit! Everyone, stop! Sylvia’s escaped, and I’d only just got her pregnant.”
So begins the first encounter between Jean Purdy and Dr. Robert Edwards in Joy (2024), the biographical drama of the invention of in vitro fertilization. A lab mouse is loose, and a roomful of maladroit men in white coats hunt for her.
“Oh, Sylvia,” Bob, on his hands and knees, says placatingly, “I know you’re upset about Patty giving birth. It will happen for you too.”
Jean, the only woman present, catches the mouse, thus earning herself a job.
This is Cambridge, the film tells us, May 1968. Fifty-five years later, Mother’s Day, I will wake in the other Cambridge and drive into Boston, where a doctor will extract with practiced precision nineteen eggs.
*
IVF is a kind of miracle, but doctors are not gods.
Deeply religious, Jean’s mother, in the film, admonishes her. “You can’t play God with this.”
A lapsed Catholic, my mother has, in IVF, unshakeable faith.
Statistics, prognoses—these do nothing to dissuade her. I want her belief to catch in me, consume me, like a flame leaping from tree to tree. But hope is agony, and I snuff it out.
My father is cautious—careful with God, careful with me. He sends me a verse:
————-—فَإِنَّ مَعَ ٱلْعُسْرِ يُسْرًا
Surely, with hardship comes ease.
*
What pains, what sorrows must I be mothering?
There are scenes between I will not show you. But you will sense the wound.
*
The film A Mouthful of Air (2021) begins at the end. A woman on her back, staring up at clouds in an impossibly blue sky.
Then, a shift to the imagined world. An illustrated one, black and white. This woman, it is soon revealed, is a writer, and the cartoon girl ascending a tower by rope is the heroine of her children’s book series. When she reaches the top, she unlocks its clock, and from it a rainbow is released. It ribbons through the world, returning to it its color. The rainbow is the bridge to the actual: Here again is the real world, a flamboyantly painted apartment in New York City, where the woman at last speaks. She is speaking to her infant son as she picks up a crayon.
You are to assume she is happy. Because of the riotous abundance of color.
*
In forums online, choruses of women. The anonymity makes this private, though anyone can peek. There’s a language we speak. TTC, TWW, BBT, DPO, EPT, BFN, AF, AMH, FSH, HCG.
We tell each other, I’m praying for you.
We squint at shadows. We say, Try again tomorrow. We are spending our lives waiting for our lives to begin.
We incant, like a charm, rainbow baby, rainbow baby, rainbow baby.
The symbol of the rainbow is saccharine, an easy metaphor, but who cares. With all our misery, you can at least give us that. Ease.
Give it to me.
*
But the mother is not happy. She bathes her son. She kisses him. An ordinary morning. She retrieves a blade from her table of crayons and uses it to slit her wrists.
*
It is usual, they say, for such a thing to happen.
It is usual in my life, and the lives of others.
*
I watch these films when I am safely on the other side. In film parlance, this would be a spoiler. I don’t care. See my daughter nursing as I watch.
Years ago, when I was structuring my first book, a writer told me, You don’t need to wait to let them know you survive.
I am letting you know I survive.
*
The woman in Private Life is also a writer. Her apartment is lined with charmingly immoderate stacks of books, and morning coffee steams in a Yaddo mug. Her life is my life, or was. Menopur and Tin House. Editors and egg counts. Printed embryo on the fridge, manuscript in hand. I’ve lived her rage, her desperation, her shame. “I feel betrayed,” she tells her husband when her disappointment with her book cover and infertility comes to a head. Betrayed by the story of a life—a career and a child—she believed could be hers but isn’t. “Whose fault is it?” she asks angrily, then answers herself. “I guess it is mine, because I was too busy writing my stupid book.” This scene stings with recognition.
But it’s an earlier scene that knocks the air out of me. When the couple’s step-niece offers to donate her eggs to help them conceive and her mother forbids it, the niece responds, “What if you had kidney disease?” She points out that a person only needs one kidney. “So I’ve got an extra one. Of course I’d give it to you.”
Her mother turns on her. Though her face is out of focus, then of view, in her voice her disgust is clear. “Kidney disease kills people.” Her mother distinguishes what constitutes an emergency. “[She] wants to have a baby. She’s not dying.”
Her daughter shoots back without pause, “How do you know?”
*
I am dying as I sit. I lose a dimension.
*
In a scene following the triumph of successfully creating a human blastocyst outside the womb, IVF’s three progenitors face the Medical Research Council. The room is dark, bleak, drained of color. The trio are desperate for support. The council is obstinate, dismissive. Unyielding. One member states, “This is a very specific problem, which, let’s face it, only affects a small number of women.”
Jean closes her eyes in disbelief. “There are women out there, lots of women, who believe if they can’t have kids, they have failed their marriage and themselves.”
The camera cuts to her face.
“They don’t understand what life is without children.”
*
I am surprised to learn that barren first described a woman, not land or trees. In my mind it was the vacant field through which we understood the woman. The bare branches. But we are the metaphor.
*
In the film, Jean cannot have children. Endometriosis, which, in life, she likely had but did not confirm—she was fiercely private.
The women in the study in the film lift their skirts for her and she injects them. She asks about their lives. She takes notes. She takes them to the beach. Jean is the provider of hope, though she is beyond it.
In the culminating moment of vulnerability, Jean allows her colleague, gynecologist Dr. Patrick Steptoe, to examine her. What we see is her face, contorting in discomfort. Her nostrils flare. She swallows. Then the snap of latex. She pulls her knees to her chest as he steps away.
She stammers on the question, unable to say the word. “Could I have—is it possible to have—” But Steptoe is decisive. “No.”
“I’m afraid science isn’t entirely ready for you yet,” he says. Her blank face fills the screen.
*
A scene cut from the film of my life: me and my aunt at my kitchen table, as if it were ordinary.
*
But this is a dream. It is my husband seated beside me, and I am counting my luck.
If I hadn’t written those poems, published the book, gotten that job—
If I didn’t live in Massachusetts—
If the bleeding had begun even a week later—
If it hadn’t been the third time—
If the law had punished me for it—
If I lived amid bombs—
If I didn’t have health insurance—
If I didn’t have that health insurance—
If I couldn’t afford the tests and shots and procedures—
If the medication had gotten lost in the mail—
If I’d missed the flight—
If I didn’t make that call and that call and that call—
If the doctor hadn’t said—
If the doctor hadn’t believed—
The one that most haunts, the ending I’ve seen up close: If I’d been born even a decade
earlier—
So many alternate stories in which I could be dead.
*
Paul Giamatti, the husband in Private Life, plays the protagonist’s psychiatrist following her suicide attempt in A Mouthful of Air. She goes on antidepressants. She improves. On her son’s first birthday, she remarks, “I was walking through a world that was black and white, and now I’m just starting to see color again.” A few moments later, she learns she is pregnant.
The resultant panic attack lands her back in the psychiatrist’s office. She insists, despite her near-lethal postpartum depression, that she can’t be on an antidepressant while pregnant. She is afraid that, as with coffee and alcohol, this would harm her baby. She will not be dissuaded. Her psychiatrist, having attempted to convince her through facts and comparisons, pulls out a book of poems and reads the end of one. It is “Balloons,” a poem Plath wrote six days before her suicide.
“How is that possible?” he asks. “She knew the beauty she was leaving behind.”
But she has already made up her mind. And we’ve seen the end. The woman stands and walks out.
*
Sometimes a movie will go black. This is when it can say what it means plainly, in text.
One study showed that 90 percent of people suffering long-term infertility experienced depression, and 42 percent reported being suicidal.
Another found that women who remained childless after a fertility evaluation had more than a twofold higher risk of dying by suicide than those who eventually did have a child.
Following a miscarriage, four in ten women experience PTSD symptoms.
A study analyzing over four decades of data in the United States found that restricting abortion access was linked to higher rates of suicide in women of reproductive age. From 1974 to 2016, the average annual suicide rate for women in states with this legislation rose 6 percent.
Suicide is a leading cause of maternal mortality, responsible for 20 percent of postpartum deaths.
Severe postpartum psychiatric illness is particularly dangerous in the first year, when the suicide risk is increased seventy-fold.
*
“I’m so sad,” the woman whispers to her husband in the denouement of Private Life.
Not every story of mothers and near-mothers and never-mothers ends in sadness. But it’s often the part left out.
Who wants to see the opening, the spot of blood and the tepid love, the ass in the air and the piss on the stick, the waiting room and the doctor’s bill, the crumpled face, the stain on the sheet, the paper gown and the knotted spine up the back, the black of the screen, the lube on the wand, the shots in the box, the shots in the thigh, the grit of the teeth, the blue of the vein, the vomit in the bowl, the lying on the floor, the hair unwashed, the skin stretched out, the scream of the woman, the scream of the child, the milk rushing in, the clots flushed down, the shit, the spit, the tears, the tears, the stare of the woman into the night, the night, the stare, her face as it starts, as the light, finally, comes up?
I do.
*
In all the years I’ve thought of Plath, revisited her story, her death, which has consumed the narrative, I never pieced together that her suicide occurred postpartum. Why is this not spoken of, not factored in as a precipitating event?
I am a year out, as she was. From this vantage, I see it all, and much more clearly.
I tell my husband. I kiss my daughter. I take the medication that is right for me.
*
I wait and ache. I think I have been healing.
There is a great deal else to do.
*
Three women’s stories, and three women’s stories, and an endlessness of stories, and a story I call mine. Who tells these stories? Who needs them?
Joy was written by a married couple, Jack Thorne and Rachel Mason, following the difficult journey with infertility and IVF that nearly ended their marriage. Private Life’s writer-director Tamara Jenkins also wrote the film following her experience with IVF and infertility, what she called her “by any means necessary” pursuit of a child. Amy Koppelman wrote the novel (and then the screenplay) A Mouthful of Air to process her experience with postpartum depression, “writing through the pain of” the question: “What if I didn’t get the help that I needed?”
All three projects were written after their writers were no longer suffering. Not everyone will reach that point. Not every story has a storybook end.
But I think we must tell the stories, those of us who can. The telling is the point. The need to say this happened.
*
An event is something that happens. But when did it happen? Was it the first time that miracle began in me? Even though it sputtered out? Or was it when I started the shots, my ovaries swelling like balloons, or was it after, those glorious blastocysts burgeoning in a dish? Or maybe it was when the doctor slipped her in, that little firework burst on the screen, or maybe once I felt the pinch so strong I winced? Or the heartbeat heard, the movement glimpsed, the turn inside like a fish? For months I played a game—poking the skin to watch the push back from within. Days, months, years—a chain of moments, the change continual. A mother is an event that keeps happening.
But mother is a name for this happening I give myself. Hap, the root, means luck of an unfortunate kind.
I am lucky. I am a woman who made a choice, who made many choices. The choices I did not have were not ones taken from me by any force on this earth.
“We never wanted this to be a film about women wanting babies, we wanted this to be a film about people having the choice whether or not to have babies,” Thorne wrote of Joy.
Happy shares the same root.
I am so very happy. It is only luck that this story ends this way. (I am letting you know I survive.)
This one story of the stories that make a life: a series of ordinary, miraculous events—pain and blessings, pain and blessings. My life. Which goes on.
*
The past of the past of the past. I am a child, one hand holding my aunt’s. The other lets go of a red balloon. My first memory.
The camera follows, rising up up up, until we are very small, until the world is. It is a scene I have only seen from a plane. In the clouds, like God. What the dead see, I thought when I was young.
But in this moment I am still young. I am not dead. Everything is possible and I know nothing of fear.
*
Fade in. The room is dark at the edges, but you see only light, pure and white. As if through my eyes. It is the event we have been waiting for.
The story ends here. Or begins. Blue gloves, like sky, lifting what I have lived my life to see.
Leila Chatti is a Tunisian-American poet and author of Wildness Before Something Sublime and Deluge (both from Copper Canyon). She teaches in Pacific University’s MFA program and lives in Cincinnati.
Photo by Sonya Lynne on Unsplash
