Besides about three scenes, it was a completely new movie to me. I have become, it seems, a completely new person since I saw it in a Parisian movie theater six years ago. Back then, this movie had simply but profoundly--with the help of all the people I met in Paris--changed my fundamental perspective on race and ethnicity. Really, this movie, in conjunction with my time in Paris, made it possible for my now-family to come into being.
Watching Vas, Vis, et Deviens, this second time around, underlined how much becoming a mother is re-shaping me. A fourth scene burned itself into my mind, and became the most haunting sequence that surfaced over and over again in my dreams afterwards: the real footage of refugee children and babies in the Sudan. One particular baby made me scream inside, with his or her swollen head and triangular jawline, two jagged peaks where his/her cheeks should have been. Oh God. Until I had a baby of my own, suffering of this extent didn't really sink in with me. It's horrible, I know, but not until I now have a personal day-to-day contrast between my own double-chinned child, who sometimes reminds me of a fat mafia warlord, did the image and the reality that this happened and is still happening to children everywhere take a figurative sucker punch to my stomach and literally take my breath away. And an urgency like never before to prevent this from happening, business as usual.
Another mother shared a long-envisioned dream of her young family living in peace, which stuck to my mind in the same niggling fashion as what I'd witnessed last night; it's the flip side of the same coin: What do I want to do with my life? This coin I have rolled around in my hands since I left my country at nine-years-old with starry dreams of righting wrongs in the world. In ignorance, I had scorned the vision of a peaceful family. It had seemed selfish, insular, and devoid of any concern for the suffering. I had, since kindergarten (most likely influenced by my male adult relatives who were government-sponsored officials, soldiers, or doctors), envisioned that I would join their ranks in confronting corruption, tyranny, or disease. Patronizing comments about my being female merely made me adjust my aspirations to account for sexism's roadblocks. Around middle school, though, under the tutelage of an excellent social studies teacher, I realized with a shock that the people I resolved to "save" seem to have the uniform desire of one day, after surviving their current conditions, creating a peaceful home and family of their own.
This growing awareness forced my hand to turn over that coin and examine more seriously the side I'd scorned for so long. If the end goal of all this striving is to lead a harmonious life, why should I--someone who could clearly enjoy what all these people long for--shun it, disrespect it? As these two contrasting (contrasting because I had made them so) ideas presented themselves so immediately this week, I discovered with great surprise how differently I understand the matter now.
It is in having a child that I'm coming to understand the suffering of the world in increasing depth. It is in caring for my family that all the problems faced by other mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, seem all the more urgent to care about. My surprise, you see, is in how the coin I've flipped over and over again is no longer disjointed. These two sides make the whole. What I want to do with my life is fully complete with these two surfaces, together. Becoming a wife and mother--two roles I had very much resented and feared would end my freedom--are actually keeping my dreams alive. People like Sandra Steingraber and Elijah Lovejoy especially inspire me; they threw themselves into their missions to call out wrongs and to right them precisely because they were/are called to protect their children. They want to help make the world a kinder, more just, place for their children and their children's children.
That is what legacy means. It would have been impossible, really, impossible, for me to understand were I to have remained childless. My vision for how I want to serve with my life would have remained immature, a quasi-noble but actually self-glorifying goal. The definition of "selfish ambition," which had troubled me when I first read it in the Scriptures because, while not understanding, I had a feeling it had something to do with me. My ante-partum depression really forced me to work on surrendering a lot of junk in my soul.
So I celebrate with other people, now, their visions of God-blessed domesticity. These are as important as the desire for Heaven in our hearts. Not as something to keep us passive in our present lives, but as a finish line that goads us on to attempt greater things because we have something so good to hope for. May God use these things--as He uses all things--for His purposes.
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