All creatures on earth have male and female attributes. The task of nurturing a child is borne by the maternal side due to the primitive nature of the creature. Males, on the other hand, only need to provide cells for a short time.
Humans are mammals with a longer gestation period. During the tenth month of pregnancy, the fetus and the mother are connected as one at all times, interacting and feeling each other at all times.
Before the birth of the child, the mother and the child already have a very deep relationship and bond, which also makes the mothers eager to give birth to a healthy baby as scheduled. Although when pregnant, more or less, couples have a little preference for the gender of their future children, but when they finally give birth, parents-to-be have only one wish: to be healthy, regardless of gender; alive, regardless of gender!
Most men who will be fathers can also understand their wives’ pregnancy, weight-bearing life, physical discomfort, emotional instability, and various pregnancy syndromes that are likely to occur during pregnancy due to hormones. But what if the baby died of lack of oxygen just minutes after birth?
The recently hotly debated movie "Woman's Fragment" produced by "Netflix" tells the story of a couple who chose to rely on a midwife to help give birth to a child at home, but after the child died immediately, the family reflected on the traumatic drama.
It appears to be the alienation of husband and wife and the rift between mother and daughter caused by the death of the child. In fact, it is a deeper level of resistance to the mother's desire to control; because of the difference in attributes, men cannot fundamentally feel the long-term physical and mental pain of women who lose their children after childbirth, and helplessness.
Bai Fumei's blond elite [Martha] and construction worker [Sean] are about to give birth at home and welcome their daughter. Masha started giving birth: The movie uses more than 20 minutes of substitution to reflect the process of [Masha] labor pains, uterine contractions, water breaking, and pain tolerance. [Sean] Cooperated actively and patiently. But the midwife who made the appointment didn't come, and instead was a middle-aged midwife named [Eva]. Eva is gentle and patient. When it was tested that the baby's heart rate dropped during labor, Eva asked Sean to go to the hospital for emergency help. But [Martha] insisted on living at home.
After all the hardships, the child was finally born, Sean and Martha wept with joy; Eva breathed a sigh of relief. But suddenly, Eva noticed that the child was turning purple. The ambulance arrived, but the child was dead.
After the death of the child, Martha experienced unspeakable physical and mental pain: the strange eyes of colleagues after work; the gossip and warm-hearted acquaintances who seemed to care about the scars; the discomfort and embarrassment of wearing adult diapers while breastfeeding; The loneliness and heartache after other children; the mother, who has always intervened too much in her own life, decides on her own initiative to write the name on the child's tombstone; the mother finds her lawyer and niece to sue the midwife. . . .
She lost her child, but her body is still a sensitive mother. Under the multiple effects of external social and family factors, internal hormones and the pain of losing her daughter, she heals herself and moves forward in two ways: because her daughter was born with the scent of apples , she began to collect fruit seeds and germinate them patiently, observing and waiting for the birth and growth of another life, as if she was creating life again; she could not truly understand her relatives when she treated her with indifference and resistance. In the latter way, [Sean] derailed and left Boston where he lived after accepting a check from Martha's mother. And Martha, who had a brief moment of motherly love, finally forgave the midwife [Eva] in court because she might be at fault. She also began to accept the affection of her mother, who had begun to lose her memory. Years later, Martha also had a daughter.
The story has an ending, but the discussion points triggered by the movie have only begun, and there are many .
In the end how to understand and reflect the mother's control? [Masha], who has been under the control of her mother for a long time, often uses the context of the bereaved girl to play the topic.
The unfriendly interaction with her mother also revealed that Martha chose to be with [Sean], whose economic and social status was far from her own, insisted on giving birth to a daughter at home, insisted on donating her daughter's body, etc., to a large extent, to resist her mother will and arrangement.
As long as the mother came forward to arrange it directly, she would disdain and resist with the anger of the bereaved daughter. Completely denying her mother's advice and will, but she also suffered the unbearable pain of losing her daughter, and both sides suffered.
Perhaps, the mother has always wanted to control her daughter's life in the name of love, but the strong mother can only acquiesce to Martha's choice, watching her daughter's accusation against her, and did not impose her will further. And the mother who was angered by her daughter also told how when she was just born, how her mother had to fight to survive in a desperate situation where she was about to stop breathing in order to avoid the Nazis. Martha, who had been a mother for a short time, was perhaps shocked by her mother's tenacious vitality when she was born, and she began to look at her mother who gave birth to her from more perspectives. In court, as a witness, Martha was at a loss for words when the defendant's lawyer asked her how it felt to hold her breathing daughter. At this time, there were many emotions ruminating in Martha's mind: when her daughter was still alive, her mother's love and tenderness; maybe she would make up for the joy of her mother holding her when she was born. . .
During the adjournment, Martha suddenly remembered that when her daughter was just born, [Sean] photographed her holding her daughter. She rushed to the printing shop. Seeing that the picture of her holding her daughter in the dark room gradually became clear, Masha, who had mixed feelings, was moved to tears.
Seeing her daughter again, although only in the image, her softest motherhood and love are stimulated. The world at this time is gentle to her, and nothing is unforgivable, including her mother's previous control. Perhaps, for the mother's control, it may be possible for him to resolve and understand with another attitude and communication, rather than blindly being rigid.
In the end, in court, Martha forgave the midwife: because the midwife was also here to deliver a healthy child. Conviction, compensation and sentence cannot bring back the daughter. The purpose of my daughter's short life is not to impose her own pain on others. This remark was also told by Martha to her mother, and her mother's eyes were full of tears, and she, who gradually lost her memory, may also begin to reflect on her past interference with her daughter.
Maybe the mother-daughter relationship can't be completely resolved, but in the soft emotions of being a mother, at least they can communicate.
In the face of a woman who is indifferent, indifferent, physically and emotionally restless after losing her daughter, can a man really understand the suffering of a woman?
After losing the child, Sean was also extremely painful. At the beginning, he was extremely patient with the aftermath and took care of Martha. But after a failed courtship, he cheated on Martha's lawyer cousin, and at the same time resumed drinking and smoking marijuana.
In order to be worthy of a white and rich elite like Martha, Sean, who was temporarily converted, plus the excitement and joy of his daughter's upcoming birth, as a blue-collar man, he is also in the midst of unpredictable happiness. At the beginning of the movie, the rich Martha's mother also buys them a nice car. Sean thinks that he is poor and doesn't like the money his mother-in-law pays, which hurts his self-esteem a bit. But I am very happy to see the beauty that luxury cars bring to my reality.
Between him and Martha, there is a shared expectation of happiness - the imminent arrival of a child and the prospect of co-parenting in the future, and life is fairly stable. This also temporarily balances and conceals family conflicts caused by class differences. In the end, due to the death of the child, the shared present and future expectations were shattered, and the unreliable bond between the two was pulled out to accept the test of real life.
Perhaps, these were not the triggers that led to his and Martha's eventual parting ways. The real reason is that, as a construction foreman with low education and social status, Sean was unable to experience the physical and mental pain of Martha's death as always for a long time after the bereavement of her daughter.
He didn't understand that it was impossible for Martha's wound to heal in a month or two. A mother who lost her daughter just after giving birth, her wounds take longer to heal. Even if it heals, the scar is there; the pain will lessen with time, but the pain is still there. Martha takes longer than Sean to heal and accept the trauma.
In the womb, the child gets along with the mother day and night and is very close. Such an in-body bond is about to be transformed into an in-vitro family bond. Once it is suddenly lost, it is a male in biology and cannot empathize with it, let alone for a long time.
Just like the title [Woman's Fragment]. When a woman gives birth to a child, her body is torn into pieces that are still connected together, and the child needs to be slowly reintegrated in the interaction between the child and the mother after birth. Without a child, the mother's pieces are difficult to integrate.
A father who has lost a child is painful, but his pain will not last long. And rational males will soon want to return to their normal life track. However, emotional mothers who have a family relationship with their children need more time to heal themselves, and the pain of the self-healing process and the hormonal interference of biological attributes also make men as relatives need more and greater patience to accompany them and inclusive.
Sean is not a scum, nor a bad person, he is just a father and a man among all living beings who have lost a newborn child. His performance is not good enough, due to the attributes of the species, and also due to the superposition of his background, social status, education level, and personality.
If men could use medical technology to enable men to experience and practice pregnancy and childbirth as they did in the movie "Devil II" many years ago, there would be fewer men in the world who harm women and children, and families that are divorced will also be less. There will not be a father like the demon beast in the [Chongqing Falling Baby Case].
The humanistic care of the film is mainly projected on the women during and after childbirth represented by [Marsha]. In the film, the two ends of the bridge over the river that Sean participated in the construction of, symbolize Martha's wound. In a total of 6 or 7 months, in the timeline of the film's account of childbirth and postpartum, from a wide distance, it gradually healed together.
The color of Martha's nails in the film has also changed from the persistent dark blue, melancholy, rebellious, eye-catching, arrogant, to the final color after self-relief, implying that Martha chose to live a more down-to-earth life from her heart. She scatters her daughter's ashes on the completed bridge, relieved and reborn. I also liked the British actress [Vanessa Kirby] who won last year's Venice Actress for her wonderful performance . In the film, her arrogant and lazy North American English accent without any sense of disobedience makes her present a multi-level female elite image of the authentic British Empire's North American colonies.
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(The original text was first published on the public account [Iron Rice], so stay tuned)
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