There are movies that keep coming up like memories. Movies that take up and take up the mind like habits when facing a situation. It is not a direct meeting, nor a direct experience, but a movie that makes me think that I have survived the scene.
I’m seven years old, and living as a mother is at the bottom of me every moment, and I’m being asked how patient I am, how selfish I am, how anxious and frightened I am. When I am deeply skeptical about 'Can I handle this child?', the movie <Rome> is screened naturally in my head. I think of Cleo, who cried, "I did not want her," and the children who cried together in Cleo's arms.
The background for the film, Rome, is a middle-class neighborhood in Mexico City in the 1970s, with Cleo (Yalicha Aparicio) being a housekeeper working for a white family in the neighborhood. In a nice two-story house, doctors Father, chemist mom, Grandma's Boy, four kids, two housekeepers. The seemingly unsavory family is cracked by Father's indefatigation; Father, who has been on a business trip to Canada, does not return home.
A crisis also comes to Cleo, who has been taking care of four children in the family. "It seems like everything is clear when you look at me," sweetly-spoken boyfriend Fermin disappears, leaving his jacket in the cinema when he tells him Cleo is pregnant.
The biological Father has abandoned the child, but Sofia and other women around him take Cleo's child together. Housekeepers working in a situation similar to Cleo try to relieve the pregnant Cleo's work a little. The four-brother Grandma's Boy finds Cleo and a furniture store for her upcoming child.
On the day he goes to a furniture store to buy a baby bed, Cleo bumps into Fermin, who points a gun at college students who are protesting democracy. For Cleo, whose pumping water suddenly bursts and labors in the car, Grandma's Boy prays and goes to the hospital together.
The nurse asks for this and that for the reception, but Grandma's Boy does not know the age, date of birth, or middle name except Cleo's name. Was it just an employer and an employee relationship that Grandma's Boy was able to do her heart for Cleo and her child because she was also someone's mother? Women who know what it means to be a woman and a mother push their hands toward each other.
On such a day, I doubted that I really wanted this child, that I did not deserve to be a mother. It took quite a long time to realize that motherhood does not mean unconditional love for a child, sometimes it is ambivalent feelings that love a child and sometimes hate a child. When I admitted that there is no perfect mother and that my mother is just a lack of one person, the name of my mother felt a little light.
Media coverage and comments on the broadcast were even more persuasive. The child's words and actions were stimulated and reproduced, and ordinary people were prescribed childcare by experts who were difficult to meet, and criticized why the mother and the child did not change. They were blamed on their mother, and some people were questioning her attitude, saying that she had no will to change.
I have also been helped by Dr. Oh Eun Young’s parenting law, but it is only possible in edited broadcasts that miraculous changes occur in a short time with one or two solutions. Child care is not an immediate output because there is an input.
It is clear that the role of the caregiver in childcare is important, but it is not absolute. In order for a child who can not keep a body to grow up as a citizen who plays a role of one person, there must be efforts of the child and the adult and society surrounding the child as well as the child. Just as Cleo tried to protect Sofia's children, and Sofia tried to protect Cleo's. I am worried that the dramatic 'Oh Eun Young Magic' will make the child's upbringing only the responsibility of the caregiver.
This article is also featured in a personal brunch.