Submitted by Natasha in Alberta, Canada (To read more about Natasha, visit her website Becoming Something.)
Despite me being thoroughly broken and achingly so, our family went to see a matinee of Marley & Me today. I sat there the whole time and didn’t die. I know. I was surprised, too.
The kids knew in advance that Marley dies. We knew this because we bought Montana the book for Christmas, not knowing in advance there would be sex references in it. Not the most appropriate reading for a very precocious 9-year old. Just because I read 9 1/2 Weeks at age 12 doesn’t mean I want to start my son on the same path. Innocence has some charm.
I asked some Twitter followers if they’d bring four kids to see the movie. The mentioned there was some talk of sex, nothing crude. Also, Jennifer Aniston takes her dress off and jumps into a pool but you don’t see anything but her back.
No one mentioned all that talk of “BALLS” and not the bouncy kind (unless you like to go running commando). Also, no one mentioned all the Marley humping.
I’d like to have kept that out of my kids ears and eyes, but oh well. Too late now.
The movie was very realistic. That’s what happens when a movie is based on a true story, I guess, as opposed to oh, Will Smith saving the planet at the very last second. Again.
Two cool things I noticed about it:
1. Owen Wilson essentially played a blogger. Okay, a COLUMNIST. But isn’t a columnist kind of like a good blogger? Writing about his dog, his life, trying to get the laughs?
2. There was this quick montage of narrated scenes of the year, all the things they had done, the columns he had written, etc. It was a TWITTER FEED! It was basically a Twitter feed in movie format.
So, then…
Marley dies.
We knew it was coming. I thought I wouldn’t cry. Then I couldn’t stop.
And neither could Montana and Josie. OH how Josie wailed.
We got into the van and decided we should distract them with McDonald’s for supper. Jude went inside to order because they usually get the order wrong and it’s easier to check in person. He was in there for 10-15 minutes and when he came back, after having corrected yet another wrong order, the wailing had not lessened at all.
“But Marley DIIIIED!” she wailed.
“Yes,” I said.
Later on:
“Marley DIIIED!”
“Yes, sweetie. He died.”
“But why did he die?”
“Well, he got sick. So they had to put him to sleep. They gave him a drug that made him fall asleep and never wake up.”
I thought she knew this but suddenly she’s choking out her shocked and indignant words:
“They KILLED him?!!”
“Ba- we- uh… Yes. Sort of. He was going to die that night anyway. This way it wasn’t painful.”
“Why did they have to have him die? The dogs in Snow Buddies didn’t die. They could have just stopped the movie!”
I resisted pointing out that Snow Buddies is a profoundly unrealistic and poorly written and poorly acted movie produced by Disney, the maker of anti-intellectualism and instead I say,
“This movie was about life. Death is a part of life, sweetie. Every dog dies. Every person dies. I believe that Marley went to heaven and maybe they’ll see him again one day… eating God’s answering machine.”
“Living is about life. Death is not life.” (She’s 7, remember.) She is SO argumentative and logical. I love it. Intellectually, I love it, that is.
Do I regret having brought them to a movie that rattled their childhood innocence and made them weep for a good half hour? I don’t. While it was sad, Marley & Me portrayed what life is about.
I want to taste as much as what Life and the Lord’s will have to offer me.
You find some people to love: friends and hopefully a partner and lover. You live in or visit some different climates. You read, you learn, you find out years later that what you learned was wrong and you discover learning all over again. You break a bone or sprain a muscle. You botch a recipe. You make a perfect cheesecake only when no one else is around to appreciate it. You play games and learn how to be a good loser. You make war, you make up, you make love. You give up on some dreams and God surprises you with His dreams for you. You find out you need $200 orthodics when you thought you had lovely, perfect arches. You save to buy the best laptop you can afford and then in one year you find out it’s ancient.
You get yourself a puppy and then wonder if your head was on straight. You walk her. You clean up her poop in the middle of the night. You paint the front door in the Spring and in the Fall because the dog has scratched off some paint, letting you know she wants to come in. You let her lick your face and try not to think about where that tongue has been because no one ever died from a dog lick, after all. You love her. You endure her smelly farts and her rapacious appetite. And then one day you bury her and you cry like no one’s business.
That’s what you do. That’s Life.
You have children and you wonder what you got yourself into. You hold them all through the night when they have ear aches. You change thousands of diapers to the point when you can change one while breastfeeding and one-handed. You French braid hair, trying in vain not to pull the little hairs at the nape of the neck. You send them off to school and feel your heart get broken when they come home and tell you that not everyone loves them like you do. You mourn over the idiocy of other people’s children and the greater idiocy of the parents who “raise” them. You teach about the birds and the bees, how to sweep crumbs, how to make a bed and how to tell the truth.
Right now, that’s all I know. This is what I do.
I don’t mean to give you a cliche mushy ending here but this is what I was thinking and what I was trying to explain to Josie, knowing she’ll never understand until she lives it herself. How do you explain Life to someone whose life has just begun? How do you explain that there’s a LOT of bad stuff in Living?
How do you prepare them for death? How do you listen to your child cry like her heart is being mutilated? You just do what you can and endure the rest.
Kids, I don’t remember anyone credible telling me this when I was your age and I wish they had. So, I’m going to tell you:
Life sucks sometimes. And it’s supposed to. Life IS the bad stuff as well as the good. Learn to expect the worst but hope for the best.
Such a great post. I LOVED this movie too. Honestly I don’t think you really can explain life is the good with the bad to someone who hasn’t experienced it yet. It’s something you just have to go through to understand. Although if you tell them that now then when they do go through hard times they will look back and say “That’s what mom was talking about!” And…hopefully they will find comfort in that.