Dwelling in Possibility

"Return to Zero" - A Story of Loss, Grief, Anger and Resurrection

The first full-length movie ever made about the issue of stillbirth premiered on Lifetime television this past weekend. “Return to Zero” starred Minnie Driver and Paul Adelstein, and it followed a couple, Maggie and Aaron, who learned late in Maggie’s first pregnancy that the baby she was carrying had died in utero, and that she was going to have to deliver their son stillborn.

The bulk of the movie, however, did not focus on the events leading up to the sad birth moment.  Instead, it was a character study of the couple as they waded through the shoals of their grief, anger and acceptance of this terrible thing that had happened to them, and the reactions of the people around them. 

Lifetime, on its website, describes the film as a “tear jerker” (although I thought that was a requisite for Lifetime movies.) And while my eyes are swollen from the crying I did watching late into the early morning last night, I found the movie actually touched a nerve in a different part of my memory banks from my own experience with neo-natal loss.

Maggie, after losing her son, sleepwalks through the world for a long time. But her closest companion during those brutal, raw first months was not her also-grieving husband, but her anger. Her anger at the utter random, unfairness of it all, her anger at her husband for not suffering in the exact same manner she is (and his ultimate decision to find solace elsewhere,) her anger at her mother and father-in-law for attempting to find some sort of normal at a Thanksgiving meal when there is no more normal to be found, her anger at random insensitivity from shopkeepers and party-goers who do not know her story and are not bending themselves to her needs.  The list goes on.

Rusty Nails v. Helicopters - What's a parent to do?

My mother-in-law has often told me a story about a bullfighter, who, when he was a young child, would hide in the folds of his mother’s long skirts. A bullfighter who was shy as a child, I would ask. How is that?  And she would say, well, if you knew you were going to be a bullfighter when you grew up, wouldn’t you hide in your mother’s skirts while you could?

I was reminded of this apocryphal tale, always told in relation to conversations about my children and their future, when listening recently to several Israeli pundits (whom I follow on a weekly podcast) discuss the question of why Israeli parents are so relaxed with their children.  Apparently, Israeli kids wander and roam very freely, and play with “rusty nails,” according to the commentators, while American kids have padded playgrounds and much less free-range in their lives.

(I, for one, am grateful for those padded American playgrounds, having gashed my head open racing into a concrete tube in a playground when I was about 10. Concrete playground – what were they thinking? My face looked like Carrie after the prom, but the cut wasn’t actually so bad. Can’t stitch a scalp, so the scar remains. But I digress.)

I liked that my kids had a little rubber padding underneath them when they were on the swings and monkey bars when they were little. But that’s about all I liked about the current trends here in America to keep our kids as safe and padlocked as possible.  So, I didn’t. I let them start walking to school by themselves by 5^th grade, and often found myself countering blank stares when I would chat with other moms about letting kids wander the neighborhood alone.