O Mother of the world, have mercy on us, and yourself first
dir: Savanah Leaf
2023
We have been living in an era, for the longest time, where we are told that people need to take responsibility for their actions, that their circumstances are the product of their choices, and that if their circumstances are difficult, well, it’s only because of the bad choices that they made along the way.
IF they struggle and work hard, eventually ‘good’ things will come their way. If something “good” happens to them, that good favour still has to flow from somewhere else, it’s still because of something external to them (the grace of God, the benefits of the welfare safety net system). If something bad happens, well, it’s entirely their own fault.
The ‘logic’ of all this bootstrap nonsense only seems to apply to poor people, though. Poor people are defined as people who don’t have enough money to be shielded from the implications of their choices, right or wrong.
Wealthy people worked hard for what they have, however they got it.
Of course.
Poor people don’t work hard enough and keep making bad choices.
Of course.
Earth Mama is about a woman who can’t get anywhere, can’t get through the difficult circumstances of her life, and her kid’s lives, no matter how hard she tries, because she’s not meant to. She is young, with two kids that have been taken away from her by Child Protective Services already, but she’s also heavily pregnant. The kids were probably taken away because of her previous drug use, which we only know because she keeps being drug tested. There’s an array of requirements she has to adhere to in order to get to spend an hour of supervised time with her kids, per week. And she has to pay child support for the kids even when they have been taken away from her and put in the foster system.
It’s as easy as anything to criticise The System that has taken her kids, and makes it almost impossible for her to get out of the binds that she’s in, and we can acknowledge that it’s unfair. But it doesn’t change anything. The prime reality is that Gia (Tia Nomore) has no protection, no insulation from her previous actions, addictions or choices, and no choices she makes now counteract that fact. No support, and therefore no money.
She can’t work more hours because of the mandatory attendance required for drug testing and for parenting courses, courses intended to help with anxiety or mental health, so she is late to everything. She has what she can earn from 15 hours a week of work at a photography place, probably in a strip mall, but that’s barely enough to get by, which is why she still has to live in share housing (with a drug dealer, no less).
We hear nothing of the men that must have been in her life, if only briefly. No family spoken of, though the implication is that what was done to her as a kid, being taken from ‘unsuitable’ parents, is done to her kids, in a repetition of cycles. Other people speak to camera about remembering, with their hearts breaking, being taken from their parents (mothers) when they were children.
As an Australian, it’s painful to listen to and watch these testimonies, and impossible to not think of the Stolen Generation(s) here, and the ongoing cycles of neglect, family separation, violence and supposed governmental benign efforts which are sometimes indistinguishable from malign indifference no matter who is in power. But it’s not fair for me to impose my own lens upon what the story is saying in Earth Mama. It explains how a young woman, who has almost no choices in her life, could consider the option of adopting out one of kids, because she just knows nothing is ever going to go her way.
This is apparently the story not of the writer / director Savanah Leaf, but of her sister, so it’s something she’s experienced closely, though this is not meant to be a documentary. It feels pretty true to life, though. As a slice of life, days in the life of…kind of story, it works pretty well. As the main character Oakland rapper Tia Nomore plays the role in an understated and lowkey manner.
She feels powerful feelings, and lives through the frustrations of having very few choices, but this is not a talky film. She doesn’t explain or exposit on what she’s thinking, feeling and experiencing, often. Every chance she gets to say something, she declines. The little she ever asks for is usually declined, politely or otherwise. She is not completely friendless in this world, but friends and their opinions / feelings present their own perils. Her friend Trina (fellow rapper Doechii) is also heavily pregnant, but she seems like she’s more certain about Gia’s ability to get back and hold onto all of her kids than Gia is. She is also more prone to invoke God, or at least a judgey version of God who unsurprisingly has no intention of helping Gia out but is still definitely going to damn her to hell no matter what choices she makes.
She is thinking of the future, though. At one point she asks her boss for an advance, so that maybe she can buy some stuff to have ready for when her baby arrives, but in the very next scene she walks from her car into a sea of prams near a playground, grabs a handful of disposable nappies from someone’s pram and then hightails it out of there, so we can guess what the answer was in the previous scene.
Gia seems not to trust anyone very much, which is probably the logical move given her past or her present, and she even pushes away the few people that seem to care about her or at least who don’t actively wish her harm. When she entertains the prospect of maybe giving her kid up, and she meets a nice, respectable, middle-class African-American family that might adopt the baby, it’s pretty obvious that she sees in them opportunities and a level of safety she never knew in her own life, that could be there for at least one of her kids. All the same, as normal and mundane as the whole process is represented, it’s impossible to ignore how alien it all is.
Every part of her, every fibre of her being aches to have the baby, keep the baby, keep the baby safe, forever and ever. She dreams of it, she yearns for it, body and soul. She often imagines herself walking through a redwood forest, naked and yet safe, unhurried and unbowed. Those scenes are such a crushing juxtaposition with the environment she actually lives in, in that she yearns for the opposite of what her lived experience is, but they are beautiful none the less.
The pressures upon Gia are invisible, but ever present, and they’re all around. Plus I imagine the last few weeks of the pregnancy can be pretty intense as well. The anxiety over what she should or shouldn’t do gets to be too much, and if you have any experience of addiction or relapse, well, you can probably guess where I’m going with this.
It’s a pretty divisive moment. I think it’s meant to be. You’re not meant to think “Good job, well done, that’s definitely going to help things”. You’re meant to think “Oh fuck.”
Mileage is definitely going to vary. I’m going to go ahead and guess that the majority of people who would watch a film like this, or any film like this, already are probably predisposed to seeing people as people, and cutting slack for people / characters whose lives we haven’t lived, whose shoes we’ll never have to walk in, because we are insulated from the repercussions of our own actions, thanks to all sorts of privileges.
Thing is, though, not everyone can sympathise with fuckups. The consolation for those of us who have been fuckups, who currently are fuckups or who worry about being fuckups again in the future, well, there even with the grace of God go we merrily along, and that can either hurt or make us feel judgemental.
I have heard, many a time in my life, the phrase “none of us should be judged solely by either our best or worst moments, because we are more than those points in time”. We’ve all got a line past which we might not accept such reasonableness. But even then, we’ve all got lines.
I can sympathise with Gia’s choices, even when I can’t accept them, because in a lot of instances they’re not choices at all, they’re just what’s going to happen without help and support. And as much as The System is at fault, the flick doesn’t overdo things too much, knowing as we might that an overworked and under-resourced system that tries to protect children from the absolute worst people isn’t always going to be able to balance the interests of parents as well as children.
One of the social workers, Miss Carmen (Erika Alexander), who had been trying unsuccessfully to get through to Gia previously, perks up when she hears Gia might want to adopt her kid out. Then she becomes fully engaged, and starts recommending courses of action and offering support to Gia that wasn’t there previously.
It's almost suspicious, isn’t it? Gia, naturally, distrusts her motives and throws it back in her face when she feels overwhelmed, saying that she’s doing it to make money from her baby. Carmen points out she gets paid the same (by the state) independent of any adoption, and her motivation is only to see a child escape from a cycle that is built to break people like Gia.
Even with the best of intentions, people still have their own interests in mind, the adoptive parents, Gia, everyone. And thus she makes the hardest decision, the hardest sacrifice, ultimately, for the good of all her kids.
I found the flick heartbreaking, beautiful and quite harrowing at times. The most debilitating moment for me is when a young mother standing before the other mothers in recovery who’ve had their kids taken away, speaks openly about how her mother had anxiety, and became an addict, and passed that anxiety down to her daughter, and how she’s passed it down to her own kid. She seems so sad and broken about it that it doesn’t feel like acting.
That’s the blessing / problem with this flick, apart from the visual flourishes in certain scenes (with impressive cinematography by Jody Lee Lipes), it often feels depressingly real. There are some short scenes of almost body horror to do with Gia’s imagining of her umbilical cord still somehow being alive, as some kind of knotted rope that still connects her to her kids no matter the distance between them, but it’s represented as something terrible rather than sentimental.
This isn’t a feel good flick about the joys of motherhood. It’s about the fierce drive to do better knowing full well that you might fail, but you’ve got to desperately try again anyway.
Like we all do.
8 times being a decent parent must be so exhausting for those that manage it out of 10
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“Why should we care that you make it? I don't care if y'all don't care if I do make it. It's my journey.” - Earth Mama
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