"BABIES" - THE MOVIE
It's Mother's Day today and my family went to see the new movie, "Babies." If you haven't seen it, it is a joy to watch. You visit four different countries (Mongolia, Japan, San Francisco, USA and Namibia) and watch a child grow from infancy to about one year in their natural environments. As a mother in the United States - having everything I would need to raise a healthy and happy child - it occurred to me during the film that there are other things just as important as health, wealth and conveniences. For example, there is a Namibian mother raising her children with absolutely nothing except the ground they walk on and the sky above. She sits - days on end - with her children, dressed in loincloth, jewelry about the neck and very little shade or comfort. Never did I see a man - a Father - appear on the screen. "He must exist," I mused, but the filmmaker chose to accentuate the mother and children against the stark background of the wilderness. The mother just sits there under a tree most of the time ... children playing around her in harmony ... or sometimes not. This whole scene burns in my mind and poses the question, "Do you sit with your children and let them be children?"
Then we switch over to Mongolia to see a child raised in the open wilderness with cattle, goats, cats, and no neighbor in sight. This child is left alone often tied to a bed, stuck in the back of a truck, or on the bed with the cat. Many times my motherly instincts were rattled as I saw the child pulling on the cat's ears or tail and no mother around to protect the child from the cat's impulses. Other times I would watch as the child would fall - or almost fall - and no one to secure or assure him that he was not alone. Yet, this child grows up happy and unafraid of his environment, having already conquered it through self-taught experience and interaction. In our American culture, we are doing so much protecting of our children that they are not free to experience it and learn from it. It's as if we want to take this danger away from them so they will be safe and sound, yet are they? Is the environment a danger? Just watching the film made me question how our environment has become so sterile, safe and secure to the point it leaves no room for real life to happen. It seems plastic or hollow to me in light of this Mongolian child's environment. Are we blocking or robbing our children of their right to explore, adventure out into the wilderness of our own neighborhoods and learn for themselves what is out there? Parents, I suppose, are very afraid of what is happening in our world with drugs, weapons, and paedophiles, that we lock our children up psychologically even before they leave the house!
So often I have been corrected by a friend who has spent his life in the bush of Africa when I have said something derogatory of people who need our help. He has shared with me that the people of Africa have much joy, ingenuity, energy and passion for living and that we would be totally exhausted trying to keep up with them from morning until night. The mothers walk long distances for water and food, carrying their babies on the back, then spend hours looking for firewood so they can cook, clean up the floors, get their children ready for the next day and then start all over again. Our American way of life is nothing like this. We are far from our roots in this regard. Much of our time is spent on intellectual pursuits and entertainment, while our children are following in our footsteps. They are reading the computer, playing on their video games, and talking to friends on their cell phones, rather than exploring their environment, searching for natural ways to entertain themselves and making friends. It is all a virtual world for them now.
Mothers all over the globe care for their babies with love, tenderness, discipline and patience. They work hard to bring them up as healthy citizens of their communities. We have much in common, but we also have much more to learn from each other.
