Lady Bird (2017)

directed by Greta Gerwig

Moira McAvoy

I saw Lady Bird in theaters four separate times, but the first was alone, opening weekend, a brisk November Saturday, in a bougie theater surrounded by couples. I’m still desperate to know how they felt about that decision, seeing that movie with those characters under the pretense of a date. I can’t imagine having seen it with anyone else for the first time; seeing Lady Bird McPherson on screen felt too much like watching myself, for better or worse, over the preceding decade or so of my life.

Here is my overbearing, loving, all-too-similar-to-me mother. Here is my enthusiastic best friend who I treated poorly chasing after “being popular.” Here is me doing theater. Here is my Danny, whom I loved in a different way than he could love me, a nearly exact mirror right down to playing Prospero in our production of The Tempest. Here is my unsuccessful student council run. Here is my Catholic guilt. Here is my alcohol poisoning. Here is Dave Matthews.

On and on ad infinitum, the film seemed to almost too-precisely track my own adolescent life in a way that was at once validating and disconcerting. I had never seen such a deft exploration of millenial girlhood, nor one handled with such humor, self-awareness, or care for its subjects (Lady Bird, Marion, Julie, Jenna—all of them). Unlike Eighth Grade, another film expertly dealing with twenty-first century American girlhood, Lady Bird does not reel you into the visceral discomfort of Being A Teen Again. It allows you to peer through the glass without dropping the barrier out from under you, the adult version of yourself squarely removed from her teenage self, looking on at her antics in wisened bemusement.

The thing about this distanced proximity is that it allowed me to actually reckon with who I was as a teenager. I’d always thought of myself as high-achieving, if not emotional—someone too smart for my own good but accomplished nonetheless. This, however, is not the truth. I, like Lady Bird, was rejected from far more colleges than those to which I was accepted (I also wished to run away to the northeast, Where Writers Lived), among other things, but when I saw the movie, I used that as a means to distance myself from her, to see myself as better than. I just didn’t work to my potential in school, I told myself, and would NEVER have done something like stealing a grade book to artificially inflate my math grade. I did the same with the way Lady Bird and I engage with our mothers which, spoiler, is exactly the same way. We love each other very much, but we’re often imperfect in the act of it. My mother shows love through worry, which manifests as fretting and nitpicking; I, as a teen, believed that love should be unconditional or not offered at all. At the end of the day, we felt the same way, but, in spite of ourselves—because of ourselves—we didn’t know how to communicate that. So, we fought. A lot, bombastically, about things as small as my shirt being wrinkled to as large as me crashing a car, with tears and shrieking and the sort of force that makes it seem impossible to reconcile once it’s through—unless you’re a mother and daughter, in which case you wait ten minutes and wordlessly resume whatever task you were doing, like homecoming dress shopping or blasting Bruce Springsteen.

This tension simmers and festers and blows up, of course—no scene was more arresting than when Lady Bird, in the midst of fighting with her mother, impossibly and angrily offers to pay her back all of the money her mother spent raising her. I almost ran out of the theater the first time I saw it; for nearly my entire adolescence, I had been compelled to do the very same thing.

This resonance, this specificity, is what haunts me most about Lady Bird and what draws me so deeply to it. I love coincidence, and often think it points to something larger, but the question remains: where was this reflection of myself pointing me?

A scene that sticks with me: Lady Bird is reviewing her college application essay, something she’d written about her hometown she purports not to like, with Sister Sarah Joan, who says it’s obvious she loves Sacramento very much. Lady Bird responds with surprise, shrugging it off as saying she pays attention. Sister Sarah Joan replies with equal surety, “don’t you think they’re the same thing? Love, and attention?”

The first thing I did after watching Lady Bird for the first time was call my mother. I was alone in a city wherein I’d thought I was thriving but was, in reality, flailing at best and drowning at worst, and the only thing I could think to do was tell her how I loved her, to show my gratitude for giving me all she did to help me stay alive this long, to thank her. I don’t remember what she said, other than sounding a bit bewildered by how emotional I was, but she agreed to my suggestion to see the movie when I was visiting home next.

We saw Lady Bird together the day before Thanksgiving in the same movie theater in which I used to Deeply Debate Christopher Nolan movies with my theater friends in high school. My mom turned to me to laugh at the fight in the opening scene, but made hardly any other acknowledgement throughout—rare for the sort of woman who just two months ago commented on nearly every other moment of Toy Story 4.

As we left the theater in a relative silence which extended through the entire hike to our car, I was worried that I’d misfired, misread our entire two-and-a-half-decades-long relationship, yet again being too selfish, too self-involved to see what my mother saw. I made some idle chat as we got into the old smoke-stained van which had ushered me from forensics meets and Girl Scouts meetings to college and beyond, when, suddenly, my mother turned to me, tears in her eyes, and said, “I’m so sorry.” She cried and talked about our relationship for the whole thirty minute drive home. She apologized for missing the flare-ups of my anxiety—which we had known about since I was eight—when I went to college. She apologized, in short, for feeling like she’d not paid enough attention to see what was happening with me in the most arduous days of my adolescence.

I was mostly quiet, at times reassuring, during this conversation, reminding her in turn that she was indeed an excellent mother, the type to which, as I’ve matured, I feel increasingly indebted. The thing is, I’m still me: still selfish. I was taken aback by her outpouring of emotion in the moment, shocked beyond being able to articulate the feelings and thoughts I’d cultivated over the previous two weeks. Enjoying my vindication, I didn’t think to apologize for much myself—not for my selfishness, my reckless behavior, my well-vocalized desire to be as distant as possible from my family throughout my teen years. I had been too focused, at the time, on being right to own up to the ways in which I’d been wrong. My mother was again showing how she worried; I was stuck wanting her to be unconditional the way I viewed it, which was to let me engage in all of my selfish self-destruction and -neglect, which was not to (rightfully) critique me. That sort of love is impossible; it’s not a real love at all.

There is a scene in the film when, while dress shopping, Marion and Lady Bird get into a bit of a tiff. It climaxes with Lady Bird asking her mother if she likes her; she responds that she loves her, but when Lady Bird pushes again asking if she likes her, she is met with Marion replying that she wants her daughter to be the best version of herself she could be.

I think, at the time, I was afraid of what love looked like. I wanted, instead, to be “liked,” all of the adoration without any of the attention. My mother has made innumerable sacrifices for me and dealt with far more than her fair share of grief and fear as a result of me being selfish and reckless and awful. Like the McPhersons, my parents worked tirelessly to send my brother and me to Catholic school. She nursed me through a months-long period of debilitating illness when I moved home from college, a period which must have filled her with unimaginable fear; when I look back on this time I, instead, focus on remembering the screaming matches we’d have in those last months we lived together. She cried and worried over me when I was taken to the hospital with alcohol poisoning, all for me to return home, demand to watch the Gilmore Girls revival with her, and act like nothing had happened, cheekily placing my own ER bill under the tree when it arrived at her house on Christmas Eve. She dealt with all of this, with me actively avoiding dealing with myself to her detriment, with the unconditional sort of love you give someone you worry over, someone you know deserves better than they’ve given themselves, someone to whom you pay attention.

We don’t know what happens to Lady Bird and Marion after her daughter’s transcendental voicemail. Perhaps Marion cries in avoidant solitude, like before her daughter leaves for college. Perhaps they don’t speak for weeks. Lady Bird almost certainly doesn’t stick to her new, gratitude-filled ways instantly, but she almost certainly does begin to be more self-aware. This is the ultimate beauty of the film, this love found in our very human imperfection, the glory of growth within failure. We’re uncertain of the specifics, but we know things are moving forward. We can love in spite of ourselves, because of ourselves.

It’s been nearly two years since that car ride. I visit home more often now, opting to spend a few weekends a year lazing on my mother’s couch watching TV instead of maniacally wandering around the city running from myself. I’m forgetful and self-centered, but I’m more mindful of how my behavior affects others, and how their behavior can affect me. I’m trying to be better. 

My mom and I are friends, most days. She follows me on Twitter; I send her memes. We bond over a mutual devotion to Lizzo. She doesn’t always like me, but, hey, I don’t always like myself either. We talk more often, and less tensely, than we ever have. There’s laughter, and honesty, and attention. I try to say “I love you” and “thank you” on every call.

Moira McAvoy lives & writes in Washington, DC, where she spends too much time and money going to concerts. Her work has previously appeared in The Rumpus, The Financial Diet, and Storyscape, among others, and she has served on the editorial staff of The Rappahannock Review and NANOfiction.