“My Left Foot” is, I think, one of a thousand movies I must have gone to with my father during visitation, so we didn’t have to talk about how strange it had become between us. Although I think movies really are among the rare things we both like. In this case, of course, the thing we didn’t talk about went further back than the thought that they both had started new lives that were different from the one that started my brother and me. Because I have cerebral palsy, too, though not like the one author and artist Christy Brown had. I don’t see many, okay, maybe any, bodies that match mine…my best guess for why is that,although humans classify things to have them make sense, but that maybe, each muscle’s response to trauma, and the call from the brain that mostly never comes, is highly specific.(Even now, though, since we are writing of my high school years as The Exception, I write this while fighting off the urge to tell my readers how much better off my family and my body were than that. About being top of the middle of my class at least and how much I made the staff of literary magazine laugh. I went to two parties in four years. It was different, but not mind-blowingly so.) Disabled people still spend a lot of time on the outside looking in.
Maybe my dad picked this movie to show me how good he thought I had it. Or maybe it was kind of a boyish wonder at how much Daniel Day Lewis was able to appear like a disabled person—a talent we’re not supposed to admire anymore on representational and authenticity grounds, but Day Lewis was able to make me think he was one of us, so much so that I felt guilty about my disappointment when he made another movie and it was clear that he was not.(In another, sweeter movie, with us in it, of course, my father picked that movie to send me a message about our past and our future and stuff, but it did not work out as the viewer guides might have predicted.) I searched my memory, but I think that viewing only gave me the dubious “opportunity” to say what people still want me to say: That I’m lucky, and that it’s good for me to find someone “worse off” than I to measure myself against. Although you can’t always tell who is struggling most by looking, actually, I think it’s better not to make extending compassion some kind of misery Olympics.
Now that I’m older and we’re in a caregiving shortage that an informal arrangement is helping us forestall, I am a bit envious of Christy’s crowded house and neighborhood, if not the mess, poverty, and drunk das. No stranger to having an indomitable mother myself(and maybe the same age as Oscar-winner Brenda Fricker by the end of the movie) I find myself wondering how Bridget Brown kept her spiritual tank filled. My mother did not get *many* breaks when I was young, but she had some friends to hang with or sometimes a little retail therapy.
Why was Dr. Cole so confused by Christy’s crush? We are built with the same emotional parts other people have, and it looked like she smelled like perfume and quoted poetry to him—it’s like infatuation generation.
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