i know the joy & the pain of having you as my mother

I was so late to the everything everywhere all at once movie – 3 years too late specifically. I had always been aware of it since its release but struggled to start watching it because I knew it would hit home. From all the videos I had seen of people leaving the cinema crying and the multiple analysis videos of the mother-daughter relationship portrayed by the film, I decided it would be best to wait and sort of prepare myself for the emotional impact it would have on me.

One night late in august I decided to rip the bandaid off and just as I had expected – it was painful and left me rubbing at my heart. While there was so much about the movie I could relate to: Joy’s parents’ relationship dynamic, Joy accompanying her mother and father to translate for them, the tension and distance between her grandfather and herself and more, the one aspect of this movie that resounded with me like a clanging cymbal (as I’m sure it did for millions of others) was the relationship between mother and daughter.

Perhaps the best way I have seen this film and therefore relationship described is through a tumblr post by @lesbalisious, who blogged “Everything everywhere all at once is a film about a girl ripping the entire universe apart just to find a part of her mother that she feels understands her. And everything everywhere all at once is a film about a mother ripping the entire universe apart just to understand her daughter. And my chest feels like it’s caving in when I think about it too long”

I think for many young girls – especially during our transformative teenage years – we slowly begin to humanise our mothers as we begin to see parts of ourselves in them. We start to think; ‘she’s been a girl just like I am, she’s just a woman like I will one day be’ rather than just this separate entity who looks after us. But there are so many parts of us that we feel she could never understand and so many parts of her that we don’t want to – that we hope never to become like. When I was younger, I could never understand my mother’s strictness, her harsh words, her curfews. I thought if I ever had children I would be much kinder, much softer and less enforcing.

A year ago, I had a final exam to sit and I was really worried about it. All night I stayed up doing as many last minute questions as I could. With two hours left to sleep, I tucked myself in and sweated as I tossed and turned. After trying – and failing – to fall asleep for thirty minutes, I decided to go to my mothers room. She woke up at the sound of my feet hitting the hardboard and asked me if I was okay. I asked her if I could sleep next to her and she lifted the duvet and told me to come in beside her. That night, my mother cocooned me in her soft, warm hands as I cried into her chest and as she caressed my head willing me to sleep. I think about this moment all the time. I think about all the moments that I thought of my mum as this harsh and uninviting woman when all she has ever been is a woman. Sometimes she’s angry – just like I am, sometimes she’s funny, sometimes she’s kind, sometimes she’s sorry, sometimes she’s excited or happy or guilty or all the other plethora of emotions I myself have experienced. In that moment, I realised that, just as Joy and her mother show in the movie, throughout all her emotions and sometimes cruel language, she has always tried to understand me.

My mother immigrated from war over 15 years ago from a country that never enabled her to pursue a full education and yet she is smart in her words and her numbers but most importantly her emotions. She has never known the trepidation of a looming exam that you don’t feel like you’re prepared for and yet she held me and kissed me and told me it would be alright. The next day, after sitting that final exam, I called her first. She could hear the happiness and relief in my voice – she told me so. I told her yes, that it went as well as I could have hoped and she told me she was coming with my dad to collect me from school. She reminded me that she had told me it would be alright and I told her she had been right and that I should have listened to her. She hugged me and kissed me on the cheek and I held in the tears of gratitude that I had towards her.

One of the most impactful scenes in the whole film for me was one of the final ones, where Joy stands in the parking lot. Her mother comes to the realisation that despite the chaos/ noise of the multiverse, Joy waded through it all in search of her and proclaims that no matter what (regardless of the fact she could be anything, anywhere) she still wants to be there with her daughter. I think this scene captures their dynamic so perfectly because we see (and subconsciously know because of our own personal experience) that Evelyn can be anything she wants – she can pursue acting and be successful, she could divorce her husband, she can leave it all behind to chase a forgotten, buried dream – but she makes the choice to stay with her daughter, deciding there is nothing else, no other success that can replace the affection and the understanding she has for Joy and her family and the life she has built through all the choices she has made that have brought her to that moment. While many might see this and think that she has trapped herself, I look to it and see my mother and all of the choices and sacrifices she has ever made to become who she is through her own volition. I don’t think Evelyn traps herself, rather that she is finally shown everything she could be, everywhere she could go and she is one final time given the choice to change it all and she decides she wants to be who she has always been and stay where she is now with her daughter and husband and father. This film is a beautiful ode to family, free will and affection all wrapped up in 2 hours and 20 minutes.

I realise as I write this that not all people have a mother like mine – to assume that understanding your mother and your mother understanding you is all it takes to accept and love each other is to take away from the experiences that others have had with their parents. I don’t write this piece to absolve all mothers of any wrongdoing – especially those that should not have been mothers to begin with, that leave their children with irreversible damage. I write this only to describe the impact this movie had on me as a daughter who has had a tumultuous relationship with her mother to explain why it was a perfect movie for me because I could relate to it from beginning to end.

I hope this convinces you to watch everything everywhere all at once (if you haven’t already because I was very, very late to the party) and if you already have, let me know what you thought about it ʚɞ

-oknaima💌