Last Saturday, Husband and I decided to have a movie night with Boychild. Yay! Let’s have movie night! Yay! God, please let’s have something to break up the monotony! Yay! I made hand-foods for dinner (food you can eat with your hands, not food made of hands), pulled up a few film choices on the ole computer app, and off we went! I made sure to build it up, too, like “Saturday, we’re going to have movie night! Isn’t that fun?!” But like most things in 2020, our family movie night turned out to be both disappointing and revealing.

My first movie choice was My Neighbor Totoro, a lovely animated tale from Japan with magical creatures and a catbus (yes, please). Nothing dies. No real bad guys. No dark stuff, plus the animation is beautiful. Do you know how sometimes kids’ voices in overdubbed movies can be grating? Not in this one. The voices are fab! So I thought this one was a win, but once Mei visits Totoro for the first time, Boychild said “I don’t want to watch this.” Now, Totoro is big, and he has a big mouth, but he is also shaped like a giant bunny. And he is super-gentle. This is what me, an adult, sees. But to Boychild, all he saw was a giant beast who growled “To-To-Ro” while a tiny girl laid on his belly. It was too scary.

But maybe I overreached on Totoro. “He’s three and a half, girl!” I thought. “Get a hold of yourself there, Roger Ebert. What, you gonna make him watch Citizen Kane when he’s four? Watch The Lego Movie for cry eye. Go with something mainstream. It’s about toys. It’s fun. It’ll be fine!”

It wasn’t fine.

After the first two minutes, a weird door-thingy scared him, so we had to turn off The Lego Movie as well. We’re 0-2 at this point. But the last movie in my Movie Night Arsenal was a little film called Kittenhood and Boychild loves cats. LOVES them. So I thought this little flick would be perfect. It began innocently enough: let’s see how three different litters of kittens grow up around the world. Cool, cool. Sounds cute AF. The first batch of kittens? Great!

Then we get to the little Greek Island kittens.

The kittens on this island are having what we might colloquially refer to as a “hard knock life.” One kitten had a gross, milky eye from malnutrition, while another was an orphan. The narrator did a great job of making the kitten’s situation as sad as possible and she had a British accent, which somehow made it worse because she sounded smart. “This orphaned kitten has a pot belly due to starvation and probably worms. His mother died before he could find food for himself. He will probably die soon.”
(cut to shot of skinny kitten with gross eye)
“This little kitten has gone blind in one eye due to malnutrition. HIs short, painful life will be snuffed out in due time.” Ugh. Our little Boychild got so very upset. “Where is his mama? What happened to that kitty’s eye? Why is he blind? Why? Why? Whhyyyyy?” And then the tears came. And came. And kept coming. We had to stop the movie.

Let me say that I love that my child was upset. It let me know that he is not a sociopath, or at least not yet. He felt very bad for those kittehs. Oh, his little heart ached for them, which broke my heart! I was also aware that his beautiful, extroverted emotional response will go away soon because in our society, men are pressured to stuff their feelings way down into their balls. I mean, I guess that’s where all the emotions go. I don’t have balls, so I couldn’t tell ya. I’m going to miss his tears once society has its way with him and he discovers that he has to hide his emotions. Maybe in Vermont, he’ll be less exposed to that type of thing and maybe we can side-step some of that toxic masculinity that’s so corrosive to our boys. Or maybe he’ll become an actor and channel all that emotion on stage, like I did.

Anyhoo, the plight of the kittens made Husband sad, too, but I took the kittens’ story in stride. Ya see, my Grannie had a neighbor called Miss Anna. Miss Anna’s yard smelled like cat pee, and my mama warned me not to go over there because of “ringworm.” But the big draw for Miss Anna’s yard was the fact that she had tons of cats – big cats, ugly cats, striped cats, cute cats- all living together. And bangin’ each other, which led to lots of mutant inbred kittens. Ones with TWO milky eyes, ones with no back legs, all kinds of weird stuff. Miss Anna’s yard was a cross between The Island of Dr. Moreau and Cats. One day, a pissed off white cat attacked me, and for years I dreamed about fending off feral cats. So when I watched Kittenhood and saw the sad kittens, I immediately thought of Miss Anna and her menagerie of inbred cats. My reactions was, “Meh. I’ve seen worse.” I forget sometimes that I come from some real Southern Gothic bullsh!t.

So, I guess the question is: do we prevent Boychild from seeing things that might be sad or challenging, or do we let him experience those things and then offer guidance after the fact? I’d really like to keep him innocent, but I also recognize the benefit of letting him see the gross, the weird, the bad parts of life. I mean, I’m not going to make him watch Faces of Death or anything, but if he comes across an orphaned kitten, will that wound him for life? Or make him more accepting? I mean, I saw Gremlins when I was waaaay too young, and I think that scarred me for life, but it made me the person I am today. I swear to God, if someone tells me not to feed a pet after midnight, I am going to listen to that person? yes i am. Lesson learned.