I can imagine the fears my daughter feels now. What happens when Dad moves away? Will Dad be okay? Will Mom be okay? Will I be okay? You will be okay, Ezra, and I’ll be okay, and your Mom will be okay. It will just take time to become more okay. Over minutes and hours and days and months and years, it will begin to feel more okay. You can still grieve how things were. How could you not? How could any of us not? Grief is natural. Loss is natural. Being okay again, eventually, is natural. It is okay to be okay again. It just takes some time.
The fears harbored by children loom larger than the fears experienced by the rest of us. They feel every feeling immensely. There are no measured responses. Everything is a first and so the emotional response is also bigger, heavier. How can you cope with what you have no guidelines for?
Isn’t the real fear what we do not understand yet? Over time, once we understand and gain firmer footing for the reality of the situation, we will all be even more okay. And we’re okay now. You just don’t know what that version of being okay feels like yet.
You will. I promise it will just take time, love, and compassion to figure it out. It’s hard now and will be hard later but what we do with that hard feeling is what counts. It’s how we use the big feelings we have and what we do for other people with those feelings.
I was looking forward to Orion and the Dark with you anyway. In a practical way, movies about fear are just great for childhood watches, like the great The Pagemaster (1994), a great adventure about overcoming fear through stories, a meta text for scared kids who need to use its stories to process the hard feelings in their own lives.
And there was the quirky writing credit: a children’s movie written by Charlie Kaufman? That Charlie Kaufman — who wrote Synecdoche, New York (2008) & I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020); so, you can see where the optimism comes from. You can even see, watching the movie, what early version of the script were like before it jumbled up its most essential moments in its act structure with over-exposition, where nothing is happening on-screen.
You can see how the designs are clever. How it has some shade of Monsters Inc. (2001) inventiveness to the premise and character concepts. It’s kind of cool. But doesn’t go anywhere.
You shouldn’t actually look forward to Netflix releases. You can’t have a day out with your kid in the cinema. In that case, Orion would earn some reason to exist. Instead, you might wait months and then just have something on that is only just having something on and you may feel nothing.
You feel numb enough anyway. From the divorce. From time apart from your Dad. From so much feeling and not feeling things. That means, you might be searching for something in this movie to help you deal with these other hard things. And if you look hard, you might find it.
We are resilient people and can overcome anything. Can find hope and realistic optimism when we look hard enough for it. We have to cultivate our own joy. And find it in ourselves. That’s why what has happened has happened. And that’s why it’s all going to be okay. Because it has to be okay.